Re: [MiNT] XaAES translations - other languages

[Paul Wratt <paul.wratt@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 4:12 AM, Mark Duckworth
<mduckworth@atari-source.org> wrote:
> On 2/10/11 11:54 AM, Paul Wratt wrote:
>>
>> I was sure there was someone on the list (or reading) who has enough
>> japanese + fonts to know if it was possible or practical in XaAES,
>> dont think console is a problem, obviously there is no know key table
>> (yet). if it worked...
>>
>> then I would get my neighbour up here to give me a hand to get a
>> Korean version working (in XaAES)
>>
>> If no one can test it, I will have to potter around and set something
>> up in console first, then do a font for GEM/fVDI then test it in
>> XaAES..
>>
>> thats a lot of time to spend if it is gonna fail anyway.. hmmm ...
>> would not be an issue if we could use utf8 or multi byte characters..
>
> I don't think it is practical to support asian languages without unicode.
>  He translated Magxdesk to romanji and that was fine for japanese friends
> but I suspect japanese people in japan might have more trouble reading that.
>  I'm not sure how much space there is in a traditional font but I know to
> support HIrigana alone you would need 46 additional characters.  I can only
> assume that although you have a japanese system font you would also want to
> be able to display english characters as well.  Then there's katakana on top
> of that but I think that's less important.
>
> Interesting OT thing, Japanese is made up of only 46 sounds total
> http://www.japanorama.com/images/hiragana.gif  If you understand these 46
> sounds and what they translate to, you can read and write japanese that
> other japanese people can understand and also look up words.  Knowing this
> made my trip to japan much more interesting ;)  It'd be nice if English was
> this straightforward.  I've been speaking it for 30 years and am still
> terrible.
>
> Thanks,
> Mark
>
cool, that image, that maybe how they got Japanese into MSX's (and
another Kanji charset), I did learn those ones, but too long ago to be
useful..

..however (not modern) as long as there is an 8 bit charset, then a
XaAES translation is possible, so Japanese may be possible, but I am
unsure about Korean atm.. I will look into 8 bit machines made for
Korean distribution.. maybe ask a few Japanese MSX users what a basic
or text file looks like on an 8 bit machine..

Cheers

Paul