Re: Announcing: Apple II Plus ROM Board

["Bryan Parkoff" <nospam@nospam.com>]

"sicklittlemonkey" <Nick.Westgate@gmail.com> wrote in message 
1169513772.600408.154560@m58g2000cwm.googlegroups.com">news:1169513772.600408.154560@m58g2000cwm.googlegroups.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!?)

Hi,

    I am interested to see Japanese font in 7x8 matrix.  I can't find any 
Apple II font for Japanese.  What about another font like Korean and 
Chinese.

Bryan Parkoff