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Beginners > Writing Japanese Characters

#13314 - jerbucket - Thu Dec 11, 2003 1:26 am

Hello

I am totally new to GBA programming. My goal is to make a simple GBA game in Japanese. Does anyone here have experience in outputing japanese Kanji and Kana? Specifially, does anyone have a font file for kanji? It would be rather huge, since there are 2000 kanji but since nearly every game ever written in GBA has a japanese version, it must be somewhat common.

Thanks in Advance
jerry

#13319 - DekuTree64 - Thu Dec 11, 2003 3:50 am

Yeah, there's a nice kanji library called TonoMoji, which can be found at http://j-gbadev.hp.infoseek.co.jp/sakuhin/
It uses 1-bit fonts, so the size isn't too huge, and has functions to print them in mode3. It's pretty easy to write your own functions to print to tiles if you need to though, the important part is the kanji data.
_________________
___________
The best optimization is to do nothing at all.
Therefore a fully optimized program doesn't exist.
-Deku

#13323 - jerbucket - Thu Dec 11, 2003 4:27 am

I just downloaded it, now I'll dig on in and see if I can print out some Kanji. Do you live in Missouri? I live in Saint Louis!

#13324 - sgeos - Thu Dec 11, 2003 5:11 am

jerbucket wrote:
Does anyone here have experience in outputing japanese Kanji and Kana? Specifially, does anyone have a font file for kanji?


I converted k14.bdf to a c file, which I called, of all things "k14.c". I also wrote routines to figure out where a kanji is stored given a SJIS hex code, and to blit the data in 16 color tile format to an arbitrary location.

The font is 14 by 14 pixels. It is not a complete implementation of SJIS; there are no halfwidth characters, and ASCII can not be mixed with the 16 bit hex codes for the kanji. (There is a k14 to ASCII lookup table, and ascii to RAM routine.)

Feel free to contact me if you are interested.

-Brendan