Hi all,
I was very happy to read about the new text mode incorporated into 40D18.
Being blind, I've wanted to play DF for quite a while now. The text mode makes it possible for my ordinary Linux screen reader to at least make an attempt at parsing things.
I'm pleased to report that for the most part, I can read what I need to. Embarking is possible, and the skills screen reads quite well.
The area I run into trouble is the maps. I share the problem reported by several others here: my screen is overrun with M's and other nonsensicle characters. I have a locale set for UTF-8, so theoretically this shouldn't be happening.
I believe, and I could be barking up the wrong tree here, that DF in curses mode is emitting characters in CP437 encoding. This isn't typically used on Linux systems, but I figured out that if I changed the locale and font maps, the display's content changes radically. From what a sighted friend tells me, it's much closer to what the screen should look like in the traditional OpenGL version.
So I'm a bit confused. I'd hope whatever the problem is could be corrected, as I'd dearly love to have a slight chance of actually being able to play this game.
I realize even with the new text mode the chances of my actually being able to get anything meaningful out of the game are minimal, but I can dream, can't I?
Any advice or information would be greatly appreciated.
All the best,
Zack.