Got a question for our European gamers

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Pocket
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Got a question for our European gamers

Post by Pocket (?) » Sat Oct 26, 2019 12:47 am

You know how in the '80s, text in games had to be made out of 8-by-8 tiles, one for each letter? I've been wondering how they dealt with diacritical marks, which exist in basically every language on Earth except English. Modern games (using the credits from Shovel Knight as an example) just make shorter versions of the letters with the diacritics crammed up top, like so:

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Looks like crap, doesn't it? Poor Josué.

But I was looking at some stuff about localization, and how in the original Japanese versions of Nintendo games, they had to write everything in kana (if not English) because the kanji symbols were too complicated to fit in 8-by-8 squares, and I noticed that some characters still needed extra room, and for those they just used the black lines in between the double-spaced text:

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And it dawned on me that this method could work perfectly well for diacritical marks as well. And in most cases, would actually use less memory. For example, Google tells me that French has 13 modified characters: Ç, É, Â, Ê, Î, Ô, Û, À, È, Ù, Ë, Ï, Ü. So that's 13 extra tiles you'd need for your game if you did it the ugly way:

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If you used the space in between the lines, you'd need a character for each of the overhead marks, but also two for the Ç because it extends below the baseline. And then, in order to accommodate cases where a Ç sits directly above an accented vowel, you'd need four more to cover all possible combinations. But guess what? We've still cut it down from 13 to just 10:

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Spanish is even easier, because we go from needing six extra tiles...

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...to two.

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OK, so I said in the title that I had a question, and here it is: Is what I'm describing anything close to how they actually handled European localizations back then?
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Re: Got a question for our European gamers

Post by Highbrow Dash (?) » Sat Oct 26, 2019 4:35 am

I guess it's the latter. I don't remember running into squashed text.

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That said a lot of games just didn't get translated into Spanish at all back then. Console games in particular were always in English. I remember Ocarina of Time came with a booklet that had Spanish translations to basically all the text in the game. I think the first translated console game I had was Majora's Mask.

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Re: Got a question for our European gamers

Post by Venusy (?) » Sat Oct 26, 2019 7:38 am

Yeah, it was only the PS1 and N64 era where language selection options started becoming more common in games.

However, there are some examples - for example, here’s Pokémon RBY, which does squash them into an 8x8 space - and subsequently looked a bit weird every time they wrote out POKÉMON (or POKéMON? It’s been a while and I forget how they handled it exactly)

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Re: Got a question for our European gamers

Post by Jill (?) » Wed Oct 30, 2019 6:31 am

ideally they would do what the Japanese versions of games already do and use the 8x8 space in between lines for diacritical marks. here's part of the above screenshot with a grid to help demonstrate:
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in practice though, it probably wasn't easy for a localization team to change how the devs hardcoded specific characters to render a specific extra tile above them. in a manner of speaking their job was only to replace font tiles and text strings, not to tamper with how each character is rendered. that's likely why they take the easier route and make the tiles for those marks blank, then use a squashed or lower-case accented letter wherever the need arises

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