Displaying Code Page 437

[Bill Kochman]

Hello Folks,

I recently resurrected — probably for the fourth time — my PC-ANSI-based BBS, which I first began running in 1993.

So, I am remaking all of my ANSI screens from screenshots I took back in 2015, which is when I last ran my board.

My question is the following:

Can BBEdit properly display what seems to be an older version of the Code Page 437 ANSI characters? I am talking about the different shaded blocks, bars, lines, etc., that us older guys used to use to manually make our ANSI screens.

Sadly, if I paste an ANSI screen in a BBEdit text file, all of the ANSI characters are just gibberish. I seem to recall that a number of years ago, I could actually see the ANSI characters, exactly as you would see them displayed on a BBS. on your computer or in a telnet client.

To clarify, if I copy and paste Code Page 437 ANSI characters from the Wikipedia website, or from an ANSI art program, they do appear properly in a BBEdit document, like this:

▼  ▲  ◄  ►  ┼  «  π  ‹  ›  ‡  »  ∏  ◊  «  »  ≡  ≈  °

]  [  ↨  ↑  ↓  →  ←  ↔  ☺  ☻  ♥  ☼  §  ◙  ○  ◘

░  ▒  ▓

█  ▄  ■  ▀  ▌  ▐  ▬  .  ·  •

Γ │  ┤  ├  ⌐  ¬  ┌  ┐  └  ┘  ┴  ┬  ├  ─  -  –  _

╡  ╞  ╧  ╨  ╤  ╥  ╢  ╟  ╫  ╪  ╓  ╖  ╒  ╕  ╙  ╜  ╒  ╛  ╘

╣  ╠  ║  ╔  ╗  ╚    ╝  ╩  ╦  ═  ╬

However, if I copy and paste the very same characters from my actual BBS, they look like this:

»  Õ  º  ∫  …  ª  À   

⁄  ø  ƒ  ≥  ¿  Ÿ  ¥  ¬  

€  ≤  ∞  ›  fi  ‹  fl    ˛  ˘

So it seems that my BBS may possibly use an older flavor of ANSI characters which BBEdit does not recognize, or at least does not know how to properly display.

In fact, if I  try to use the first group of ANSI characters above in my BBS, it won’t even let me, and it just beeps. Yes, my BBS is OLD, from the 80s and the 90s.  :)

Kind regards,

Kind regards,

[GP]

Have you tried to use iconv (command line tool included with MacOS) to convert your code page 437 character files to Unicode character files?

Once converted then test the conversion's display using one of the several fixed width fonts to see if that font has defined character renderings for all the translation's used Unicode characters.

[Darren Duncan]

I expect what is happening here is that what you copied and pasted from
Wikipedia is not Code Page 437 but rather is Unicode for the same glyphs. The
Unicode glyphs would display properly. What you're copying that's not working
is probably not carrying the metadata saying what code page it is, so the bytes
are interpreted wrong. -- Darren Duncan

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[Rick Gordon]

What if you set your text encoding to one of the other Western encodings?

On Sunday, March 17, 2024 at 5:08:14 PM UTC-7 Bill Kochman wrote:

[Kevin]

You can change the encoding of a text file within BBEdit. If you look at the bottom status bar of the document window, you should see a drop-down menu where you can select a different encoding. You might need to click on "Other..." to select from a larger list. For code page 437, I think the correct choice would be called "Western (DOS Latin 1)".

[Bill Kochman]

Thank you to everyone who has responded to my inquiry. I appreciate it. As some of you have suggested, I had already used the encoding menu in the bottom left side of the BBEdit window, even before I wrote into the list. Doing so does not help.

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that my BBS software won’t even recognize the code page 437 characters which I extracted from a program which was specifically made to draw PC-ANSI graphics for BBSes, strongly suggests to me that the problem is with the BBS software itself.

In other words, I don’t think that the problem is with BBEdit. I just think that Hermes — the BBS software — is so old, that it uses some flavor of code page 437 characters which is somehow different from modern versions of the same code.

Darren is probably right regarding Wikipedia converting the characters to unicode so that they will display properly on a web page, or in a regular text document.

But when even the characters extracted from an actual PC-ANSI drawing program don’t work in the BBS software, that tells me something: there is something different about the characters that the Hermes software uses.

In the end, what I was forced to do in order to draw the new ANSI screens for my resurrected BBS, was copy the code page 437 characters from the different ANSI screens which are included with the BBS software, and paste them into a document created by another old BBS software called Public Address, which does recognize the characters from Hermes.

Public Address has a built-in ANSI editor which not only allows you to draw ANSI screens in it, but it allows you to preview your screens as you draw them, and even test them at different modem speeds.

The only problem is that you have to know how to type them with your keyboard to begin with, which invokves a lot if pick and shovel work.

The ANSI characters which I found within Hermes itself are very limited. They are not the complete set of code page 437 characters. Ism thinking that if I can find some other externals — a.k.a. doors — which still work with Hermes, I might be able to extract more characters from them. Only a few externals still work with Hermes, and they were of little help.

Nevertheless, working with the limited set of characters that I was able to extract from Hermes, I have thus far made new Main Menu, Transfer Menu, and Welcome screens for my BBS in the Public Address ANSI editor.

Needless-to-say, it is very slow, tedious work for a 70 year old guy with back problems and very poor vision, but I’m getting it done for the love of the hobby. Why else would I resurrect my BBS three or four times since 1993? 😆😀🤣

Again, thanks to everyone who has tried to help. And, Rich, sorry if we got a bit off-topic with this. 😀

Kind regards,

Bill Kochman

[GP]

This from the "THE OLDSCHOOL PC FONT RESOURCE", https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#cp437_text, may give a clue as to the difficulty you're having:

"CP437 can't really be mapped to Unicode in a simple 1:1 manner. The culprits are characters 00h-1Fh and 7Fh, which can be interpreted either as control codes or as graphical symbols. Thus there are two widely used mappings: the standard IBM/MS map (which does the former), and Unicode's "IBMGRAPH" map (which does the latter). Trouble is, software that expects one of them may not always play nice with the other one." 

[Bill Kochman]

Thanks for the info from “The OldSchool PC Font Resource” site. You may possibly be on to something. Who knows. But, whatever the  case may be, and regardless of why Hermes rejects the ANSI codes I try to paste into my screens, as I said previously, it just forces me to make my screens the way I have always made them since decades ago — by pasting in one character at a time. It is sad though that animated ANSI no longer works on modern computers, because they run too fast, and the animation just zips by. And with that, I will bring this conversation to a close before we test Rich’s patience too much! 😀🤣😇😆

Kind regards,