Microsoft MS-DOS CD-ROM Extensions
Kanji Support
17 March 1989

The Kanji support in MSCDEX presently recognizes High Sierra CD-ROM discs with a coded character set that has bit 0 set to 1 in the volume flags indicating at least one escape sequence is not registered according to ISO 2375, and has an escape sequence of three bytes in the coded character set for descriptor identifiers field of "$+:". This indicates that the character set is a private multi-byte G3 coded character set and identifies the disc as having shift-Kanji.

In order to make MSCDEX scan for the SVD (Supplementary Volume Descriptor) instead of the PVD (Primary Volume Descriptor), there is a new command line argument /K. If this is present, MSCDEX will use the shift-Kanji SVD if it is present, otherwise it will use the PVD. All discs are required by ISO-9660 to have a PVD even if there is an SVD. 

In addition, there is an accompanying program SVD that can be used to change the default preference each CD-ROM drive has for scanning for a SVD or PVD. The syntax is:

SVD [<drive letter>: <std | svd>]

Running SVD with no arguments will report the current settings. Including a drive letter and either STD or SVD will change the preference for that drive from one to the other.