On 04/12/17, bcw142 pondered and said...
It needed to be CP437. Now all is suddenly clear. Thanks!
Can you put that in the FAQ on the Mystic Wiki or don't you have that level of access? It gets asked monthly at least. Something to the effect
All done.
[snip]
Q: ANSI output and other screens that Mystic displays looks a bit strange / distorted when I connect to the BBS or run a configuration change. Why is
this and how can I fix it?
This is most likely caused by the Default CodePage setting you are using.
Mystic can send client terminals either CP437 or UTF8 data output, converting relevant outbound data to UTF8 when selected. There are two settings that control this. They can be found in the Mystic Configuration System by
running Mystic -cfg from the command line.
Then head to the Configuration > Login/Matrix menu and look for the
Default Codepage and Local Codepage settings.
Default Codepage
This sets the default codepage sent to the users console when connecting
to Mystic.
Local CodePage
Mystic has a Local CodePage option which is used as the default when the -L command is used (local login). This allows separate defaults local console
vs an incoming caller.
Note that Local Codepage defaults to UTF8 for OSX and Raspberry Pi. MUTIL and MIS honor the local codepage settings and runs in UTF8 in Linux/OSX.
The documentation has this to say about the Mystic codepage settings:
If you do not understand what these are, set Default to CP437 and
Ask CodePage to "Detect". What this basically does is allows users to use things like Putty to connect to your BBS, and everything should look and
work as expected.
When Mystic starts up, by default a user will have the configured "Default" code page. Then depending on the setting of "Ask CodePage", Mystic will do
one of the following:
Detect : Mystic only changes codepage from default if it is able
to detect a terminal that is likely NOT the default, but the
user is never prompted.
Ask : Mystic will ask the user which Codepage they would like
to use after detecting ANSI.
CP437 : Codepage will always be set to MS-DOS (CP437)
UTF8 : Codepage will always be set to UTF8
In Linux, the Default code page will actually be what Mystic runs in
when you run mystic from the command line, too. In Windows, the Sysop
side will always execute in CP437, even when a user is logged in that
has UTF8 enabled (the user of course will still get sent UTF8).
One other consideration, is that many terminals that use UTF8 are using
VT102 instead of ANSI-BBS, which means a few things are different - most noticably are ANSI clear screen codes. In ANSI-BBS, the clear screen also moves the cursor to 1,1, while in VT102 it does not. This means its best
to edit your ANSIs and add a |CL at the very top so Mystic clears the
screen in a compatible way.
Some other final tips.
For a session you can override the the default code page settings from the command line by using the following syntax: Mystic -CP<mode>
IE: ./mystic -CPutf8 will force UTF8 default output regardless of the default setting. Any -CP that does not contain UTF will cause Mystic to default
to CP437
When a user selects UTF8 encoding, Mystic will now assume their terminal sends VT102 DELETE/BACKSPACE keys rather than the MS-DOS terminal behavior.
[snip]
Best, Paul
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A31 (Windows)
* Origin: Agency BBS |
telnet://agency.bbs.geek.nz (21:1/101)