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Difference between revisions of "CHARSET.DTA"

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==Japanese version==
 
==Japanese version==
  
There is a Japanese font for [[Creatures]], which includes [[Wikipedia:Katakana|katakana]] in addition to the normal ASCII characters (and uses [[Wikipedia:Code_page_932_(Microsoft_Windows)|CP-932 encoding]] internally). Each character's data is 12 pixels wide to accommodate the larger Japanese characters.
+
There is a Japanese font for [[Creatures]], which includes [[Wikipedia:Katakana|katakana]] in addition to the normal ASCII characters (and uses [[Wikipedia:Code_page_932_(Microsoft_Windows)|CP-932 encoding]] internally). Each character's data is 11 pixels wide to accommodate the larger Japanese characters.
  
 
It was hypothesized that there existed a Japanese font for [[Creatures 2]], but the game is believed to never have been released for the Japanese market.
 
It was hypothesized that there existed a Japanese font for [[Creatures 2]], but the game is believed to never have been released for the Japanese market.

Revision as of 00:47, 16 October 2021

CHARSET.DTA is the font used in Creatures 1 and Creatures 2. It contains 128 characters, matching the standard ASCII text encoding. Creatures 2 additionally has EuroCharset.dta, which contains 256 characters, matching the CP-1252 encoding with support for accented characters common to European languages.

The file format is as follows:

size description
72 bytes Data for a single character - 6 pixels wide, 12 pixels high. It's not clear how pixels are mapped to colors.
... Additional characters (128 total in CHARSET.DTA, 256 total in EuroCharset.dta)
16-bit integer Width when rendered of character at this index. Character data is left-aligned.
... Additional character widths when rendered

Japanese version

There is a Japanese font for Creatures, which includes katakana in addition to the normal ASCII characters (and uses CP-932 encoding internally). Each character's data is 11 pixels wide to accommodate the larger Japanese characters.

It was hypothesized that there existed a Japanese font for Creatures 2, but the game is believed to never have been released for the Japanese market.

Creatures prototypes

Prototypes prior to Creatures 1 used a different format. CHARSET.DTA contained the same 128 characters, but each was 4 pixels wide and 32 pixels high. Character width information was not included as all characters simply rendered as 4 pixels wide.

size description
32 bytes Data for a single character - 4 pixels wide, 8 pixels high.
... Additional characters (128 total)