Recently, I tried to play Tecmo Koei Sangokushi 12 PK Traditional Chinese version (三國志12威力加強版繁體中文) on WINE using PlayOnLinux. It works fine, but there is a problem that is the game can only be run in LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8 locale instead of zh_TW.UTF-8 locale (there are some reasons behind). As a result, if I enter some Chinese characters using fcitx, the output will be converted. Such as 一 becomes 珨. This is because when using fcitx in the zh_CN.UTF-8 locale, the character will be encoded as zh_CN.UTF-8. However, because the game itself is Traditional Chinese, the output will be encoded as possibly BIG5. This can be proved by using iconv with the following command,
echo "一" |iconv -f utf8 -t gb18030|iconv -f big5 -t utf8 #results 珨
Therefore, I need to convert this faulty character back to the character I intended. Thus, the iconv can be used to reverse the result by following command,
echo "珨" |iconv -f utf8 -t big5|iconv -f gb18030 -t utf8 #results 一
Because the game does not allow copy-paste, I can only solve this problem programmatically by creating a(n) fcitx module with the iconv. The module is available here.
The fcitx module I created works partially satisfying. It still has a problem which I cannot solve. I am not sure what is the root problem, either iconv, fcitx, WINE, the game itself, or other reason. That is, some of the Chinese characters such as 自 and 何 are not able to be entered and result question marks (?). (This is solved, read UPDATE below.)
Note: In order to use the module, that is to convert the GB18030 to BIG5 (yet still UTF8), because BIG5 is Traditional Chinese, that means we need to enable the “Simplified Chinese To Traditional Chinese” module in fcitx. Then only input the Traditional Chinese characters will work. Such as entering 會 instead of 会. Because BIG5 does not have the character for 会, but 會.
Because of the question mark problem as mentioned above, I can only give up playing the game with WINE. There is no choice but only to play the game with Windows in the VirtualBox which works fine in the Chinese (Taiwan) locale.
Update (2014-06-18): With the latest version of Wine 1.7.20 and fcitx 4.2.8, after using the module, all the words can be encoded as BIG5.
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