MrValentine
I had already looked at those links and countless others for several hours and got no where fast as they keep sending me round in circles when trying to understand them, all the while attempting to follow the path they seem to show. Even after reading your more recent posts I still fail to connect the dots and you especially lose me with the part referring to 0192 through to emails.
Regardless of this I have sussed it out although the steps I am about to describe are a little long winded, but to me they are the simplest possible steps to take in order to get from start to end with regards to obtaining the correct characters for the desired strange looking string.
Anyway here goes, I hope you and others with any interest can follow this as I am making a special effort to try and keep it simple;
Step 1
http://mymemory.translated.net/en/English/Japanese/Dark-BASIC
Make sure you are using English to Japanese lol - you first of course need to translate your desired English text to katakana, so your only interested in the results that show the katakana symbols/characters. Copy them over somewhere you can easily access them. I don't know but I assume a space between words is just that if this is what is required. Likewise I don't seem to see anything indicating lower/upper cases but I am sure you would agree by process of elimination you can work this out over time along with any characters that aren't strictly part of the alphabet. In the case of DarkBASIC as we already know you should have ダークベーツック, and put spaces between to easily spot them separately ダ ー ク ベ ー ツ ッ ク so that step 2 will be easier
Step 2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana
As mentioned in my earlier post your only interested in the Japanese section ie not the script as far as I can tell. What needs to be done here is to find each symbol from step one and write down the corresponding English characters from the unicode description from the tables ie 2 letters or functional characters. Once again with spaces this will give you Da - ku be - si ? ku
Note that the - I am using to represent the prolonged sound mark or chōonpu and the ? I am using to represent the little tsu or sokuon which after some reading is now simply tu. These are both from the functional characters and are not the hard sounds but appear to be ways of determining how previous characters should sound when spoken.
Step 3
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/OBSOLETE/EASTASIA/JIS/SHIFTJIS.TXT
This is the awkward part - it would be best if you took all the lines with the word katakana in them from the above site and pool them in a text file to make life easier. What you want to do is to find the unicode description that matches the read out you produced in step 2, then for each one take the hex value(1st column) without the 0x and input them into a hex to string converter here
http://www.string-functions.com/hex-string.aspx then click convert and you can copy the result over somewhere and keep adding to it. This will give you your final strange looking string to use in the print command of your code.
So Da is 835F and converts to ƒ_
- or prolonged sound mark is 815B and converts to [
NOTE just before the bracket is an invisible character - one you can spot by cycling the cursor through the result
ku is 834E and converts to ƒN
be is 8378 and converts to ƒx
- once again is the prolonged sound mark, it is 815B and converts to [
si is 8356 and converts to ƒV
? which is the little tsu now called small tu, this is 8362 and converts to ƒb
NOTE I mentioned earlier this is another functional character that dictates how the previous characters sound when spoken, in this case si as in sick
ku once again this is 834E and converts to ƒN
Put them all together and voilà you have your odd looking string ƒ_[ƒNƒx[ƒVƒbƒN !!
So now you have the right tools to work with. I hope this is clear enough for all to understand, anything not clear then please feel free to ask, I don't know how much more help I can be as this is the first time I've done anything like this, heck I don't even understand what all these formats and encoding things are - I can only know what I see I am afraid as I am without proper terminology or ability to describe to you all the way I see them - and no I don't know the first thing about Japanese so I wouldn't be much help there either.
Now I believe we are way off topic, my opinion on GameGuru is neutral - but I will say this, Lee knows exactly what he is doing I should think, so speed issues won't be a problem, and if as MrValentine has stated Lee wrote the snippet for charset 128 then I should think he can write translations if that's what he wants - I would guess that it depends on if he thinks its worth the effort or not.
