MS-DOS codepage tech notes
January 5, 2005

CODEPAGE and KEYB affect the operation of DOS-based programs. If, whilst at a command prompt, a character other than "@" appears when the "@" button is pressed, some attention to codepages is required.

The following lines are typical entries in CONFIG.SYS:

device=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\display.sys con=(ega,,1)
Country=044,437,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\country.sys

...and the following in AUTOEXEC.BAT:

mode con codepage prepare=((437) C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ega.cpi)
mode con codepage select=437
keyb uk,,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\keyboard.sys

The last line loads the correct driver for the UK keyboard, whilst all of the other lines load the UK character sets for display & print purposes.

Note: Windows has a habit of resetting the codepage number to 850 (rather than 437) every time it is updated or reloaded.