Fix: Microworlds Pro installer showing gibberish instead of Greek

A friend sent me the other day a screenshot from the installer of Microwords Pro Greek version on Windows 10 that was showing gibberish instead of Greek. At their school on Windows 10 it was showing up fine, so they wondered what the issue was.

They mentioned that on Windows 10 english it was showing fine. So we did try changing the preferred language order of Windows (at Laguage preferences in settings), to put English first (clicking on a language there shows arrows to reorder them, but has no drag action allowed btw), then Greek and try installing again, but the issue was still the same.

Note that at first I had wondered if it was a similar issue with the OwnCloud client installation that was showing an unexpected language instead of English, but since the screenshot was showing gibberish chars I guessed it was indeed showing Greek, but at some unexpected encoding for the system’s codepage. Note that codepages are a thing of the past and not needed for Unicode programs, but they’re still needed for older programs that just used a single byte (that couldn’t fit all posisble characters in the world) to encode a character.

I noticed it was showing a WinRar icon at that installer, so wondered if they had WinRar installed, but since installers are usually self-contained, I guessed the installer had been built with some older non-unicode WinRar engine version or something.

So I suggested going to Control Panel > Change Display Language > Administrative > Change System Locale for non Unicode programs and choose Greek there instead of English and indeed it worked.

Note that to find Control Panel on recent versions of Windows 10, the easiest way is to press the Search icon on the taskbar and then type “Control Panel” (or “Πίνακας Ελέγχου” if you’re on a Greek system). On the first Windows 10 editions you could just right click the Windows 10 Start/flag button on the taskbar and select Control Panel from the popup menu shown, but it seems they’ve removed that with recent updates.

This is useful to know since it usually affects most older non-Unicode programs that expect the system to work with a specific codepage. Microsoft used to have a utility that allowed one to switch the system codepage separately for various programs instead of doing a system-wide change, but it was hard to find even back then (plus didn’t allow redistribution) and most probably doesn’t work on newer systems.

E-Slate – educational microworlds authoring componentized environment

E-Slate (http://e-slate.cti.gr) is an exploratory learning environment. It provides a workbench for creating highly dynamic software with rich functionality, even by non-programmers.

Educational activity ideas can be turned into software, with minimal authoring effort, in the form of interactive Microworlds which contain specially designed educational components.

E-Slate components are provided as a kit of pre-fabricated, interoperable computational objects. Software Microworlds can be very easily constructed by plugging components in various configurations.

The behaviour of both components and Microworlds, can be programmed in a Logo scripting language dialect.

Most recent E-Slate version is implemented in Java (had been implemented on OpenDoc / C++ on both MacOS and Windows originally, till Apple pulled the plug from OpenDoc on MacOS (and IBM followed with OpenDoc for Windows) and the components are implemented as JavaBeans.

Special E-Slate software interfaces are available for the components to optionally implement in order to have higher integration with the E-Slate features like dataflow and interface-based pairing via visual Plugs (wiring), however other functionality like structured storage (storing of the microworld and components and sub-objects’ state in a single file) are offered via standard Java APIs like the ones for object serialization and externalization.

The Logo engine used is the OpenSource TurtleTracks Logo by Daniel Azuma (PhD student of Brian Harvey) with extensions of mine for Object Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts (TELL/ASK/EACH/TELLALL) and for free mixing of English and localized primitives (based on dynamically loaded/unloaded dictionaries for each component inserted/removed at a microworld and for the microworld/environment itself).

I was one of the main members of the team who designed & built E-Slate (did the Logo scripting API and lots of the components, specifically Logo, Canvas, Turtle, Slider, 2D Slider, Stage, TV and Browser) and many microworlds with it, so I guess I should take the time in a follow-up post to explain how to run the latest official version of E-Slate on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista too).

Note that there are some newer versions of E-Slate around on the web, but not all are guaranteed to be backwards compatible with existing microworlds files and have never been released officially through the E-Slate download page (the site is unfortunately not maintained currently by RA.CTI since the original team isn’t around anymore – some formed Talent.gr and put their work into Cruiser, while I took the freelancing route with Zoomicon.com).