Well, sometimes, life is hard for retro computer freaks. Imagine using an old program that relies on ANSI screen characters (you know the colorful BBS font in the 80s) It is officially called CP437 or CP850, where CP stands for codepage.

Back in the old days you had only 8 bits per character, which results in 256 possible characters (the first 128 are mostly normal ascii). To make a computer fit your language needs, you could chose from varios "Codepages" like greek, latin, hebrew to alter the chars 128-255. The two codepages mentioned above above use the upper 128 characters to display some kind of graphics like this one:

(image from https://www.ansilove.org/examples.html )

On modern Linux systems, terminals use UTF-8, a universal font encoding, which is capable of displaying ALL ever man made character, like ℋ or ℌ or ⛮ or whatever extinct ancient font you could imagine (Linear A or B i.e.)

But you are never able to see the good old ANSI screens. until now. With a simple program called (guess) CP437 from github user "keaston" the graphic chars are being translated to UTF-8 to let you use old programs like BitchX or telnet to old BBSes.

Thank you keaston
Get it here: https://github.com/keaston/cp437

Usage
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Just run cp437 followed by the command and argument you want to run:

cp437 BitchX irc.efnet.org