On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 18:22:40 -0500, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The two main files seem to be (as mentioned) fdos0138.exe (.ZIP sfx of > .IMA) and jis4pack.lzh (three .fnt files, the first of which is huge, > presumably only useful with something on the .IMA, perhaps FONTNX.EXE > ??). Yes, and they are both downloadable here http://dos.minashiro.net/freedosvd.html > > I still don't understand which encoding, which scripts, etc. are > supported here. Plus, it's not obvious (to me) which third-party > programs are supported or whether such support has to be built into > each by default. I believe the encoding used is Shift-JIS. Instead of the usual character-mapped text mode, the display is switched to a bitmapped mode, the fonts are loaded into memory, and the driver intercepts calls to write text to the screen and handles drawing the characters itself. 7-bit ASCII can be written as normal ("half-width" characters), but bytes in the 128-255 range can be combined with the following byte to form a longer character code. These can represent any of the kana/kanji/etc. and while they are two bytes long they are also physically twice as wide on the screen ("full-width" characters). Once the drivers are installed then for instance, one could use the TYPE command to display the included readme file and the Japanese characters would then be displayed properly. Whereas in a normal FreeDOS install, trying to view the file would result in mojibake (nonsense strings). I imagine this would allow running any other legacy DOS programs which were designed to use Shift-JIS. But then, I've never used DOS/V, or any Japanese DOS programs other than the command-line utilities that are included with Japanese Windows XP, so I'm not entirely sure. I also don't know how kanji input (if any) works. > I don't see any sources, but I know that FreeDOS heavily frowns on > anything that isn't free/libre (four freedoms). In other words, I > don't think "freeware", no matter how useful, is good enough to > mirror. Presumably the mention here of GPL only refers to FreeDOS > proper stuff (kernel, shell), not the others. > > I really am too pessimistic to email the author. If you or someone > else isn't willing, I could try, but I really doubt it would help any > of us here very much. And of course I don't speak Japanese, so .... I don't know if it is a good candidate for a mirror, but at least anyone who wants Japanese support in FreeDOS can try it out. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
