Hey guys

Just wanted to announce that I programmed a new application that lets you easily manipulate the text.dat and dd1text.dat files from DK in Windows. You can get it here:

eternity.mancubus.net/stuff/DKText32-bin.zip -- Binaries
eternity.mancubus.net/stuff/DKText32-src.zip -- Source code, released under the GNU GPL.

If you'd like to mirror it here on the site, feel free Instructions on how to use it are included (but only in English, sorry :'()

It's pretty simple to figure out. Just double-click, hit enter, or use the toolbar or menus to edit an existing message, or press insert/delete or use the +/- button or menus to add new messages to the end or delete ones from the end. It has full undo/redo, copy, paste, cut, and even printing ability (though you are going to need a very wide sheet of paper to print the messages in full...).

I hope this will be useful to somebody here. I enjoyed working on it a lot.

EDIT: There was a bug with loading a file when you had one already open. It's now been fixed, so if you downloaded the files before 5:22 CDT today, you need to redownload them to upgrade to v1.01

Nice!

However, there's already a Text and Dd1text editor: the one included in DKTools. The bad thing in your program is that it doesn't support special characters like: à â é è ê ç... If you could check for that, that would be great (excepted if you reserve your program for english users).

I figured there might already be a utility similar to this one, but I wanted to create it anyway, mainly for the experience, and also to make sure that there is an open-source, free software utility that handles the text file format

Omission of support for "international" characters is not intentional, however the text.dat files only support ASCII. So if your OS is set up to input text in Unicode, this would be a problem no matter what. I'll look into this and see what I can do about letting it accept extended ASCII. I really expected it to work automatically, but Windows rarely gives you anything for free

I'll update this thread again later with a new version if I find out how to add support for this.

EDIT: I just tested on my system and I am able to type é into the message dialog by using ALT+0233 and likewise for other characters. However, does this work on French keyboards? I have no way to test it

All I know is that Text.dat and Dd1text.dat are using "MS-DOS text file" character type. If you still have the original CD of DK, go in the DataKeeper folder on your CD and copy "Text.dat" from the TextFrench folder to your hard drive. Then, switch the extension of "Text.dat" to "Text.txt" and open it in WordPad using the "MS-DOS text file (.txt)" type and all the characters will be okay! This is the way I do to edit texts.

I changed my keyboard layout to French and tried using my app with it, and it seemed to work for me. Pressing the "2" on the US keyboard entered an e with an accent, "9" entered a c with a cedilla. It didn't seem to like Alt-Gr much though (right alt on US keyboard). I was still able to enter alt codes using left Alt also. I saved the file and opened it in UltraEdit-32 and the characters had been saved correctly, at least for Windows' normal ASCII mapping. The problem is that DOS is different.

But, I'll continue to investigate. If necessary, I can do low-level character translation while writing the messages to file

EDIT: Yes I see now, sorry for the misunderstanding. This is a matter of Windows vs DOS character mapping. I may be able to fix this.

EDIT #2: OK it's now fixed. The links above will get you v1.5 which now supports all the languages except Polish, which uses a different code page. However there's a bug in the French text.dat. A couple of messages at the end that are used during the ending are already ANSI-encoded while the rest of the file is OEM, and there's really no way to efficiently handle that as a special case. So you might see something odd when you beat the game, as it changes an "O avec circonflex" and a dot character to other things.

Anyway, I did correct all the texts in my French unofficial patch. There are no problems for now!

Thanks anyway!