Neko Project 21/w printing garbage with games made by C's Ware

[Comrade-Hee-Ho]

As you can see in the image, the game EVE Burst Error keeps printing garbage text, this doesn't happen with all games on the system but seemingly it only happens with games developed by C's Ware as far as I can tell, because the game 同級生2 works perfectly.

[Chenx221]

@Comrade-Hee-Ho
I've done some investigating, and it seems that the text coming through the Neko Project 21/w text hook has some degree of offset. It is possible that this developer's games aren't using standard JIS encoding to handle text?

Since these are PC-98 games and 16-bit programs, I don't have any tools to locate the game's character map. :(

---

If you are really intent on playing this game with Textractor, you might want to consider the Windows version of the game instead.

[Comrade-Hee-Ho]

I see, thanks for replying... I'm a bit disappointed on the outcome but I'll play PC-98 without a texthooker, at the very least Dokyusei 2 and other games on the system work.

[Chenx221]

@Comrade-Hee-Ho
You can try this np21w build.

np21w_260513.zip

I've made some minor adjustments to the emulator, and it seems that text can now be extracted correctly.

(For games that already have no issues with text extraction, please continue using the original np21w.)

[Comrade-Hee-Ho]

Thanks!!! I wonder if there's a way to implement these changes to the actual NP21W build, maybe I can ask the creator on twitter or something, but thanks!!

[Chenx221]

@Comrade-Hee-Ho

np21w-src-rev101\io\cgrom.c

// write charactor code low
static void IOOUTCALL cgrom_oa1(UINT port, REG8 dat) {

	CGROM	cr;

//	TRACEOUT(("%.4x:%.2x [%.4x:%.4x]", port, dat, CPU_CS, CPU_IP));
	cr = &cgrom;
	cr->code = (dat << 8) | (cr->code & 0xff);
//#if defined(SUPPORT_TEXTHOOK)
//	if(np2cfg.usetexthook){
//		UINT16 SJis;
//		UINT8 th[3];
//		UINT16 thw[2];
//		thw[1]='\0';
//		SJis = font_Jis2Sjis(((cr->code + 0x20) << 8) | (cr->code >> 8));
//		if(SJis){
//			th[0] = SJis >> 8; th[1] = SJis & 0x00ff; th[2] = '\0';
//			codecnv_sjistoucs2(thw, 1, (const char*)th, 2);
//			font_outhooktest((wchar_t*)thw);
//		}
//	}
//#endif
	cgwindowset(cr);
	(void)port;
}

// write charactor code high
static void IOOUTCALL cgrom_oa3(UINT port, REG8 dat) {

	CGROM	cr;

//	TRACEOUT(("%.4x:%.2x [%.4x:%.4x]", port, dat, CPU_CS, CPU_IP));
	cr = &cgrom;
	cr->code = (cr->code & 0xff00) | dat;
#if defined(SUPPORT_TEXTHOOK)
	if(np2cfg.usetexthook){
		UINT16 SJis;
		UINT8 th[3];
		UINT16 thw[2];
		thw[1]='\0';
		SJis = font_Jis2Sjis(((cr->code + 0x20) << 8) | (cr->code >> 8));
		if(SJis){
			th[0] = SJis >> 8; th[1] = SJis & 0x00ff; th[2] = '\0';
			codecnv_sjistoucs2(thw, 1, (const char*)th, 2);
			font_outhooktest((wchar_t*)thw);
		}
	}
#endif
	cgwindowset(cr);
	(void)port;
}

The changes consist solely of commenting out the textout section in cgrom_oa3 and uncommenting the textout section in cgrom_oa1. The reasons are as follows:

seg016:00DE sub_1E9CE       proc far                ; CODE XREF: sub_1ED53+7C↓p
seg016:00DE                                         ; sub_1EE9C+81↓p
seg016:00DE
seg016:00DE var_6           = word ptr -6
seg016:00DE var_4           = dword ptr -4
seg016:00DE arg_0           = byte ptr  6
seg016:00DE arg_2           = byte ptr  8
seg016:00DE arg_4           = word ptr  0Ah
seg016:00DE arg_6           = word ptr  0Ch
seg016:00DE
seg016:00DE                 enter   6, 0
seg016:00E2                 push    si
seg016:00E3                 push    di
seg016:00E4                 mov     dx, [bp+arg_6]
seg016:00E7                 mov     ax, [bp+arg_4]
seg016:00EA                 mov     word ptr [bp+var_4+2], dx
seg016:00ED                 mov     word ptr [bp+var_4], ax
seg016:00F0                 push    ss
seg016:00F1                 lea     ax, [bp+arg_2]
seg016:00F4                 push    ax
seg016:00F5                 push    ss
seg016:00F6                 lea     ax, [bp+arg_0]
seg016:00F9                 push    ax
seg016:00FA                 call    sub_1E971
seg016:00FD                 add     sp, 8
seg016:0100                 mov     dx, 68h ; 'h'
seg016:0103                 mov     al, 0Bh
seg016:0105                 out     dx, al
seg016:0106                 mov     al, [bp+arg_0]
seg016:0109                 add     al, 0E0h
seg016:010B                 mov     dx, 0A3h        ; a3
seg016:010E                 out     dx, al          ; Interrupt Controller #2, 8259A
seg016:010F                 mov     dx, 0A1h        ; a1
seg016:0112                 mov     al, [bp+arg_2]
seg016:0115                 out     dx, al          ; Interrupt Controller #2, 8259A
seg016:0116                 xor     ax, ax
seg016:0118                 mov     es, ax

[Comrade-Hee-Ho]

Interesting, I'll see if these changes can be implemented into the actual build of the emulator, btw this is amazing so thanks!!

[Comrade-Hee-Ho]

I got a reply from the creator of the emulator, he has now updated the emulator to support your fix, so thanks a bunch for all the help!!