AConv

Text conversion between Amiga, Atari, ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS and Windows encodings

AConv is a command-line tool that converts text between retro and modern character encodings: Amiga, Atari 8-bit, MS-DOS, Windows and ZX Spectrum. Characters are mapped by dictionaries (.dict), which are plain text files, so you can add your own encodings. If you don’t know the encoding of a text, AConv can detect it. The original concept is by Wolf; I maintain and extend the program.

Features

• Four conversion modes: byte → byte (b2b), byte → Windows (b2w), Windows → byte (w2b) and Windows → Windows (w2w).
• Dictionaries with bytes, Windows strings and escape sequences, including string-to-string mappings (e.g. ZX BasinC \a → á). A dictionary can be inverted (-invert).
• Encoding detection (-detect): dictionary scoring, text heuristics, n-gram analysis and a penalty for unknown characters. Dictionaries are given by a mask, e.g. dict\*.dict.
• Byte dumps in decimal or hex (-decdump, -hexdump) and a default keymap generator (-generatekeymap).
• Input and output can be the clipboard instead of a file.
• Output as ANSI, UTF-8 or UTF-8 with BOM, configurable handling of unknown characters and console logging.

The zip contains dictionaries for the Amiga (CZ, E2, Kamenický, KOI8, Latin 1, Latin 2, PBX, PL2), Atari (CZ, EN), ZX Spectrum and helper conversions (remove diacritics, lower and upper case).

Sublime Text plugin

The second zip is a package for Sublime Text 4 that uses AConv right in the editor: Tools → AConv converts the open file (or just the selection) between Windows and the Amiga, Atari or ZX Spectrum, and adds quick conversions (DEC/HEX/BIN, upper and lower case, removing diacritics). It can also detect the encoding of a file. Conversion profiles are in AConv.cfg.

Usage

rem detect the encoding of a file
AConv.exe -detect -input text.txt -dict dict\*.dict

rem Windows text for the Amiga and back (output in ANSI)
AConv.exe -i story.txt -o story.ami -k dict\amiga_e2.dict -t w2b
AConv.exe -i story.ami -o story.txt -k dict\amiga_e2.dict -t b2w -f ansi

rem file bytes as decimal numbers
AConv.exe -i file.bin -o dump.txt -decdump

Detection lists the encodings from the most likely one:

PC-Latin 2 => score 1090, confidence 0.74
Amiga E2 => score 1082, confidence 0.73
ZX(Win) for BasinC => score 424, confidence 0.29

Options