Author Topic: WinAGI 2.2.3 goes International (sort of)  (Read 1910 times)

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Offline AGKorson

WinAGI 2.2.3 goes International (sort of)
« on: June 04, 2022, 07:52:17 PM »
Here's the newest version of WinAGI: http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=File:WinAGI_2_2_3.zip

The big change in this version is support for non-English MSDOS codepages, which makes it much easier to edit resources in other languages. If you never intend on using extended characters or working in a language other than English, there's no reason to change from the default MSDOS codepage (437). (But I would still advise upgrading to this version; it also fixes a few more minor bugs, including the issue that causes it to fail on older versions of Windows.)

AGI doesn't contain any native support for non-English text/fonts. And showing extended characters on screen (other than in the text.screen mode) is not normally possible. So why bother adding this feature to WinAGI?

Using the string hack technique, it is possible to get AGI (when running on DOSBox, or on an actual MSDOS machine) to show all characters in whatever codepage the environment is set to. You can also get AGI to allow inputting letters with diacritics on the input line to let players use non-English words to play a game.

The logic code needed to make this work is very complicated, and formatting foreign words in your WORDS.TOK file is also quite complicated, but if you are interested in doing this, WinAGI now lets you edit your resources in the same codepage that your game will use, making translations (or creating new games in non-English) much simpler. It will also create word lists with non-English words (which are simply ignored in 'normal' AGI but work perfectly when paired with the codepage string hack technique).







Offline Collector

Re: WinAGI 2.2.3 goes International (sort of)
« Reply #1 on: June 04, 2022, 09:19:16 PM »
Nice job.
KQII Remake Pic

Offline Threepwang

Re: WinAGI 2.2.3 goes International (sort of)
« Reply #2 on: June 23, 2022, 01:01:24 AM »
Arf, I hadn't even seen that you had uploaded the update  ::) I'm glad that my SQ1 translation project motivated this WinAGI update. It's awesome ;D

The beta version that Doomlazer and I had tested was already very conclusive. I'll test it right away and report back to you. I'm grateful to you, you can't even imagine !

Thank you AGK !
« Last Edit: June 23, 2022, 06:01:36 AM by Threepwang »

Offline Threepwang

Re: WinAGI 2.2.3 goes International (sort of)
« Reply #3 on: June 23, 2022, 09:17:55 AM »
It works very well :




The result is perfect with DOSBox and ScummVM.

Offline doomlazer

Re: WinAGI 2.2.3 goes International (sort of)
« Reply #4 on: June 24, 2022, 11:57:52 AM »
Thank you for all your work on these great improvements, AGKorson.

Thrpwng's SQ1 translation uses the DOSBox " KEYB " command to utilize a custom codepage that, thanks to the string hack, changes the default font for both AGI graphics and text modes. It's used in the SQ1 French translation because the default English 437 codepage accents are a bit boring, but could also allow for Cyrillic letters or other special font cases. The custom font needs to be packed into a .cpi file, which can be done with an old DOS tool called CPI120 (download cpi120.zip from: http://www.kostis.net/freeware/)

The custom codepage font can also be repurposed to create an agi-font-dos.bin file used by ScummVM. This allows for consistency between both DOSBox and SVM. All possible because of WinAGI 2.2.3!


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