Winamp doesn’t natively support unicode characters correctly, instead it semi-leaves it to the operating system to display them. The problem with this is if you don’t have your OS set for the language of the text, it’ll display a bunch of ???’s instead of what you actually want to see. Well, there are two ways around this…

1st way is to set your locale to Japanese. This was my solution for a while, but there are a few annoyances. First of all, it changes every / to a ¥. (ie: C:\windows\system32 becomes c:¥windows¥system32.) Second, any application that uses your current locale to display help/settings/menus/etc, will now display them in Japanese. This doesn’t normally bother me since after looking up the kanji a few times, I start to remember, but I’m sure Tina doesn’t want to have to deal with that. (I need to check to see if I can set mine to Japanese while her profile stays to English… hmm..) Anyway, to avoid this, I opted for option 2.

Option 2 is to use a M$ program called AppLoc.exe. You can download this from the windows update site if you need it (just google apploc.exe). Anyway, the biggest annoyance with this option is that Microsoft put the following banner before every use of the program:

So, I decided to fix that tonight. So, I broke open my debugger, and found the code that displays the banner. Easy enough to fix.. just change the CALL to a NO-OP. (Well, a little more difficult than that since you had to change pushes and stuff as well, but I’ll bypass that stuff.)

Well, when I changed it, I accidentally selected the return call from the function before it… so instead of returning, it would continue on… which made an infinite loop of opening the program (in this case, winamp).

Next thing I knew I had a screen full of Japanese Winamps, and no end in sight.

I had to reboot my computer to fix it. I’m such a dork…

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ June 4, 2006 7:16 am

Tags: japanese