First post, by Peter Swinkels
Whenever I work with DOSBox I usually deal with english only and sometimes dutch. For those languages the basic (32-127) ASCII character set is usually good enough for my purposes. However, when I do want to create or edit text files for DOS programs in a language that requires characters from the extended character set (128-255) I have noticed that Notepad (Windows) usually isn't able to properly decode and display extended characters and encodes special characters in a way that isn't supported by DOS based programs when saving.
In short, I am looking for a program (preferably for Windows) that will display extended characters in a text file as they would be using a specific code page in DOS and will save them in such a way they a DOS program will display them properly (assuming the correct code page is set of course.)
A DOS based editor is acceptable too, however I have noticed that using the KeyB command in DOSBox changes the keyboard layout along with any extended characters being displayed. This is rather annoying when typing on a keyboard with a USA english layout. I don't mind memorizing a few special character codes and entering them using ALT+numpad code. It would however be nice if I can verify the correct character has been entered when seeing the result on screen.
(This is related to an earlier post I made about changing code pages using Quick Basic.) Also, if anyone wants to know what I want this for, I am going to try translating a DOS program I wrote to another language. I have already done a translation to Spanish once, and I remember special characters giving a lot of trouble whenever having to use a Windows based (sometimes I had to resort to an online dictionary or Google Translate) program to modify text.
EDIT:
https://github.com/PeterSwinkels/Topography-3 … tree/main/Topo3 (a Quick Basic 4.5 program I wrote years ago (1996) that supports multiple languages and have been slowly updating and extending)
Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!
Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels