I saw there was a lively AI/vibe-coding discussion on Dove-Net. :) I'm vibe-coding a clone of Barren Realms Elite, and hit a snag, and looking for human feedback regarding this charset issue:

https://github.com/andy5995/immortal-barons/issues/18

Excerpt:

A sysop who tested the Win32 snapshot door on a BBS reported that the
"output appears to be UTF-8 instead of CP-437." On a CP437 terminal, that >means the box-drawing and block characters render as garbage (mojibake).

The observation is correct. Immortal Barons emits UTF-8 on the wire, and there >is no output-side character-set layer.

I've been testing locally in my terminal (on Manjaro Linux in XFCE terminal), and set up a Mystic BBS locally, telnetted in and opened it as a door, with no trouble.

I'd appreciate it if anyone could provide me with definitive feedback about the

design.

--
-Andy
Website: https://andy5995.github.io


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Digital Man wrote to Andy Alt <=-

Traditional BBS terminals (including even modern ones like SyncTERM, Netrunner, etc.) do not (yet) support UTF-8 - just CP437. And
Synchronet assumes all doors, by default, output CP437. So you need to convert your output character set to CP437. It's not a "design" so much
as an implementation detail. --
digital man (rob)

Thanks! That pretty much confirms things. Regarding sbbs, has there ever been a

discussion about configuring a door to use the charset the user has enabled (or

what's been auto-detected) in their settings?

On a loosely related topic, I've been working on modemu2k, and for testing, I use it with minicom. On Vertrauen (and other boards), cp437 is auto-detected, but I get odd characters (mostly '?'s) at some of the ANSI screens. When I tried minicom's '-R CP437' option, the characters were correct, but some of the

block chars weren't positioned properly (at the main menu, for example), and the prompt appeared in the lower-right corner of the menu, buried in the border. Other sbbs boards I've tried recently have an option where I can manually change to UTF-8, and that always gives me the correct output when using minicom. On Vert, I've changed to US-ASCII (I didn't see a utf-8 option).

I've used syncterm (telnet/ssh client) a little and so far never have to change

any settings on vert or in syncterm for proper operation.

--
-Andy
Website: https://andy5995.github.io


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Digital Man wrote to Andy Alt <=-

Re: charset question for Immortal Barons
By: Andy Alt to All on Wed Jul 08 2026 08:45 pm

Subject: charset question for Immortal Barons

I'd appreciate it if anyone could provide me with definitive feedback about the

design.

Traditional BBS terminals (including even modern ones like SyncTERM, Netrunner, etc.) do not (yet) support UTF-8 - just CP437. And
Synchronet assumes all doors, by default, output CP437. So you need to convert your output character set to CP437. It's not a "design" so much
as an implementation detail. --
digital man (rob)

I and Claude took care of the "implementation details" ;) Issue resolved.


--
-Andy
Website: https://andy5995.github.io


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Re: Re: charset question for Immortal Barons
By: Andy Alt to Digital Man on Thu Jul 09 2026 07:30 am

Subject: Re: charset question for Immortal Barons

Digital Man wrote to Andy Alt <=-

Traditional BBS terminals (including even modern ones like SyncTERM, Netrunner, etc.) do not (yet) support UTF-8 - just CP437. And Synchronet assumes all doors, by default, output CP437. So you need to convert your output character set to CP437. It's not a "design" so much as an implementation detail. --
digital man (rob)

Thanks! That pretty much confirms things. Regarding sbbs, has there ever been a
discussion about configuring a door to use the charset the user has enabled (or
what's been auto-detected) in their settings?

Most recent builds of SCFG (v3.22a) allow the sysop to enable "Untranslated" for any external program (door) I/O mode, in which case, it's entirely up to the door itself to do any charset/encoding conversions (e.g. CP437->PETSCII, UTF8->CP437).

But other than some recent experiments I've been working on, I know of no doors that actually handle the charset conversions themselves.

On a loosely related topic, I've been working on modemu2k, and for testing, I use it with minicom. On Vertrauen (and other boards), cp437 is auto-detected, but I get odd characters (mostly '?'s) at some of the ANSI screens. When I tried minicom's '-R CP437' option, the characters were correct, but some of the

block chars weren't positioned properly (at the main menu, for example), and the prompt appeared in the lower-right corner of the menu, buried in the border. Other sbbs boards I've tried recently have an option where I can manually change to UTF-8, and that always gives me the correct output when using minicom. On Vert, I've changed to US-ASCII (I didn't see a utf-8 option).

UTF-8 must be auto-detected on Synchronet (upon connect). There's no mechanism to manually-force UTF-8.

I've used syncterm (telnet/ssh client) a little and so far never have to change

any settings on vert or in syncterm for proper operation.

Sounds right.
--
digital man (rob)

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