Am Sonntag, 28. September 2008 schrieb Aitor Santamaría: > Hello Andreas, Hello Aitor!
> Apparently not, as we can read in one of my favourites posts on this > topic by Matthias Paul (from whom we haven't read much lately, and > that hopefully will be there ;)). > > http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/txt/141.txt Just read through it. I'm just a user, so a lot of its contents is much too complicated for me (asm-functions for example, DOS kernel system calls, and such). But I agree with Matthias, I quote freedos/news/technote/txt/141.txt: > Having done massive research in this area for years, > I have come to the conclusion that NLS support in DOS > is one of the most complex and confusing issues (at > least for most of the English speaking people, who do > not normally consider into going into all this mess [;-)] , > and there is a broad range of misconception how it > actually works and which component does what. I'm a DOS user since the early 90's, I used DR DOS 5.0, later MS-DOS 7.00 and DR-DOS/OpenDOS 7 a lot, always together with 4DOS. I always removed DISPLAY.SYS, MODE CON ... and just left COUNTRY=49,850, C:\DOS\COUNTRY.SYS in my start-up files. It made the date/time look more european (DD.MM.YY instead of MM/DD/YY, which is so mixed up... [:-)] ) I figured that it doesn't make sense to waste memory for german translations when most of the programs were running in english language anyway. So, yes, it is very complex and confusing... > Another suggestion why BIOS is NOT always 437 is the fact that I am > just cloning Microsoft interface, and Microsoft is giving you the > option to tell what it is. It is completely new to me that there are BIOSes that aren't US-English. I always thought, regardless of the VGA adaptor used, that the BIOS provides an english codepage and fonts (CP437, Extended ASCII). But I'm wrong again, as this is quite complex. > But even if you were true, it could also have a function. It allows > you to use a "software" version of CP 437 (in which charcters may look > a bit "nicer" than in BIOS do, I seem to recall that Henrique has > tried this in his CP file packages). This way, if you leave that space > empty at DISPLAY commandline, you tell it that you do not KNOW which > is your codepage. And if you PREPARE a 437 codepage, when you SELECT > it, DISPLAY does not get confused and knows that it should use the > PREPAREd one, rather than the hardware one. Interesting, because I noticed that the fonts on different computers looked a bit different too, and that MS-DOS 4.01 (at a friend's PC, back in 1990) and DR DOS 5.0 (on my computer, at that time) had different fonts and that one could "load" such a font using MODE or something. But I never bothered much with it. BTW I didn't like the zeros "0" in MS-DOS 4.01 - it had a dot inside the circle, DR DOS had the zeros crossed out with a fine line... > Regards, > Aitor Thanks again for the explanations. I appreciate it very much, as my contribution here is merely giving a user's perspective. Andreas. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
