Hi! I'm just starting out with assembler as I've finally found one which provides what I want.
I was playing with unicode APIs. I was especially interested in UNICODE console output. After writing a few routines to handle the strings, I put my unicode 'Hello world' to run only to find that 'Lucida Console' font lacks installed charsets different from OEM codepage, thus just printing squares. The fun part is that I could still search for the string in the box or copy the console contents to a text file, and the length was correct, not double as you would expect from ANSI. Switching codepages just doesn't run, and although windows itself sort of lets you "change the console font"(no unicode fonts though) no known API for that purpose. I'm really astounded to see how hundreds of professional developers are unable to develop a unicode console. If I was them, at least, would have removed the W version of the console APIs...
I'm afraid this has no solution, but if someone can help me...
Thanks!

Konbanwa Sikigun
well, if you want to use unicode fonts (to eg view utf-8 encoded Japanese) in windows you must either have a japanese version of windows or install a package for windows (unfortainly I forgot the name of it, but I think something like "Asian Language Pack" I'd guess) - it'll install unicode fonts (whith a much better coverage, naturally it contains all the kana (hiragana and katakana) and many kanji (not sure about the windows fonts but I think most used knaji are in the fonts)) - besides the japanese IME I can't honestly say that my (relativly limited) experience with the unicode support in windows isn't comparable with eg that in linux (even if I don't claim it to be "the best", well, at least not in here )
Also, in windows (last time I checkeed), the unicode support is implemented in a at first glance minimal effort way is a 16-bit unicode char width (not sure if it's UTF-16 or UCs-2).

offtopic: btw, hope you'll enjoy japan (haven't been there my self, but I hope to visit it at some point in the future).

if you switch your DEFAULT regional settings to japanese, you will be able to output kanji/kana characters. it's annoying though, since a lot of ASCII stuff are recognized and some erroneous character is displayed. just go to control panel --> regional settings --> set as default --> select japanese, but make sure you have the japanese IME installed first. that's all there is to it!

hope that helps.

Afaik, NT added UNICODE support before the "new standards" arrived - and now it's a bit hard changing the APIs without breaking a lot of stuff.

Thank you all!
Of course I knew about the changing the regional settings thing, but the idea was a bilingual project which could display both Japanese and European Languages. And of course, even if I forgot about European extended characters I don't want a program which requires the user to change the regional settings(ie to restart the computer).
I guess I'll have to learn windows programming in assembler . I hate handling events(I love VB xDDD).

offtopic: I still have a month left to spend programming until I go there :