If the characters were encoded into the tsengs bios, you could view it in a program like DirectEd. If it selects a character set from the system bios, that would be a more complicated thing; to find where it selects the system bios character set and change it to standard us. Is this a translation problem or is it that the character set isn't displaying properly on a monitor type of thing?

nekurahoka wrote:

If the characters were encoded into the tsengs bios, you could view it in a program like DirectEd. If it selects a character set from the system bios, that would be a more complicated thing; to find where it selects the system bios character set and change it to standard us. Is this a translation problem or is it that the character set isn't displaying properly on a monitor type of thing?

Where would I find DirectED?

The issue is that there are several keys that output different characters than they typically would. For example, where it would typically show "C:\" this card displays it as "C:Ð"

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/93/
That'll get you a copy of DirectEd. There are other utilities available for this, but I've used this in the past and found it to be easy. Load the bios and scroll through. The program basically graphically displays hex information. You should see the graphical information for the font tiles at some point and you'll be able to see if there are anomalies in the font map. Like having a second "D" in the map in an area where symbols like the slash should be.

Based on what you're describing, it seems more like corruption of some kind. I could totally be wrong though.

That’s a cool program but it seems to make the bios unbootable whenever I make any changes. Changing just one pixel then pressing s to save then reburning just causes a blank screen on the computer.

Found a solution!

Re: Tseng 4000AX Weird Characters

fsmith2003 wrote:

That’s a cool program but it seems to make the bios unbootable whenever I make any changes. Changing just one pixel then pressing s to save then reburning just causes a blank screen on the computer.

You likely need to recalculate/fix the checksum on the modified image before burning. Some editors do this automatically for you, but others don't.

133MHz wrote:

fsmith2003 wrote:

That’s a cool program but it seems to make the bios unbootable whenever I make any changes. Changing just one pixel then pressing s to save then reburning just causes a blank screen on the computer.

You likely need to recalculate/fix the checksum on the modified image before burning. Some editors do this automatically for you, but others don't.

Do you know how I do that on the TL866 software?

Edit: I did actually figure out how to do that with a little googling. Thanks for the advice. It worked! So now I have a couple different options for a workaround.