• readmaps.dat and writmaps.dat

    From mark lewis@1:218/700 to all on Sun Jun 3 15:38:04 2012

    i'm looking for updated readmaps.dat and writmaps.dat that use CP437 instead of
    IBMPC... hopefully the format of these two files has not changed and can still be used with the original TimED 1.10 as seen in my PID line... the included makemaps.exe appears to be hardcoded to use IBMPC and i haven't found my hex editor to alter that to CP437 to test with... i already have additional CHS files (pulled from jamnntpd) to use... i just need either a new makemaps or already generated readmaps.dat and writmaps.dat files...

    the whole idea behind this is to bring (at least the original) TimED closer to today's world with the character translation and CHRS control line...

    )\/(ark


    * Origin: (1:3634/12)

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  • From Dallas Hinton@1:153/715 to mark lewis on Sun Jun 3 16:28:10 2012
    Hi mark -- on Jun 03 2012 at 15:38, you wrote:

    i'm looking for updated readmaps.dat and writmaps.dat that use CP437 instead of IBMPC... hopefully the format of these two files has not

    I'd be interested in this also -- I've had no luck getting TimEd to display russian characters!

    Please let me know if you succeed!


    Cheers... Dallas

    --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
    * Origin: The BandMaster, CANADA [telnet: bandmaster.tzo.com] (1:153/715)
  • From mark lewis@1:218/700 to Dallas Hinton on Mon Jun 4 09:46:50 2012

    i'm looking for updated readmaps.dat and writmaps.dat that use CP437 instead of IBMPC... hopefully the format of these two files has not

    I'd be interested in this also -- I've had no luck getting TimEd to display russian characters!

    i see you are running the original like i am... v1.10 with the y2k patch... i dug around and found that the first thing i was unable to do was use CP437... it wasn't recognized at all and there was no CHRS control line generated... i finally located another program that uses the same dat files... MsgED... pulled
    some from there that were specifically set for CP437, put them in place and tried... no luck... using the READchangecharset option didn't show me any available character sets other than IBMPC... i had to put the old dat files back in place and then TimED would show all the character sets in them...

    Please let me know if you succeed!

    sadly, i don't think it is going to happen with what we're using right now... both TimED and MsgED were written to FSC-0054 which has now been superceeded by
    FTS-5003... as such, both were hardcoded for IBMPC and other characterset names
    which were not really proper then and are definitely not proper now... these days everything is CPxxx which are also going by the wayside as everything moves more to UTF-8 or UTF-16... UTF-8 works for everything that i'm aware of but there are problems at times in conversion to/from the old CPxxx stuff... we
    can easily go one way but not the other... why? because CPxxx fits within UTF-8
    but UTF-8 has more characters than any of the CPxxx sets...

    while TimED's (and MsgED's) code has been released, not much has been done with
    it... the original DOS and OS2 versions that we are running were written and compiled with Watcom C... i'm not a C coder so there's very little that i could
    do even if i wanted to...

    as far as displaying russian characters goes, the way things are done currently, the old school way, you'd have to switch your codepage to one that contain those characters... right now you are most likely either CP437 or CP850... type chcp at the command line to tell you... when you know the codepage that has those characters, then you would use chcp to change by entering its number (ie: chcp 850 will set CP850... go back to CP437 with chcp 437)... the problem is that when you change, you'll be totally immersed and if the normal latin characters we're used to seeing are not where we are used to finding them, then everything may be gibberish... blindly typing chcp 437 should get you back to something recognizable... unless you read russian or whatever language the codepage you switched to uses ;)

    the current choices with the available dat files are IBMPC, CANADIAN, DUTCH, FINNISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, ISO-60, ITALIAN, NORWEG, PORTU, SPANISH, SWEDISH, SWISS, UK, LATIN-1, and MAC... even the CP437 dat files i found only replace IBMPC with CP437... everything else is still basically the same...

    )\/(ark


    * Origin: (1:3634/12)

    SEEN-BY: 229/426 103/705 218/720 102/401 103/1 218/215 840 301/1 218/860 880 SEEN-BY: 214/22 218/870 930 601 124/5016 218/700 1 10/1 218/0 10/0
  • From Dallas Hinton@1:153/715 to mark lewis on Mon Jun 4 16:15:10 2012
    Hi mark -- on Jun 04 2012 at 09:46, you wrote:

    i see you are running the original like i am... v1.10 with the y2k
    [...]
    else is still basically the same...

    All your experience matches mine....Oh well, at least it works! :-)


    Cheers... Dallas

    --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
    * Origin: The BandMaster, CANADA [telnet: bandmaster.tzo.com] (1:153/715)
  • From mark lewis@1:218/700 to Dallas Hinton on Mon Jun 4 23:10:06 2012

    i see you are running the original like i am... v1.10 with the y2k
    [...]
    else is still basically the same...

    All your experience matches mine....Oh well, at least it works! :-)

    seems that way... this is one of those times that i kinda (!) wish i was a C coder... if i was, i could fix what TimED needs to have fixed... even the y2k date stuff... but :(

    from what i can see, there really should be a reverse translation capability...
    much software currently allows for translation from IBMPC, CPxxx to UTF-8 but nothing goes the other way... there's not even anything that allows for conversion back from UTF-8 to multiple characters like was used in numerous other languages in recent years... sure the tables could be built but no one seems to want to do that... at least, none of those in the know about such stuff... everyone seems to want to "cop out" to the simple life... so who am i to try to bring forth anything compatible to the past? :( :?

    )\/(ark


    * Origin: (1:3634/12)

    SEEN-BY: 229/426 103/705 218/720 102/401 103/1 218/215 840 301/1 218/860 880 SEEN-BY: 214/22 218/870 930 601 124/5016 218/700 1 10/1 218/0 10/0