Hi apam! I have a question for you, kind of a strange one I suppose.

I've been configuring my BBS in a way to be a sort of front end for textmode/console games. I have successfully gotten a number of old roguelikes and things to work...more or less. :)

One thing that feels "missing" in this case is support for nonstandard (i.e., non-cp437) character sets. If I manually telnet into my BBS from my linux terminal emulator with full xterm-256color and unicode capability, and set my BBS to use UFT8 (vs cp437), these games look perfect.

So boiling it all down here - is there a way, you think, that MagiTerm could support all the full character encoding of a full modern terminal emulator, so that we could support games and things?

Thanks!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

So boiling it all down here - is there a way, you think, that MagiTerm
could support all the full character encoding of a full modern
terminal emulator, so that we could support games and things?

Do you mean support CP437 and UTF-8 simultainiously? If so, I don't think that's possible - there would be no way to tell what is utf-8 data and
what is not.

I think depending on what terminal you prefer, the best way would be to
either use a utf8 terminal as you have been, or convert your games to
cp437 via some sort of conversion utility. I imagine your nethack or
whatever just output to stdio, then pipe it through a converter - (I
believe there is one called cp437)

I suppose there could be some kind of hotkey to switch between utf-8 and
cp437 in magiterm, there's just no way of detecting without knowing
exactly what the data is.

Andrew


--- Talisman v0.43-dev (Windows/x64)
* Origin: Smuggler's Cove - Private BBS (21:1/182)

I suppose there could be some kind of hotkey to switch between utf-8 and cp437 in magiterm, there's just no way of detecting without knowing exactly what the data is.

I think this is the ideal solution - give magiterm the ability to switch and then leave it up to the BBS for implementing details like "if you see some character here, press 1 for cp437, if you see this other thing, press 2 for utf8". But yeah, opening up utf8/utf16 would really increase the available charactersets for making doorgames and stuff as well.

Thanks for your reply btw! I also installed Talisman today for the first time to experiment with. Cheers.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Thanks for your reply btw! I also installed Talisman today for the
first time to experiment with. Cheers.

You're welcome, I'm not sure when I would be able to look at UTF-8 etc, I imagine it would be quiet a thing to do.

Have fun with Talisman :)

Andrew


--- Talisman v0.43-dev (Windows/x64)
* Origin: Smuggler's Cove - Private BBS (21:1/182)