DGDS:HoC: German umlauts in Textboxes are not displayed

[Commodusaurel]

German Umlauts (Ä,Ö,Ü) in Textboxes are not displayed

ScummVM 2.10.0git DailyBuild 22.03.2025
German Floppy Version

[windlepoons]

I can confirm the missing German umlauts in the text fields and speech bubbles.
Tested with the self-compiled ScummVM 2.10.0git (Mar 23 2025 11:58:54)

[mduggan]

A quick question about this version - is it an official port or a fan translation? I don't have it which makes it hard to debug :|

I looked around and couldn't find reference to an official German release for HoC, but I may have searched for the wrong things of course.

[Commodusaurel]

There was definitely an official German release.

​https://ogdb.eu/index.php?section=game&gameid=138594

[windlepoons]

This is an official version (I think it is very rare).
Here is the link to the German online games database:
​https://ogdb.eu/index.php?section=game&gameid=107047

[mduggan]

The font file which used for dialogs (CHINA.FNT) contains 100 glyphs with a start of 32 (ie, the max char code it can render is 131), but, eg, the lowercase o with umlaut is char 148 so it gets skipped.

The other 2 fonts (HOC.FNT and CHINESE.FNT) both have 194 glyphs start offset 32

Some possible things here are:

• The DE game uses a different font by default for dialogs?
• The DE game is filling extended characters from another font?
• There is something else about the font format that only turns up in this context? All the bytes in the file except one seem to be accounted for so I'm not sure what this could be..

I'll experiment a bit. I found a playthrough which shows how these characters should look:
​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I0z9mId6p4

[mduggan]

In d87db4db:

DGDS: Use a different font for HOC DE dialogs

Looking at a video of the original, it looks like the DE version should use the
same font for the dialogs and menus in order to get the umlauts.

This fixes #15817.