breastle screen for HLA Adventure Need help designing one 848

JohnnyMrNinja

The MS-DOS era block-drawing characters, happy faces & such belong to IBM Codepage 437, also sometimes referenced to as "IBM Extended ASCII". Codepage 437 already contains many accented characters as well.

The support for international characters was further extended with the introduction of Codepage 850, which I believe contains all the same characters as ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1), though in different code positions, plus most of the old block drawing characters (even though some of the ones that existed in 437 had to be sacrificed.)

Windows, to my knowledge, has always used a derivation of ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1), though Microsoft has added in new characters in unused code positions and calls this superset "Windows codepage 1252"

Then where did ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) come from? It is itself a derivation (and a slightly modified superset) of the "DEC Multinational" character set, which is (or was) used in dumb character-cell based VT-love video terminals.

The "happy face" character in IBM Codepage 437 occupies the character code position 0x01 (or 0x02, if you want the filled happy face instead of just an outline.) This is somewhat problematic, since normal terminal emulations should consider this an unprintable control code. I'm pretty sure Unicode considers the character code 0x01 "undefined" or a legacy control code as well, without buttigning any symbol to it.

The IBM PC + clones + MS-DOS world was filled with this kind of sloppy language. There are no "ANSI characters". If someone from PC MS-DOS background is talking about "ANSI characters" they are referring to the "IBM Extended ASCII" character set (in other words, "IBM Codepage 437", which is usable in its entirety even without loading the "ANSI.SYS" driver.)

ANSI.SYS simply adds VT-love style terminal emulation capabilities on top of COMMAND.COM, allowing you to position the cursor, change the colors etc. using ANSI X.34 (or ECMA-94) escape codes.

(IIRC ANSI.SYS was quite slow and there were better 3rd party alternatives for it.)

It's just another example of the kind of sloppy terminology that was prevalent in those days. With "ANSI", they're referring to the ANSI X.34 color codes the "ANSI.SYS" driver provides. With "ASCII", they're referring to not using those color codes, but contrary to what the label says, TheDraw does not in any way ensure that the end result would be pure ASCII (it does not filter the character codes 128...255 away), so the resulting file will contain all Codepage 437 (or 850, or whatever codepage you were using) "Extended ASCII" characters if you have used them. (That's not a problem in MS-DOS environment, though, since - as noted above - even if you don't load ANSI.SYS, you can still use all characters.)

-- znark