frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) (06/19/91)
I just sent a small program off to Simtel20 - it should appear there soon. It is named ICELAND.SYS, and its purpose is to provide a simple method for testing whether programs work with European keyboards. It will install an Icelandic keyboard, change the font to CP 861, (requires VGA) and provides all the necessary country information - sorting order, case conversion etc, which can be obtained by INT 21H, functions 38H and 65H (DOS 3.3 and above). Best of all, it only takes up 2K of memory - a lot less than the standard DOS solution, which requires the use of COUNTRY.SYS, KEYB.COM, MODE CON PREPARE... etc Why Icelandic ? Well, it is a bit more demanding than any other language of Western Europe, so any program which works with Icelandic will probably work anywhere else as well - at least in countries using 8-bit characters - forget about Kanji for a while....so even if you don't care whether your programs work in Iceland or not, you can almost certainly assume they will work in France, Germany, Scandinavia and other more "important" markets, if the work in Iceland :-) (By "more demanding" I mean for example that we use 10 letters not in the English alphabet, many of which are not present in CP 437) -frisk