To all users who care about 'special' characters

Post by **grinvader** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:58 pm

Namely, these extended ascii characters:
161 (0xA1) í - acute accent i (appears as 'I' in zsnes)
162 (0xA2) ó - acute accent o (appears as 'O' in zsnes)
163 (0xA3) ú - acute accent u (appears as 'U' in zsnes)
164 (0xA4) ñ - tilde n (appears as 'N' in zsnes)
165 (0xA5) Ñ - tilde N (appears as 'N' in zsnes)
166 (0xA6) ª - feminine ordinal indicator (appears as 'A' in zsnes)
167 (0xA7) º - masculine ordinal indicator (appears as 'O' in zsnes)

The changes *only* apply to these particular extended ASCII chars (well, they also apply to the next 60, but these aren't letters and zsnes displayed ' ' whenever it met one anyway).
These chars aren't gonna be understood by zsnes the same way anymore.

Basically, if you have a file named 'reñom.txt', then while browsing for your ROMs you'd not see 'RENOM.TXT' anymore, but something like 'RE,OM.TXT'.
And, if you're chatting over netplay and write an 'í' it won't be written 'I' but more like '.'
In short, it won't be anything usable as letter.

For those who use these extended characters: Do you mind this ?

soulmata · Post by **soulmata** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 3:03 pm

When 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of your time in zsnes is spent playing games and not looking at filenames I don't think being picky about letters will get you far.

Unless you goose-step around your house.

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:28 pm

If things will stay like that, it should be mentioned in the documentation.

But I've never used them (yet), so that's all I have to say.

Joe Camacho · Post by **Joe Camacho** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 5:52 pm

I could see some problems for spanish speaking people while on netplay, but if it's for the best, I don't really mind, like Soul said, the time spent on the menu is pretty small compared to the time spent on games.

I can't think of a rom that has any of those characters in the name, anyway.

Post by **grinvader** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 6:41 pm

Joe Camacho wrote:I can't think of a rom that has any of those characters in the name, anyway.

Joe Camacho · Post by **Joe Camacho** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 6:49 pm

Ah, that's different, when I first read your post Grin, I thought you were just talking about the characters that you posted. I didn't know you included Japanese characters.

Noxious Ninja · Post by **Noxious Ninja** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 6:51 pm

Death to small screen modes!

Post by **Nach** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:01 pm

Why are we losing characters here?

To get >255 characters working, or getting correct characters to display when sharing a code space, make them remapable and selectable.

Iff game is region zero, then use SJIS, iff game is region 6, map French into upper character table, etc...

Post by **grinvader** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:15 pm

Nach wrote:Why are we losing characters here?

To get >255 characters working, or getting correct characters to display when sharing a code space, make them remapable and selectable.

Iff game is region zero, then use SJIS, iff game is region 6, map French into upper character table, etc...

No, you don't get it.

ALL games are in sjis. Simple as that.

But zsnes uses the same font for everything - and typing these 7 chars in zsnes won't make it spit the previous result anymore.

Post by **Nach** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:17 pm

grinvader wrote: ALL games are in sjis. Simple as that.

You sure? I'm pretty sure I recall someone saying certain european games had european characters in the header.

Post by **grinvader** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:27 pm

Nach wrote:
grinvader wrote: ALL games are in sjis. Simple as that.
You sure? I'm pretty sure I recall someone saying certain european games had european characters in the header.

Sorry, but I'll wait for proof.

kieran_ · Post by **kieran_** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:47 pm

haha
i'm that one guy who didn't know what extended HAHAHAHAHAHAH ASCII is. I am thinkoing it is those weird characters that yu can only access with Charmap.
Do whatever you want, you are the developer. I Don't really mind none.

soulmata · Post by **soulmata** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 8:41 pm

kieran wrote: I am thinkoing it is those weird characters that yu can only access with Charmap.

ALT

kieran_ · Post by **kieran_** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 8:43 pm

soulmata wrote:
kieran wrote: I am thinkoing it is those weird characters that yu can only access with Charmap.
ALT

yeah. But I would only know about those characters by using Charmap. And my spelling is really horrible in that post. Jesus.

Tallgeese · Post by **Tallgeese** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 9:31 pm

I'm curious.. But is there a reason this is being changed?

DOLLS (J) [!] · Post by **DOLLS (J) [!]** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 10:26 pm

Metatron wrote:I'm curious.. But is there a reason this is being changed?

SJIS encoding, as ZSNES will be able to display japanese characters soon.

Post by **grinvader** » Tue Jul 19, 2005 12:14 am

Metatron wrote:I'm curious.. But is there a reason this is being changed?

As the pics show, some ROMs have sjis katakana internal header names. To properly display these, i have to decode them correctly, which means ASCII chars 161 to 223 now 'mean' something to ZSNES.

But when I started adding them, i saw that ZSNES was using some Latin-1 extensions on characters 161-167 (see first post tosee what zsnes did with those).
Since allowing to decode several extended ASCII encodings would require extra work, I asked if anyone minded these to go.
The result being mainly negative, the changes are now in CVS - zsnes won't choke on japanese headers anymore.

If this brings a consistent wave of whiny users here, I'll have to rework it all so that the headers use another table (and code it so i won't have to do it again for any kind of encoding), or something - in short, a lot more work just for 7 crappy characters.

rlbond · Post by **rlbond** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 1:50 am

couldn't you just make 2 fontsets, and if the header had A-Z or a-z in it, it would use the european, and if it didn't it would use japanese.

Nightcrawler · Post by **Nightcrawler** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 1:39 pm

rlbond wrote:couldn't you just make 2 fontsets, and if the header had A-Z or a-z in it, it would use the european, and if it didn't it would use japanese.

That will not work. I think some games have some capital English letters mixed with the Japanese. Take a look at Wozz. I believe that is an example.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 3:31 pm

Unicode lololol.

How about a way of detecting and decoding SJIS where applicable, otherwise warning on high ASCII? Now the real fun is implementing Unicode chatting. You can receive input in local codepage on win9x systems, or Unicode on NT, but probably display on both depending on the completeness of your fontset.

UTF-8 makes a nice transport encoding, and contrary to what some spoony people think, it does not require Windows NT or special API calls, as translating UTF-16 to and from UTF-8 is quite simple.

From there, there are relevant functions for iconv or whatever on loonix, or MultiByteToWideChar / WideCharToMultiByte on Winders, for translating between UTF-16 and the local codepage if you're using ANSI input, as is necessary on Win9x systems.

As if this custom GUI were not already complicated enough, now it needs a full Unicode bitmap font. All hope is lost.

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 7:18 pm

This reminds me...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Kagerato · Post by **Kagerato** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 11:45 pm

kode54 wrote:As if this custom GUI were not already complicated enough, now it needs a full Unicode bitmap font. All hope is lost.

That might be resolvable by rendering all the required glyphs out of an existing truetype/postscript font. There are, of course, certain prerequisites for such a process to work. You'd need support for large enough characters to legibly print the glyphs in the first place. Additionally, I can't name any software off-hand that does batch/mass conversion of scalable fonts to output bitmaps.

rlbond · Post by **rlbond** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 1:25 am

Wozz? There is no Wozz in the goodsnes set if my eyes are not mistaken.

However that is a good point.

Perhaps detect if 2 or more of the japanese characters are adjacent, and if so, use the japanese font?

Post by **Agozer** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 1:34 am

There is. Chou-Mahou Tairiku WOZZ.

rlbond · Post by **rlbond** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 1:54 am

too bad it's not filed under "w".

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To all users who care about 'special' characters

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