display kanji characters in programs?

Does anyone know if there is a way to get some of these Japanese programs to display correctly on a device with an English ROM? We have a lot of programs from Japan and I would much rather see the actual kanji characters than a bunch of boxes (besides sometimes it causes part of the program to go off the screen!). But, I also don't want to cause the latin alphabet characters to turn into blocks either. Anybody experimented with or had any luck with that?

I believe your device requires east asian script support to be able to render those

Is that something that can be added or does it have to be in the ROM?

This thread may be relevant.
I remember using a program called CE-Star myself to make Japanese device to English. I think the opposite might be possible according to the thread.

https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=525&star...

According to the thread and the archived page, CE-Star 2.2 seems to be the application that can do this.

Correct Archived Page from 2005 January (has HPC supported ver.):
https://web.archive.org/web/20050120052134/http://www.mobem.com/prod...

Edited by stingraze 2023-01-29 2:40 AM

Thanks stingraze, that looks really promising. Unfortunately the wayback machine didn't archive the hpc/hpc pro installers and only captured the pocketpc ones

Edit: I should have checked the SCL first! https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/1474/Rasir_Dex/CE-Star/version_1.1?pag...

Edited by thenzero 2023-01-29 4:10 AM

Let us know if Ver. 1.1 works for what you needed.

I'd love to although so far I haven't been able to figure out how to install this!

It's not you, there's something wrong with those files. I think they may be CE direct .exes but I'm not sure which arch they're for.

In the meantime, I also found:
https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=285&post...
and
a great thread from stingraze!
https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=10794&po...

SHARP Brain is shipped with English OS and can't display Japanese characters initially (displayed as squares), so we first make them readable by patching the font to include Japanese characters.

1. Download Task Switcher and extract it on a Windows desktop machine.


2. If your desktop machine doesn't have Japanese fonts, add it from languages and regions.


3. Run "MS UI Gothic.bat" or "Meiryo UI.bat" on the desktop machine to build a patched font file. Meiryo UI is more beautiful but requires your Windows CE device to have antialiasing support.


4. Copy the whole resulting Task Switcher files to your Windows CE device and run "AppMain.exe" on CE.


5. Tap the tools icon.


6. Tap the "System Font Patcher" and "Yes".

Idk whether this is applicable to standard HPC machines but if that helps.

Thank you for all the inputs. The CE-Star binary from the SCL turned out to be some kind of archive file with an ARM executable inside of "CEditor.exe". I wasn't able to run it because I'm missing wxecode.dll but it looks like it's an asian font aware text editor. My guess is it's one part of the original CE-Star suite.

watamario15- That approach sounds very promising. However, the appmain executable shows as an ARM thumb type (0x01c2) and for a newer CE version and I'm afraid I'm not skilled enough to override it properly. It did generate the font files and I tried to copy them over manually from a CF card but they also won't copy over for some reason. I read the CESD on copying fonts but I wasn't able to get them copied over.

Oh, yeah SHARP Brain is a CE 6.0 device with Armv5TEJ. The font patch isn't just adding fonts but it overwrites the system font (tahoma) to include Japanese characters. Manual installation might have failed because the newly created font includes "tahoma" which a font with the same name is already present and in use by the system.

I saw two font patching implementations. It seems that both of them operate as kernel drivers and modify the raw memory in binary sense, and I can't fully understand what it does... I wonder if those direct memory addressing work on other machines than SHARP Brain.

Alternatively, you might be able to just switch the system UI font with a Japanese one from control panel or registry, and soft reset.

Edit: SmallTweak seems have a font menu to change the system font. You might get some luck with it.

Edited by watamario15 2023-01-30 12:55 PM

Ok I'll have a look. I did finally get the font to copy over (even though there appeared to be enough space it needed more!) And I tried setting it in a bunch of places in the registry but it didn't seem to take effect after a reset. I'll try the tweak program. Thanks

Also, this doesn't exactly help, but you can also install this:
https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/1319/Eiichiroh_Itoh/Kanji_Controls_for...
Which is basically a "special runtime" so be able to run certain Japanese programs that require this .dll and those will display Japanese text.
But obviously, it doesn't answer your question, which was the whole interface.
This only works with specific programs that work with this third party program
Of which, there aren't many (there may be more, here's the dev's official website which is still up https://oohito.com/mcsg/wince/mips_j.htm ):
https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/1280/Eiichiroh_Itoh/KanjiIn/version_0....
https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/1335/Eiichiroh_Itoh/MiniPad/version_0....
https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/158/Eiichiroh_Itoh/Regedit/version_0.1...
https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/1257/Eiichiroh_Itoh/Console/version_0....
https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/1340/Eiichiroh_Itoh/WVI/version_0.05

Thanks torch, inkbook as the main one I'm trying to get working

This one:

https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/1479/K-Mix_Software/InkBook_RichInk_Me...