Yopparai Sarariiman

[Andre Leao]

A new release...





https://planetasinclair.blogspot.com/20 ... iiman.html

[Juan F. Ramirez]

It will be the first game in japanese language of the database...

[iadvd]

Dear all, we hope you like this game! We made a new tool for the MK1 engine in order to be able to write games with in-game texts in Japanese language (Hiragana, using a self made conversion of the classic Famicom 8-bit Misaki font), so this is game is intended as an example of use. It is also a "summer refreshment", just to enjoy a little bit (well, some of the screens are difficult). It will be also interesting for the Japanese language students.

We will now focus on our next Spectrum 128k game, so probably we will not be back until end of year (crossing fingers!). Cheers!

It will be the first game in japanese language of the database...

[TMD2003]

Quoth the otaku: "Japan is betteru!"

I'd been wondering recently if it was possible to make kana fonts for the Spectrum. I've spent long enough playing the NES Final Fantasy games - two of which needed fan translations to get them into English - that it should have been obvious, as the NES character squares are surely 8x8... aren't they? And then there's the MSX machines - seeing as they were all from Japanese manufacturers (GoldStar aside), did they have kana built in?

For great kawaii super happy fun time, etc.

[Lethargeek]

Dear all, we hope you like this game! We made a new tool for the MK1 engine in order to be able to write games with in-game texts in Japanese language (Hiragana, using a self made conversion of the classic Famicom 8-bit Misaki font), so this is game is intended as an example of use. It is also a "summer refreshment", just to enjoy a little bit (well, some of the screens are difficult). It will be also interesting for the Japanese language students.

We will now focus on our next Spectrum 128k game, so probably we will not be back until end of year (crossing fingers!). Cheers!

will you switch to MK2/MK3 finally? i like your games, but i think the time has come

[iadvd]

[mention]TMD2003[/mention] yes, as you see it is possible, but tricky. The Hiragana set of characters requires more characters of 8 bytes each to be stored than our A-Z letters, for that reason if you want to store that set you need to use not only the a-z characters set storing place but the A-Z place too. Games usually use part of the font space to store tiles or other resources of the game: for instance MK1 uses only A-Z characters, so the space of a-z characters are free to allocate whatever tiles you want there to show objects of the game, etc. If you use hiragana you require the usual space of A-Z plus some more space (hiragana set is longer than the A-Z set) taken from the a-z set of characters space. Due to this, if you use hiragana, you will be able to use less tiles in your game because for instance you need to relocate the numbers 0-9 in another place. Sorry if my words do not explain it clearly.

Besides, for instance a ZX Spectrum ROM including hiragana by default would be possible, BUT the big problem is that the physical keyboard is not ready to input hiragana or convert combinations of characters to hiragana, that would require specific ROM functions (e.g. Windows IME mode, if you write sayonara it will automatically write さよなら; adding those features inside a ZX Spectrum ROM by default sounds quite difficult).

I hope this explanation helps...

Quoth the otaku: "Japan is betteru!"

I'd been wondering recently if it was possible to make kana fonts for the Spectrum. I've spent long enough playing the NES Final Fantasy games - two of which needed fan translations to get them into English - that it should have been obvious, as the NES character squares are surely 8x8... aren't they? And then there's the MSX machines - seeing as they were all from Japanese manufacturers (GoldStar aside), did they have kana built in?

For great kawaii super happy fun time, etc.

[iadvd]

[mention]Lethargeek[/mention] hey thanks for your support, it is really important the feedback.

Regarding MK1, MK2 and MK3, this game "Yopparai Sarariiman" is quite special, we just had one week to prepare it and we wanted to show the hiragana features, so it was not our best moment / opportunity to learn the new functionalities and way of working of MK2 or MK3. Using the classic MK1 engine was the quickest way to show the Japanese features and doing something funny using the time we had available.

Apart from that you might have heard that MK1 was enhanced indeed recently, so basically all the functionalities of the MK2 and MK3 regarding speed, or reduction of space of the .tap file are already included in the latest version of MK1. So basically regarding compilation, space, liability, etc. the results obtained using the latest (this year) MK1, or MK2 or MK3 are the same.

MK2 and MK3 as far as I know are engines with more features, so you can make more different games. In that part of course if we try to do in the future let's say standard-like 48k / 128k MK1 type games, for sure we will go for MK2 in a first step.

But for instance, if we are using MK out-of-the-box, like in the case of "The Doom of the Pond" our first 128k game, there will be no difference, because we are using only the framework, not the engine. So right now for games out-of-the-box (MK framework only, no engine) the latest MK1 is very good.

Next year we will have a look probably, but initially our next games are not requiring the MK1 engine but the MK1 framework, so we are not in a hurry this year. Thanks for your support, cheers!!

Dear all, we hope you like this game! We made a new tool for the MK1 engine in order to be able to write games with in-game texts in Japanese language (Hiragana, using a self made conversion of the classic Famicom 8-bit Misaki font), so this is game is intended as an example of use. It is also a "summer refreshment", just to enjoy a little bit (well, some of the screens are difficult). It will be also interesting for the Japanese language students.

We will now focus on our next Spectrum 128k game, so probably we will not be back until end of year (crossing fingers!). Cheers!

will you switch to MK2/MK3 finally? i like your games, but i think the time has come

[akeley]

This game was made in one week? Seriously? Wow. I think it's quite wonderful, especially love some of the gfx blocks, it's amazing what can you achieve in such a tiny space. Overall it's a classic Nippon game: cute, charming, and with good gameplay.

[iadvd]

[mention]akeley[/mention] thank you, glad you like it!! yes, one week, except the new tool to convert to hiragana: that one was made in 2020 and took me around 1 week to think about it and make it. Cheers!

This game was made in one week? Seriously? Wow. I think it's quite wonderful, especially love some of the gfx blocks, it's amazing what can you achieve in such a tiny space. Overall it's a classic Nippon game: cute, charming, and with good gameplay.

[iadvd]

Dear all, just a quick message to confirm that we finally had time to publish the tool and files required to use the Japanese feature with the MK1 engine . Files and a guide are at this link:

https://github.com/Iadvd/Retrocomputing ... o/MK1_Tool

To the forum admins: dear friends, if you think that this should be a new topic please be free to make a new entry, but I would like to keep this comment inside this post too (because the game was done using this tool so it is an example of it). Cheers!