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Guide:Regional settings in DOSBox‐X
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You can customize the regional settings in DOSBox-X, such as changing the country code for country-specific date/time formats, as well as modifying the international keyboard layouts and codepages. If you are a DOSBox-X user living outside the United States, you probably want to do this in order for DOSBox-X to match the regional settings in your country. Such settings can be configured either from the DOSBox-X config file (dosbox-x.conf by default), or from the DOSBox-X command line.
The country code can be set in the [config] section of the DOSBox-x config file by use of the COUNTRY= setting. This defaults to 1, which is the US. This setting influences date and time format as used by DOSBox-X, such as the DIR command. It may also influence regional settings in other applications.
For example, the date is displayed in MM-DD-YYYY format with the default US setting:
07-30-2020 12:34p
If you change the COUNTRY= setting, the date and time will be displayed in the format associated with the specified country code. For example, 44 (or 044) is the country code for the UK, and setting the following:
COUNTRY=44
Will cause DOSBox-X to use the UK date and time format:
30/07/2020 12:34
You can also instruct DOSBox-X to use the Canadian French date and time format like this:
COUNTRY=2
Then the date and time will be displayed like this:
2020-07-30 12:34
A list of country codes and their corresponding date/time formats can be found in the MS-DOS COUNTRY Notes page.
If you set COUNTRY=0 in the [config] section of the DOSBox-X config file, then DOSBox-X will try to auto-detect and set the country code based on the regional setting of the host system. This however only works on Windows systems.
Alternatively, the COUNTRY command can be used from the DOSBox-X command line to change the country code. For example, the following command will switch the country code to 61 for international English:
COUNTRY 61
Typing COUNTRY without parameters from the DOSBox-X command line will display the current country code.
The US keyboard layout is used by default in DOSBox-X with code page 437. These can be customized to use a different keyboard layout or code page for DOSBox-X.
When starting DOSBox-X on a Windows system with the default keyboardlayout=auto config setting, it will try to set the keyboard layout automatically, depending on the host OS region, for a wide range of regions. This may not necessarily match your actual keyboard, or your region may not currently be supported. In addition, the auto setting has no effect on Linux and macOS.
You can set your keyboard layout manually in the [dos] section of the dosbox-x.conf file. For instance to set a German keyboard layout you can specify keyboardlayout=de. It will also automatically set a suitable codepage.
Alternatively, the KEYB command can be used from the DOSBox-X command line to change the keyboard layout. For example:
KEYB UK
This command will switch the current keyboard layout to the UK keyboard layout and set code page 858.
Alternatively you can also specify a different codepage by adding the codepage number to the end.
KEYB UK 850
Most western European countries would have used codepage 850 back in the day, but DOSBox-X by default uses codepage 858, which is the same as codepage 850 with the addition of the Euro symbol. See the "Support for the Euro symbol" section below for further details.
Note that software that uses certain box drawing characters may not look 100% accurate unless codepage 437 (default US codepage) is used. But this codepage lacks many diacritic glyphs that may be needed for regional support. As such a choice may have to be made between support for those box drawing characters or diacritic glyphs.
The Japanese keyboard layout is also supported in NEC PC-98 mode. You can start DOSBox-X in PC-98 mode directly by setting "machine=pc98" in the [dosbox] section of the dosbox-x.conf file. DOSBox-X will use codepage 932 in this mode and support double-byte Shift-JIS characters such as Kana and Kanji in addition to ASCII characters.
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Note
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The information in this section applies to DOSBox-X 0.83.4 and later. Previous versions of DOSBox-X did not support the usescancodes=auto config setting.
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DOSBox-X supports both SDL1 and SDL2 versions, using the cross-platform SDL 1.2 and SDL 2.0 libraries respectively. Since SDL is responsible for input handling in DOSBox-X, there are some differences between the SDL1 binary and the SDL2 binary in regard to the keyboard layout support of DOSBox-X.
The SDL1 version of DOSBox-X in particular only supports the US keyboard layout due to the limitations around the SDL1 library. As such when using the SDL1 version, DOSBox-X will automatically decide whether to use scancodes with the default usescancodes=auto config setting, which should work around most keyboard layout problems with non-US keyboards.
On the other hand, you can override this by changing the setting usescancodes to either true or false. The false setting was the default setting before DOSBox-X 0.83.4, which worked well for US keyboard layout, but the keys could be messed up for non-US keyboards when you are using the SDL1 version. So it is recommended to leave this setting to auto for the SDL1 binary.
When using the SDL2 binary, scancodes are not needed when using non-US keyboard layouts in DOSBox-X (this setting has no effect in the SDL2 version).
The Euro symbol is the currency symbol introduced by the European Monetary and Currency Union, and began its use on January 1, 1999. Because the Euro symbol was introduced after Windows 95 was released to the public, most DOS versions (including all versions of MS-DOS and PC DOS up to 7.0) did not support this symbol. Back in the day codepages such as 850 and 855 were used by most European DOS users, and they did not contain the Euro symbol. DOSBox-X did support these codepages, but it also supports modified codepages with the Euro symbol enabled, such as codepage 858, which are introduced since 1999. The modifications only apply to the Euro sign position, so everything else remains the same.
Below is a table listing the original codepages (without the Euro symbol) and their counterparts with the Euro symbol enabled.
| Original codepage | New codepage | Codepage name | Euro symbol position |
|---|---|---|---|
850 |
858 |
Latin 1 |
ASCII 213 (0xD5) |
855 |
872 |
Cyrillic |
ASCII 207 (0xCF) |
866 |
808 |
Cyrillic Russian |
ASCII 253 (0xFD) |
DOSBox-X by default uses the new codepage with the Euro symbol enabled for the specified keyboard layout (if available), if you do not specify a codepage for it. The Euro symbol will be supported and displayed in the above-mentioned ASCII position.
It is also possible to display the Euro symbol instead of the specified ASCII character in any codepage in DOSBox-X, including the default codepage 437 and codepages without the Euro symbol such as 850. DOSBox-X has an euro config option in the [render] section of the config file (dosbox-x.conf by default), which allows you to specify a ASCII position (between 33 and 255) for the Euro symbol to be rendered in place of the original character. For example, setting the following will allow DOSBox-X to display the Euro symbol instead of C-cedilla in position 128.
euro=128
It will work even after you use the KEYB command to change the current codepage of DOSBox-X from the command line. The Euro symbol will be displayed in the specified position instead of the original character in that codepage as long as the euro setting remains active.