mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz) (06/30/91)
In article <1991Jun28.225233.19410@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes: >In article <rkushner.3611@sycom.UUCP> rkushner@sycom.UUCP (Ronald Kushner) writes: >>Apple Computer is catering to the needs of 250 Japanese firms in the Detroit >>area. Apple uses something called KanjiTalk, which uses word phonetics to >>build characters from the sounds of the word types in. The user points to the >>character on the screen that is the correct one.... >> > Wouldn't it be possible to incorporate Kanji via a Kanji >font and a Commodity which would trap incoming keystrokes and >process them? > -- Ethan > Sorry if I'm not quoting someone correctly here, but I did my best to figure out who was saying what. It was pretty well nested :) I want this to be a better and cleaner thread in its own right... I saw on TV some software for the Mac that is probably this KanjiTalk. It allowed one person to type stuff in in english and it came out in Japanese on the other machine (over AppleTalk or whatever). I'm pretty sure it also used Macintalk as well. Looked like a great idea. But back to what I really want to get into, which is how to make the Amiga do Japanese - which is what Ethan appears to be hinting at. I worked for Sega for a time and got to see and use Japanese NEC PCs. I also worked with several Japanese folks (great people, by the way) who knew PCs quite well. At Sega, we were using networked Amigas to do Genesis development, and the Japanese guys all saw how great the Amiga was and those who spoke/read/wrote english well enough actually used the Amiga quite well. In fact, those who did use the Amiga suggested that it would be a huge hit in the Japanese market, if it only did Japanese. Now before getting more into what the Amiga needs to do, a look at the Japanese PC is in order. The NEC incorporates a version of MS DOS which has a lot of Japanese features built in. In ROM, they have Kanji and Katakana fonts and they have altered the BIOS to support the display of these character sets. They also have translated all of the MS-DOS messages into Japanese (I don't read Japanese, but I can sure tell when it's saying Abort, Retry or Quit? :) Anyhow, they also have a wedge between the command line and the user that allows them to enter the Japanese characters onto the command line. This is done by combining multiple key strokes to generate a single Japanese character equivalent. The Japanese command line is edited in an area of the screen below the normal screen area and then the command can be transfered to the normal DOS command prompt... In order to accomplish this, a 600K file is used to perform various translations. So, I got this idea. Everything that renders text to the screen on the Amiga, at least everything that uses the OS, eventually ends up funneling through the Text() routine. This includes the screen title bar, menus, and text inside applications (like the CLI). It seemed to me that it might not be all that hard to wedge into Text() and have it translate english words into Japanese and then render the Japanese instead. Instantly, you'd have every application for the Amiga with Japanese support, including DPaint, CED, etc. But I am not very good at Japanese, so I am far from qualified to do it myself... So it seems like a bit of work, but not at all impossible to make the Amiga render Japanese in a totally transparent manner! But there is still an issue/problem to be explored. The Japanese text needs to be rendered in two fonts at the same time (Kanji and Katakana). One of these fonts is 8x8 pixels and the other is 16x16. The way the Amiga does Menus, for example, often has applications hard coding the coordinates of menu items based upon a certain font size. With 2.0, software is going to have to be more algorithmic about deciding how to place menu items, so this issue might go away shortly. The next issue becomes how to allow Japanese to be input to programs. Well, I figure that it should be quite simple to implement the same scheme that the NEC PC uses for entering Japanese by wedging into the input event stream and doing the translation there. But again, someonw who knows Japanese, English, and the Amiga would be a much more qualified person to implement this. Now the strangest things about the Japanese folks I know is that they all have had like 8 years of english in school, but they all have a real hard time speaking the language. It seems they are tought to read and write, but not to speak. I've been to Tokyo, and I was amazed to find how easy it was for me to find my way around, since almost every sign everywhere was written in both English and Japanese. The Japanese software that I was able to see source to was all written in english - 'C', assembly, or pascal or whatever, but the comments and text in strings were either english or japanese (they didn't seem to care much either way). There is a 68000 based machine in Japan from Sharp called the X68000, which reminds me a lot of the Amiga. It is clearly superior in every way to the PC, is great for games, has great features built-in, and is also a relatively poor seller when compared to the PC. In many respects, the X68000 blows the Amiga away. Like it has had dual playfields with 256 colors each since day 1, and built in audio and video digitizers. The Amiga has a much better software base, and multitasking, though, which would make it interesting the the Japanese. In addition, a Japanese Amiga would also permit a lot of the Japanese X68000 software to be ported to it... In summary, there is no doubt that Japanese could be done for the Amiga, and if it were, the sales of Amigas might double if the Japanese market were tapped. It might behoove CBM or some third party to implement something like what I've described here. -- **************************************************** * I want games that look like Shadow of the Beast * * but play like Leisure Suit Larry. * ****************************************************