Buggier qb64

[foolproofer]

Hello, with newer versions come new bugs...older versions could handle international characters, but 1.2 don't (or some hidden setting?). 1.2 has on Windows 7 a buggy first start of a program: you only see the frame and nothing happens (except the usual background darkening), so you have  to click the taskbar button to bring it to "front" and working.

Tested (used!) on several machines.

[FellippeHeitor]

Need more details.

- which previous version were you using that handled international characters differently? (My guess is any version prior to 0.954, before the switch from SDL to OpenGL).

- as I use qb64 on Windows 7 with no issues, please indicate whether you downloaded the regular 1.2 build or the development build (both will show version 1.2 in the Help->About dialog for now, so it matters to know the download source actually).

[Bert22306]

Fellipe and Foolproofer, the extended character set is a subject that also matters to me. However, it seems to work fine with QB64 version 1.2, on both Windows 7 and Windows 10, on my machines. (Last Win7 machine upgraded to Win10, just last Thursday.) This was not always the case, but it was fixed by Steve way back before version 1.0, IIRC.

I use the latest development build, version blabla.86, and would definitely have complained if something was wrong on this score. Not sure what the problem might be. I use the US keyboard, and everything works just like the US version of the extended ASCII set is meant to be.

Also unclear about having to click the taskbar. My output screen comes in front of the IDE, when I click F5, as it should. Is this what isn't working for you, Foolproofer? Could it be your antivirus software getting in the way? (I use Defender in one machine, McAfee in the second one, and both behave properly.)

[RhoSigma]

Hi foolproofer, I've the same problem here in Germany with a german keyboard. As long as QB64 is setup to use CP437 with the inbuilt standard font, typing the german umlauts (ä,ö,ü,ß) gives wrong results on the display. Also some chars which are reached via the AltGr key on my german keyboard (µ,€,²,³) give wrong results. However, if I save the text in QB64 and then open it in the Windows Editor or Notepad++, then the wrong chars magically got right. This is because Editor/Notepad++ are using windows CP1252 (Western European).

If you switch QB64 to the correct Windows CP for your country and also use a unicode custom font, then it should work. However this affects the IDE only, in your programs you have to use a _MAPUNICODE table with a unicode custom font to achieve the same.

Of course it would be nice, if the whole thing would work with the CP437/standard font setup too, especially because it was already working in the old SDL versions of QB64.

OpenGL seems to do some kind of pre-mapping keyboard inputs to the active system codepage before it hands over the inputs to QB64, which then leads to wrong results on CP437. Something must have been different here in SDL. However, as the majority of QB64 users is sitting in the US were everything is working just fine, I doubt that anything about that issue will change soon (waiting since 6 years).