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matrixDoppelganger

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From: Ürf (for now)

Registered: 2026-06-18

Posts: 2

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Mousepad: Allow Saving to Codepage 437 Format

I've been tinkering with 8088/x86-era DOS programming, thanks to OpenWatcom giving me a pretty dang good C library to do so with.

Whilst UTF-8 works good enough for most of my programming needs, I'd like to be able to directly encode IBM437 DOStext into a file, without having to use shorthands like \x2b or \xF8 to get around the quirks of UTF-8 encoding. The closest I could find was IBM850, but apparently that isn't backwards compatible, as most of the bytecodes used to draw box characters and greek letters for 437 have been changed into Latin diacritic characters on 850.

I know this isn't a widely-used feature, but it does seem pretty simple to implement (in theory), and it would make DOS TUI/Text-Based program development a lot more smoother.

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