ASCII for the String Parses? Help with text blitting

I’ve came across this excellent tutorial and example http://www.diybandits.com.au/MMF/examples.html
about text blitting with active object and string parser, but I’m having a hard time to get any character beyong the english set because the “asc” command from stringparser returns me “63” regardless of the russian character I put in a string and the documentation do not offer the correspondent unicode (apparently there are several standards)… any light on this?
I’m trying to stick with this one because it’s the only way I’ve found to change color of the text without using the textblitter extension.
 
Thanks