Re: Announcing: Apple II Plus ROM Board

["sicklittlemonkey" <Nick.Westgate@gmail.com>]

heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:
> Bryan Parkoff wrote:
> >
> > Can't you imagine -- Japanese font?  English has 26 letters and Japanese
> > has 56 letters.  How can Japanese font fit in 7x8 matrix?  It may be enough
> > to fit ASCII space of 256 excluding English.

Like this: (you need a fixed-width font to format it correctly)

   0  1   2   3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C   D  E  F
00 TA CHI TSU TE TO NA NI NU NE NO HA HI FU  HE HO MA
10 MI MU  ME  MO YA YU YO RA RI RU RE RO WA  N  "  '
20    .   [   ]  ,  +  WO a  i  RO WA '  ya  yu yo tsu
30 -  A   I   U  E  O  KA KI KU KE KO SA SHI SU SE SO

Notes:
- Full size katakana are represented above in CAPITAL CASE
- Small katakana are represented above in lower case
- RO WA ' appear twice because [ \ _ are not able to be typed from the
keyboard
- RO WA ' can be typed in katakana mode via ) * +

Japanese Punctuation Key:
" dakuten/tenten (voiced mark)
' handakuten (plosive mark)
  (space)
. maru/kuten (full stop)
[ kakko/kagikakko (left half bracket)
] kakkotoji/kagikakkotoji (right half bracket)
, ten/touten (comma)
+ nakaguro/potsu/nakaten (middle dot)
- bousen/chouon (dash)

> Search for the "Apple II J-plus" - the Japanese II+ version...
>
> > It allows ROM board to switch F8 ROM and font ROM.  Perhaps keyboard
> > for Japanese.

No keyboard decoder switching is required.
It would help to have Japanese markings on the keys though. ;-)

> I found this regarding the font switching:
>
> POKE -16292,0 : activates the KATAKANA font set.
> CTRL T : toggles between english and KATAKANA.
>
> POKE -16291,0 : activates inverse english text and turns KATAKANA off.
> CTRL T : toggles between regular and inverse text.

Yes, annunciator 2 is tied (from the game I/O connector) to an address
pin of a custom video ROM with katakana as the first 64 characters.
There are a few small changes in the F8 ROM to implement the ctrl-T
toggling.

Thanks go to Philip Lord for providing access to the hardware that
allowed this analysis.

We still haven't located any software that used these features of the
IIj+. If you come across any, please email me. (Surely there was a
system disk or something!?)

Cheers,
Nick.