-={ lundi, mars 30 2015, 11:25:32 -0700 }=-

Hey Alan!

 AI> Some of the lines around the outside showed up as question marks

That is more of a font issue although it could be the wrong codes being used
for the line/box drawing characters and in utf-8 those happen to be 24-bit
characters.  Not sure what codepage mp3blaster is defaulting to given that most
true Unix based text apps usually assume iso-8859-1 which don't have line/box
drawing characters.  However that is taken care of by whatever terminal fonts
you are loading and for xterm, or other gui terminal, xorg terminal fonts take
care of those.

 AI> So I'm hoping I can also do that with those BBS files so they
 AI> look as expected utf-8 or not.

glibc's iconv is the way to go but then one has to ensure that the characters
in question can be converted to the targetted user's terminal capabilities. 
For example for cp437 encoded line/box drawing characters to a utf-8 terminal
the conversion would be, "iconv -f cp437 -t uft8", and outputted to the client
app.  Apache has a module for iconv that converts encodings on the fly based on
the client's requirements rather than the host's.  A properly written BBS could
do the same.  It is doable.

Speaking for myself, I avoid line/box drawing characters as a rule and just
send the text.  I figure if someone wants/needs line/box drawing characters
then the client's end is the best place to add such things.  No?

Life is good,
Maurice

... Don't cry for me I have vi.
--- GNU bash, version 4.3.33(1)-release (x86_64-atom-linux-gnu)