I’m a heavy mIRC user, I use it to chat, to get help, to download, etc., but that’s not important! I often find myself explaining to people how to enable UTF-8 encoding, especially for japanese characters encoding, in their mIRC clients, so I decided to write a little tutorial to make my life easier.

NOTE: This tutorial was made on Windows XP and mIRC version 6.33.

First things first, you must have East Asian Languages installed on your computer. Go to Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, Languages tab. There, you’ll have to check the Install files for East Asian Languages, like in the image below.

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If it’s alreasy checked, you should be okay. If not, you’ll have to check it, and you’ll be asked for a Windows XP CD (pirated or not :P) from which it’ll get some files. When you’re done, click OK, DUUH!

Once you get that clear, you move to the mIRC application. There, you’ll have to do two things.

FIRST! Go to Tools menu item and click Options…. In the mIRC Options windows, on the left side, expand/collapse the IRC menu and click Messages. There, you’ll have to check 4 of the 6 lower boxes: Multibyte display, Multibyte editbox, UTF-8 display and Font Linking, as seen in the image below.

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Now click OK and you’re done with the first step!

SECOND! In the very same menubar, go to View and click Font…. I recommend keeping the Fixedsys font as the default font, as it’s probably the best. But anyway, at the UTF-8 dropdown menu, click the Display and encode option, as seen in the image below. Then click OK, DUUH!

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Well, that’s about it, simple right ?
UTF-8 BANZAAAAAAAI! \o/

Example:

Special note: If you’re dumb enough to NOT understand this tutorial, then mIRC is not for you.