How to type Félix on Windows :-)

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Edward K. Ream

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Jul 11, 2020, 5:38:30 AM7/11/20
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I finally though to google "windows how to type accent character". Explained here:

- Ensure Num lock is on.
- Hold down Alt key.
- Type 0233 in numeric keypad.

é will appear when you release the Alt key.

Who knew :-) This is way faster than using the Character Map tool. Works in Leo too.

Edward

jkn

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Jul 11, 2020, 6:06:51 AM7/11/20
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Hi Edward
   Wow ... this goes back to ... Windows 3.0, maybe earlier? It was the 'only known use' of the Grey Alt key for me back then.
There used to be a table in the original IBM PC manual (small hardback ring binder affair with clip in pages) with
all the three-digit decimal codes you could type, and the characters you would get as a result

Who knew indeed? (not a dig, I'm sure there are other things going back that far that I don't know about). Those were the
days when you got the BIOS assembly listing in the reference manual...

    Cheers
    J^n


Edward

Edward K. Ream

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Jul 11, 2020, 6:22:36 AM7/11/20
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On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 5:06 AM jkn <jkn...@nicorp.f9.co.uk> wrote:

QQQ
Hi Edward
   Wow ... this goes back to ... Windows 3.0, maybe earlier? It was the 'only known use' of the Grey Alt key for me back then.
There used to be a table in the original IBM PC manual (small hardback ring binder affair with clip in pages) with
all the three-digit decimal codes you could type, and the characters you would get as a result

Who knew indeed? (not a dig, I'm sure there are other things going back that far that I don't know about). Those were the
days when you got the BIOS assembly listing in the reference manual...
QQQ

Hehe. I remember those days. I rewrote a screen driver in assembly language to increase its speed by a factor of 10. Have no idea why I bothered :-)

Edward

jkn

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Jul 11, 2020, 2:13:15 PM7/11/20
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I worked with someone who wrote an alternative 'dprintf' (Direct printf()) in assembly - it had a cut-down list of format specifier support,
but also extended it in a few ways, to suit our work. This was for visualisation of a multimedia system. So you could specify a bar graph with a given
screen position and width etc., then feed it a value and it would use the block codes of the IBM character set in (mode 7, was it) to dynamically
show this. There were a lot of other bells and whistles as well. It was c-r-a-z-y fast, even on an 80286... John Goodman, I wonder where you are now...


Thomas Passin

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Jul 11, 2020, 4:50:14 PM7/11/20
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I remember them too, hehe ... I rewrote a buggy parallel port driver in my Sanyo MS-DOS level clone (i.e., it used a non-IBM bios and hardware).  I had to wind the new code in and out through unused stretches of bytes to find enough room.  I was forced into doing this because my printer sometimes printed screwy output, caused by a bug in the BIOS error handling.
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