The Sword of Kumdor
lynn.github.io
lynn.github.io
It's stuff like this that makes me love early games.
Things that seem bizarre now, but at the time were "Sure, that more or less works!"
The font seems to fix itself when zooming in a bunch.
"<!--<details><summary>Spoilers!</summary>....."
Lynn wanted the font to look like an "old", pixelated one, I guess. And instead of using a font that would work anywhere, they have chosen to set `-webkit-font-smoothing: none;`, which works on Chrome and Safari in a certain font size only and not even on every OS. I guess it should look like this (scaled to 110% in my browser): https://i.postimg.cc/rsmpLprJ/Bildschirmfoto-2024-06-03-um-1...
Yes, Firefox has `-moz-osx-font-smoothing`. Which's name at least makes it clear that it -- like `-webkit-font-smoothing` -- only works on OSX (AFAIK).
Or did the game font somehow already support latin characters?
Or is the font provided by the platform (PC-98) in this case?
The game looks gorgeous.
Edit: I figured it out myself, the font is provided by the platform but is commonly patched:
https://gang-fight.com/projects/98faq/#changeFont
I wonder what font the author used in their screenshots, definitely not the default one from that emulator and doesn't really look like the one from that link either.
The PC-98 actually comes with a "kanji ROM" chip, that you poll 16x16 characters from one at a time. FONT.ROM is the data used to emulate this chip. Loading an entire font into RAM was not practical on old Japanese PCs. The earliest models, like the MSX, had 64kB of RAM, which was no match for the 3000×16×16 bits = 96kB of font data! (On the PC-98, it's something like 282kB of font data that would eat up half the available 640kB of RAM.)
I've seen games that have their own font data for drawing stylish hiragana/katakana/Latin characters but fall back to the "kanji ROM" for kanji. Kumdor's custom font only covers Latin characters. The typing tests in the game progress from QWERTY nonsense (sdfjkl jklsdf) to little texts in English and rōmaji. My translation patch leaves them perfectly untouched :)
And great work on translating the game and writing about it!