#169040 - vallme2003 - Wed Jun 10, 2009 6:14 pm
Hello Friends
Im new to this Forum and as well as GBA...I got a doubt! I could see a lot of different Language GBA games but i couldnt even find one in my own Language! My Native Language is Tamil..Its a unicode type..Can i make use of unicodes in programming GBA for fonts? Any help Appreciated!
#169046 - Dwedit - Thu Jun 11, 2009 12:06 am
I don't think you'd be able to use printf or iprintf, since they are intended for ASCII only, but you may be able to find a bitmap unicode font containing the characters you need.
Then you could write your own text display code.
Edit: looks like it might be tough, that language appears to have adjacent characters joined together in various ways.
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#169051 - sgeos - Thu Jun 11, 2009 1:22 pm
| vallme2003 wrote: |
| My Native Language is Tamil..Its a unicode type..Can i make use of unicodes in programming GBA for fonts? |
Yes, but not out of the box. You will have to do all the programming to make it work. For that you will have to reference unicode docs. I don't know anything about Tamil, but it sounds like it may be a non-trivial exercise.
#169058 - Kyoufu Kawa - Thu Jun 11, 2009 6:54 pm
| sgeos wrote: |
| it sounds like it may be a non-trivial exercise. |
I took the time to look it up on Wikipedia. It's not trivial.
#169067 - sgeos - Thu Jun 11, 2009 10:57 pm
| Kyoufu Kawa wrote: |
| I took the time to look it up on Wikipedia. It's not trivial. |
Hmmm... although not trivial, with only 247 combinations it certainly looks doable.
#169068 - Dwedit - Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:40 pm
There's always the really easy way to do it: pictures of text. Don't laugh, many games actually do this. Just not for very much text.
_________________
"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."
#169071 - sgeos - Fri Jun 12, 2009 3:15 am
| Dwedit wrote: |
| There's always the really easy way to do it: pictures of text. Don't laugh, many games actually do this. Just not for very much text. |
It is only easy so long as there is not very much text. At some point it is easier to implement a proper text display system.
With 247 syllables, you could set up a regex filter to convert unicode encoded text to some sort of proprietary format. 247 is actually a really nice number- if you want to use a single byte encoding, you have room for a null terminator and 8 control codes (newline, form feed, etc). 8 control codes ought to be enough for a basic GBA text display system.
#169074 - Ruben - Fri Jun 12, 2009 2:25 pm
And even if it's not enough, you can always have sub-routines, like..
0xFF <- Video Subroutine
0x01 <- Video Subroutine[1]
0xFE <- Sound Subroutine
0x03 <- Video Subroutine [3]
Etc. I did that once with a sound system that I deleted. Seems to work fine, unless you start compressing commands.
#169630 - Karatorian - Mon Jul 27, 2009 3:50 pm
As mentioned above, with less than 2^8 combinations, it's actually not that bad. Many other scripts are much more complex. I think the hard part wouldn't be the encoding or any of that, but rather, making a good looking font at a size reasonable for display on the GBA. Tamil is a little complex to be squeezing into 8x8.
The idea to preproccess the text into a proprietary encoding is a good one, but it's not strictly required. It probably wouldn't be all that hard to do the proccessing on the GBA itself. (Which you might need anyway if you're going the let the player enter text, like character names, etc.) Of course, storing the unicode as 16 bit values would probably be a waste of space and UTF8 would be kinda silly. What you could do instead is to only store the lower eight bits. As the block starts at U+0B80, you could even stuff ASCII (or something else) in the lower part if you wanted.