Talk:Code page 850

Upper half of table
Only the upper half (128–255) of the table is shown, the lower half (0–127) being the same as ASCII.

Hm, is that really true? Look at code page 437, you will find characters like ☺ and ☻ and ♥ on the positions 1, 2, 3, respectively, instead of control codes. cp 850 contains them, too, in my eyes. --Abdull 14:50, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I think the following paragraph from our code page 437 article also applies here. unfortunately i don't have access to an old dos manual to check
 * "The C0 control range (0x00-0x1F hex) is mapped to graphics characters. The codes can assume their original function as controls (as they still do—typing "echo", space, control-G and then Enter causes the PC speaker to emit a beep—even on the command prompt on Windows XP), but in display, for example in a screen editor like MS-DOS edit, they show as graphics. The graphics are various, such as smiling faces, card suits and musical notes. Code 0x7F, DEL, similarly shows as a graphic (a house)." Plugwash 15:30, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi, thank you for your quick response. I just found a IBM datasheet on Code page 850: http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/software/globalization/pdf/cp00850z.pdf
 * You can see graphical characters in this data sheets instead of C0 control codes. I therefore changed the table accordingly. Still, your aforementioned comment on the graphical characters responding the same way as the control codes hold. I'll at this comment to the article. --Abdull 19:01, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * It may be best, as in the CP862 article, to say that the lower half is the same as CP437. --Shlomi Tal ☜ 21:28, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Obsolete?
Does Microsoft really say that 850 is obsolete and unsupported? Even Vista uses 850 for OEM (console) output:

Code pages supported by Windows (including 850):

Code page 850 in Microsoft.com:

-- Talamus 15:31, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

C0 control codes
No one may write here such things like C0 control codes are mapped to graphics characters. Apparently there is no distinctive behaviour of CP850 with respect to C0 control codes among other DOS code pages. Generally the topic "what C0 controls maps to in DOS code pages" is a bit controversial (see Code page 437). C_850.NLS file from Windows maps C0 codes to identical UCS codes, not to card suits etc, just like for all other code pages. On the other hand, almost all EGA/VGA screen fonts contain some glyphs for 1–31 code points (0 is usually blank), which more or less resemble some Unicode graphic characters. Fonts and other environment for CP850 are not unusual compared to CP437 or, say, code page 866. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 14:42, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Color legend
Might it be a good idea to add a legend that explains which color in the table means what? Or, in case I missed it, make it more intuitively findable... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jfresen (talk • contribs) 10:47, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Code table removed
The entire code page table was deleted by Bjacke in this edit, on the claim that it was ISO 8859-1 instead of CP 850. As I understand it, that is what CP 850 is. Can someone clarify? Massive deletions like this are usually not the right thing to do, at least not without some talk page discussion first. — Loadmaster (talk) 16:33, 9 October 2012 (UTC)


 * FWIW, the character sets listed at Microsoft's MSDN site (here) and at IBM's site (here) are both exactly the same as the chart in WP article (as of this writing). — Loadmaster (talk) 20:39, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Picture of the character set
The picture of the character set shows characters with a size of 9x14 pixels, while the comment says that it is 9x16 pixels. 91.6.41.35 (talk) 16:26, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Unrelated code pages
I don't think any pages that replace any ASCII printing characters or replace all or most of the remaining 437 graphics belongs here. Either of these changes makes them quite useless to anybody using a DOS computer which is what 850 was designed for. Spitzak (talk) 16:59, 12 June 2023 (UTC)