MSX character sets are a group of single- and

double A double is a look-alike or doppelgänger; one person or being that resembles another. Double, The Double or Dubble may also refer to: Film and television * Double (filmmaking), someone who substitutes for the credited actor of a character * Th ...

-byte

character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

s developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

for

MSX MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by Microsoft and ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, then vice-p ...

computers. They are based on

code page 437 Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diac ...

Character sets

The following table shows the MSX character set. Each character is shown with a potential

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

equivalent if available. Control characters and other non-printing characters are represented by their names. Character set differences exist, depending on the target market of the machine. These are the variations: * Arabic * Brazilian * German DIN * International * Japanese * Korean * Russian The German DIN and International character sets are identical, apart from the style of zero (0) character. The international character set has a zero with a slash, while the DIN character set has a dotted zero. The MSX terminal is compatible with

VT52 The VT50 was a CRT-based computer terminal introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in July 1974. It provided a display with 12 rows and 80 columns of upper-case text, and used an expanded set of control characters and forward-only scrol ...

escape codes, plus extra control codes shown below.

Brazilian variants

Gradiente custom charset

The Brazilian manufacturer Gradiente have initially included a modified MSX character set on their v1.0 machines to allow writing correct Portuguese. Differences are shown boxed. The symbol at 0x9E (158) is the currency symbol for the Brazilian cruzado which is not used anymore.

BRASCII

Later Brazilian MSX models (v1.1 or higher) included a standardized character set named

BRASCII BraSCII is an encoded repertoire of characters that was used in Brazil. It was used in the 1980s on several printers, in applications like , in video boards and it was the standard character set in the Brazilian line of MSX computers. This code ...

, which solved the accentuation incompatibility problems amongst the different makers.

References

{{Character encodings Character sets MSX