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Text files

The DOS game's text — GAME.TXT, PEDIA.TXT, MENU.TXT and the rest — is plain DOS text in code page 437, read line by line.

The 18 .TXT and 2 .DB files are read by text_open / text_get (file 0x6f8fa) through the C runtime's stdio, one line at a time, with CRLF line endings. They need no decoding, only a character set.

Every shipped file is ASCII except one byte of PEDIA.TXT: 0xF9, which is cp437's ∙. Code page 437 assigns a character to all 256 bytes, so converting to and from Unicode is exact both ways.

Compared with Windows #

The Windows release moves its text into TEXT resources inside COLTEXT0.DLL, one named resource per dialog or article, in code page 1252, with a directive header and its own markup.

An independent research project. Sid Meier's Colonization belongs to its rights holders; nothing here is affiliated with them.

Figures come from the reconstructed code of the 1995 Windows release · styled with web-ui v1.2.0 · source on GitHub · 2026