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Non-Latin Alphabetic Text Display?


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I'm viewing a KansasFest (think Apple II version of Intellivision Virtual Expo) session on early 80s struggles with doing typewriter/keyboarding in China.

The steps of "Criteria, Candidates, Confirmation" were requirements of input for putting characters on paper, push a series of keys to get fragments and then 1-8 options are presented in the display and then push 1-8 for the character that is wanted. Entry today is similar.

 

So.... Has anyone experimented with non-Latin characters on the Intellivision? Or Keyboard component? It seems close to impossible with 20x12 characters and 64 GRAM positions, but maybe I'm not being imaginative enough. What do you think?

 

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

image.thumb.png.a2ac58ce487154f0cffa85d66df021f8.pngimage.thumb.png.6667b263bec233156471ce4686b7a17d.png 

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In Japanese, if one can settle with just hiragana and katakana, we are talking about 71 characters needed for EACH. 

That seems feasible with INTV88's expanded gram of 256 positions. You can even fill the screen with text and write whatever you want with gram to spare for graphics.

 

On the other hand, with the standard 64 positions you would have to keep the text very short and only load the hiragana/katakana that are needed.

 

The same approach would apply to Kanji in Japanese, or straight Chinese. Keep sentences VERY short and only load the ones you need. Even with expanded GRAM.

After all, there are 50,000+ kanji!

 

Of course I'm only talking about showing the characters, and not entering them. That's a different challenge.

 

Hope this helps.

 

To your question, I have experimented with Katakana and Kanji when putting Infiltrator together.

Eventually I dropped the first, but the latter still appears at the title screen.

Edited by cmadruga
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An 8x8 pixel character resolution might not be enough to be legible.  There's a discussion linked below.  You could go 16x16 but that would mean an Intellivision could only display 16 unique characters.

https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pixel-resolution-needed-to-support-chinese

Edited by mr_me
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I suppose for permanent usage, the GROM could be replaced or some hardware switch added that replaces at least the graphic symbols with a good part of writing symbols. Yes it would require CS mode but in particular for text heavy screens even I might consider it. It would leave the 64 GRAM available for additional use.

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On 7/23/2021 at 2:32 PM, mr_me said:

An 8x8 pixel character resolution might not be enough to be legible.  There's a discussion linked below.  You could go 16x16 but that would mean an Intellivision could only display 16 unique characters.

https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pixel-resolution-needed-to-support-chinese

8-bit generation console games did it bitd. I believe that Necromancer is supposed to be the first console game to feature a kanji font, but I don't see any.

 

http://pcengine.co.uk/HTML_Games/Jaseiken_Necromancer.htm

 

Should be a lot of 8 x 8 font rips out there to work with.

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Well, the VIC-1001 released in Sept-Oct 1980 has a 8x8 Kanji Katakana font. Minus the line drawing graphics, I'm counting to 52 symbols?

 

vic20-kanji.png.07bb224dbcb2784e8e8e05f82d28cde2.png

 

I'm sure several other Japanese micros did too, e.g. Sharp MZ series and others. But exactly how legible the text is, or if the users are compensating for lack of detail is beyond my knowledge.

Edited by carlsson
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There are 46 basic characters plus 25 “diacritics”, which are modified versions of basic characters. On that table you showed, it seems they have the symbols that make the diacritics as “add ons” instead of storing each modified one separately. Smart  compression technique ?

That means standard GRAM could store either an entire katakana or hiragana with room to spare.


 

image.thumb.png.b7b143f18f3a2796c5d02a3be388748a.png

Edited by cmadruga
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22 minutes ago, BSRSteve said:

This is some artwork from Bandai in December 1982, for a proposed Mah Jong cartridge. Most of the artwork is 16x16, but there is some 8x8 text in the middle. 

 

Wow that is awesome! I wonder if there were some BSR secret sauce plans to do something about the 16x16 parts?

Embarrassed that I forgot about Hiragana, I used to understand enough to get-by on some TurboGrafx-16 games. However, that doesn't help with Chinese. Interesting stuff.

 

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7 hours ago, Black_Tiger said:

8-bit generation console games did it bitd. I believe that Necromancer is supposed to be the first console game to feature a kanji font, but I don't see any.

 

http://pcengine.co.uk/HTML_Games/Jaseiken_Necromancer.htm

 

Should be a lot of 8 x 8 font rips out there to work with.

This is all academic for me, I'm not planning to do anything with Chinese text (yet?), so thanks for indulging me. This Inty community is awesome!

 

The special SimSun font, if available as TrueType, I would use Inty Letterpress to convert each character as an 8x8 image. I think then the issue is that the Intellivision GRAM can show 64 different characters maximum, so maybe some sentences or concepts could not be said?

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I remember I introduced Japanese text on Mecha-9 but I didn't used more than 64 characters. I'll look for it as it could be useful.

 

Edit: just noticed cmadruga also had a number below 64 characters.

Edited by nanochess
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