In some, but not all, my strategy games that have French or German accented letters in their texts, the accented letters fail to be represented correctly on screen. Most recently this problem occurred with Silent Hunter III, a licensed copy (?) of which I bought here in Moscow and to which I added the "Grey Wolves" add-on. The German umlauted letters (Ää Öö Üü) and the character known as "scharfes-S" (i.e. "ß") appear on the screen as Cyrillic letters. However, I have other software having umlauts and French accented letters that are represented correctly on screen, e.g. a copy of an English version of Silent Hunter III that I bought here.

For historical accuracy freaks such as I am you can have your crew in Silent Hunter III speaking in German as well as English or Russian or whatever, depending where you bought your licensed copy, and have the game texts in German as well if you so choose.

This problem also occurs with a Langenscheidt and Düden electronic dictionaries that I bought here.

I have discussed this problem with several expats in Moscow and they all have the same problem with accented letters; they have sought advice off computer experts, but to no avail.

I've tinkered around with the languages parameters without success.

I did solve the same problem long ago that I had with the Sid Meier stategy game "Waterloo" (which Meier game, together with "Gettysburg" and "Antietam"doesn't operate on Windows XP), but I'm not sure if I can remember how I did this. I think I re-installed the OS (which was Windows Me) with English as the operating language.

Any advice?

Your computer is probably set for a different character encoding than the one the game is written in.

There are several different character encoding sets. Note that making this software work by changing the computer's character encoding will make your other applications which are now correct to start producing wrong characters.

First, find out what your character encoding setting is. Standard settings for English speaking computers are:

USASCII
ISO-WESTERN
UTF-8
UTF-16
UNICODE

Then find out what encoding the games are written in.

If the game has a character encoding setting, set tht to match the setting on your computer.

Otherwise, you may ahve to keep changing encodings to get all of your stuff to work.

Yeah, that must be it. That's what happened when I had "Waterloo" running with French accents and not Cyrillic letters in their place. I just hit on the solution by chance. What I do remember, though, is that after "Waterloo" was running satisfactorily, all the other texts in Latin characters in other programs came out as gobbledygook. Like you said, if I get the coding right for Silent Hunter III with the "Grey Wolves" mod, then I'll have to change back the code when I want to use other programs.

The next question is: How do I find the coding for the game that's causing the problem?