Why is Chinese my only option?

[danielktdoranie]

Only see two options for encoding and both are Chinese. Why?

Is this Chinese only BBS software?

[ytang]

It is because the majority of our users use it for BBSes in GBK or BIG5, and both encodings are compatible with the standard 7-bit ASCII.

If you are interested, you can take a look at https://github.com/ytang/welly/blob/master/Welly/WLEncoder.m and provide a translation from a specific encoding to Unicode. Pull requests are always welcome.

[danielktdoranie]

This link you sent me means nothing to me.

I think you should put in the description in the Apple App Store this is Chinese only. It's a shame because you seem to have the ONLY native BBS telnet client that's also native Apple Silicon.

[ytang]

This link you sent me means nothing to me.

I think you should put in the description in the Apple App Store this is Chinese only. It's a shame because you seem to have the ONLY native BBS telnet client that's also native Apple Silicon.

I don't see why that is necessary. Again, both GBK and Big5 are fully compatible with the standard 7-bit ASCII, which means all alphanumeric characters work as intended.

Welly is open-source software. If you want to contribute to it, please feel free to go ahead and submit pull requests. Otherwise, kindly mind your words.

[cmang]

It would be nice to have options for regular Unicode encoding (without attempts to translate from Chinese), and for Code Page 437 (aka IBM-PC or "Western (ISO Latin 1)") encoding. This will let us use this software with English language BBSs.

I also downloaded this software without realizing it is only for Chinese character encoding. That is good to know that BGK and Big5 are compatible with 7-bit ASCII, at least.

[cmang]

If you are interested, you can take a look at https://github.com/ytang/welly/blob/master/Welly/WLEncoder.m and provide a translation from a specific encoding to Unicode.

Would you be so kind as to elaborate a bit on how this encoder/decoder works? I see a large array of unichars/numbers, which I assume represent Chinese characters, but I am not sure how that becomes an encoding translator. I guess their position in the array maps directly to the number of the relevant Unicode character?

Thank you for the nice piece of software. With a variety of translations this could be a great terminal for accessing a variety of vintage computers remotely.

[ytang]

G2U maps GBK to Unicode, and B2U maps Big5 to Unicode. For example, the encoding for 一 is 0xD2BB in GBK. From here, you can see the value for 0xD2BB is 0x4E00, which is the encoding for 一 in Unicode.