On Wed, 28 Jan 2026, Ben Russell via Freedos-devel wrote:
I can chip in on two of those languages and one extra.
Serbian:
I have no knowledge of how this normally works in DOS.
Firstly a correction: sr_RS, not sr_SR. Anyway...
Latin script and Cyrillic script are both used in Serbia. Now, you may
wish to consider having an option to have Serbian specifically in a
Latin version and a Cyrillic version, potentially using the language
code "sr" for one and the country code "rs" for the other... but if you
have to choose one or the other, go with Cyrillic. If someone would
rather use Latin script they might take a hit and go with Croatian (hr,
country code HR) instead. (I argue that they're national dialects of a
common language, but this really isn't an ideal solution.)
As I understand it, the situation with Serbian is a bit hairy -
officially it's written in Cyrillic but often it's written in Roman and
is effectively the same as Croatian.
Japanese:
ja_JP, language code is ja, country code is JP.
Code page 932 which is Shift-JIS. On the NEC PC-98 you get extra glyphs.
On an IBM PC compatible, you need to render this in software in a
graphics mode because there are way more than 512 characters in common
use in the Japanese language.
Do we support the DOS/V API and appropriate fonts? We might have to tell
people to get their own IME for now (Input Method Editor) if they want
to write in Japanese, but
Actually, do we have any DBCS support (double-byte character set) at
all? And would it even be possible for someone to hook an IME up?
MS-DOS/V and PC DOS/V have different ways of supporting Japanese, and
completely different fonts. They also are both bilingual and can be
placed in either English or Japanese mode.
Yes and No use Y and N (checked with MS-DOS 6.20 FORMAT). Typically
these get denoted as はい(Y) / いいえ(N) , but FORMAT just says (Y/N).
Quit probably uses Qq as its hotkey. Not sure what the text for Quit
would be, probably 終了(Q) . EDIT uses X implying Exit and uses 終了(X) in
its menu.
Japanese apps in general seem to prefer to use English accelerator keys
(lol, I can't imagine anything asking H/I instead of Y/N).
Korean:
You didn't explicitly ask for it but here it is anyway.
Language code ko, South Korea is KR, code page 934, EUC-KR encoding.
North Korea is KP but I don't know what all the differences are or the
relevant codepage is.
I'll need a bit more time to get more details as to what is typical here
but I think it's a similar situation to Japanese where you have
NativeText(EnglishLetter).
I know Chinese does that too.
-uso.
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