How I made typing Chinese on the Apple II possible
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- Опубликовано: 20 окт 2021
- I created a Chinese Word Processor for the Apple IIe, originally released in 1983. This program was written in 6502 Assembly and was compiled with an Apple II Assembler. While other programs like this did eventually exist during the later years of the Apple II, I made my own from scratch and showed that it would have been possible for a Chinese Word Processor like this to have come to market even earlier than one did.
Download and run: Living Type: The Chinese Word Processor
github.com/InkboxSoftware/Liv...
Junferno: Making a Keyboard for Every Language
• The Challenge of Makin...
C2T - Convert binary code/data to Apple II disk images
github.com/datajerk/c2t
The website explaining how Apple II graphics work:
www.chibiakumas.com/6502/appl...
方正像素 FZXS12 Font
www.foundertype.com/index.php/...
Want to learn how to program for the Apple IIe?
archive.org/details/Apple_IIe...
archive.org/details/apple-650...
archive.org/details/A2_Hyde_6... 
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Those beeps that are WAY louder than all the rest of the audio are like GETTING YOUR EARS BOXED.
I couldn't agree more
EMOTIONAL DAMAGE
Fr! I jumped irl after the first one and felt legit embarrassed after jumping again on the second one lol
"Now that Windows 11 is out, I'm switching to Apple..."
*THE LOUDEST SOUND YOU HAVE EVER HEARD
authentic 80s experience
As a master 6502 programmer who's done many different systems, including APPLE2, wow, those disk files were probably a pain! Glad I started with modern compilers and not the apple 2.
One problem, beeps need to be 10x louder. Great video overall tho.
Now the next step is to invent time travel.
Bold choice to start the video with a massive audio jumpscare
There was a word processor for Hanzi/Kanji for the Apple 2 series released in 1985. It was called Assist 16. It ran on a 48k apple IIe or IIc, and included 2965 characters. But there was another program that I can't find a reference to, that allowed you to create arbitrary hanzi/kanji by codes corresponding to radicals in each areas of the character.
The latter program is called Cangjie, but it required an extension card.
This was fascinating. I love projects that are constrained to the point of absurdity… are these chip-tunes original compositions… or do you mind sharing the games they are from? Thanks in advance.
This channel deserves far more subscribers then it had
Pretty cool, looked like an easy project lol. I can see why people make "quality of life" improvements to old coding environments, even bitd people would use better faster platforms as their development kit Eg. Amstrad to ZX Spectrum development.
I don't speak or read Chinese but the language conveyance systems shown in the past and the one you made certainly seemed logical in operation. Been working on text related projects myself and most Asian languages are a tough fit within those old graphical constraints and despite English having it's own quirks it is the most compact alphabet ever made by far.
Depending how far back you go in Apple 2 development, there really wouldn't've been stronger platforms to use to develop on other than considerably more expensive minicomputers or mainframes, with Apple 2 being one of the first home computers that was ready to go and use out of the box. But yeah later on for sure, and I wouldn't've criticized the person who made this video for using a fully modern environment with a build script that packed it all up in to a disk image to load in the emulator. I've definitely developed for older systems in the same way. :p
I just want to ask one little question... Are you aware of the several add-on cards for the Apple II that provide Chinese word processing support? Or the CEC (Chinese Education Computer), which actually has several decent input methods built-in and even BASIC support.
Didn't see that coming at 19:47
19:45 "The point is this"
Hm, what exactly is the message you're trying to send with those images and drawn text there?
Please, every time there is a CRT in the recording, put a low pass filter on the audio.
legends say that inkbox still hasnt closed the website to this day,
Thanks for reminding me about copying programs like for line from the back of magazines into my Apple IIGS. Me and my friends had a lot of fun back then
i heard there existed an apple ii clone with cyrillic support.
I thought there were Chinese personal computers as early as 1982. The MFP II had Chinese input and even a Chinese dialect of BASIC.
Very impressive!
Old computers did not have good multilingual support. even in the 90s languages like Spanish or French would get messed up if you had accents on the letters like è would be ? .and that was on systems with a 500mb hard drive and could play quake and browse the internet not 8 bit systems with very low storage. i think i saw a windows 3.0 ad from the early 90s where they bragged they supported 10 languages now they got 130+ on windows 11.
Old Japanese computers had brilliant multilingual support. But it's hard to fault Apple for not building that in; it's expensive, and what American would care (or even know)?
@@Curt_Sampson They didn't they only had Japanese and English and maybe Chinese. they also had to make systems made for japan only .they couldn't compete in other countries because they had different standards for everything.
@@belstar1128 That's pretty much entirely wrong.
The Japanese computers were using American standards for almost all the components. The CPUs were mostly Z80, with a few 6800 and 6809: both American designs that the Japanese manufacturers licensed. Most of the other chips (and virtually all of the important ones) were American designs as well. The video standard was NTSC: the American standard. The BASIC in ROM was almost invariably Microsoft BASIC.
They did export their computers, too, though with somewhat limited success. The cover story of the May 1982 issue of _BYTE_ magazine was a review of five Japanese computers, and I still regularly see people both in the U.S. and Europe with, e.g, a PC-8001A, the western version of the PC-8001 (the best-selling series in Japan). The most successful export was the MSX computer series (from multiple manufacturers, based on a standard developed by ASCII Corporation and Microsoft), which was reasonably well known in many countries (all of Europe, Brazil, etc.) outside of America.
@@Curt_Sampson nobody used Japanese computers outside of japan apart from the msx. and that one had limited success in only a few random regions. a lot of the best selling games and software for the msx in japan was not sold world wide. and western users had their own different software. there was no law that stopped japanese systems from coming out here. but they failed or never bothered because the market was too different. also all these Japanese systems where incompatible with popular western systems at the time. even if they did use American cpu architectures. because the rest of the world couldn't make decent cpu's. the ussr tried to but they gave up and just started copying western chips. japan didn't have a reason to do that since American cpu's where good enough. but it didn't matter because they actual full computer could only run software made for that computer. in most countries the ibm pc became the dominant computer platform and the mac survived. but in japan the ibm pc and mac didn't get popular until the mid 90s
@@belstar1128 It sounds to me as if you've defined "standard" as, "western computers," which seems to me a bit culture-centric. Japan certainly did fail to meet the early '80s western "standard" of, say, 280x192 6-colour composite video displays set by the Apple II by instead using a 640x200 8-colour RGB display with a separate processor to handle graphics, and an extra 48K of RAM for the frame buffer on top of the usual 64K (1981 FM-8).
And Japan did make their own CPUs, such as the Panafacom L-16A (MN1610), which in 1975 was one of the first 16-bit single-chip microprocessors. If you're thinking, "I didn't know that," yeah, there's a lot about the Japanese computer industry that's not well known in the west, and that causes people like you to look down on it when in many ways it was superior.
_"but in japan the ibm pc...didn't get popular until the mid 90s."_ Yes, and for good reason. The IBM PC simply wasn't capable enough to display kanji, whereas the 8086-based PC-9801, introduced the same year, was. And even the 8-bit PC-8801 could do 640x400 graphics from the start. Western computers took a fair amount of time to catch up and it wasn't until after they did that they could be useful for business in Japan.
Very impressive. 太好了。
the beeps ouch
You're a very good RUclipsr.
Would using the radicals and saving chinese characters as combinations of them make storing more characters possible?
Have some variations of the characters in different positions and placements and not have it look exactly perfect but close enough for the resolution.
Epic video
Very impressive. I have done some 6502 code, and I would never attempt that size of a project!
As I am Korean, I am Intereted in this. Korean is Using 11171 character But It can be disbanded.
12x12 Pixel. It's Size is 4 (2x2) ASCII character per 1 Chinese Charcter. right?
for something made in china how the heck can it not speak Chinese
love the ending
Can't believe you mentioned 倚天 but not 注音 :^)
非常好！
did you leveraged modern tools for all of that? I would’ve
It says "WORD PROCESSER"
Good video and the beeps were amazing.
the entire time i was thinking “what would ronald reagan say if he saw this” and at the end i determined he would hate you. (complement)
you could have very much used a modern assembler like vasm for modern pcs. a lot of software for the apple 2 was written on minicomputers and mainframes running unix, not really on the apple itself
Loved the video! What''s the song name?
Which song? The ending song is the Chinese national anthem
Very interesting view. If I can suggest another feature that could have introduced Chinese characters back in the early days of Apple, a ROM card would have been the cheapest and fastest way to get around the memory and search speed problem. ROMS were cheap, cheaper and faster than disk space, not to mention the price of the disk drive itself that I could not afford.
That was actually the main way that character input was configured in both China and Japan in the early 80s. I'm covering a machine soon that includes a 汉卡, a character ROM card.
@@InkboxSoftware I'd be glad to add them to my humble Apple II+ emulator.
@@InkboxSoftware Were any computers that had chinese characters built into the hardware by default, or did they all require plug-in rom? Or did they stick with pinyin, forcing these cumbersome (yet very skillfully made) workarounds to display proper chinese text?
Time to do this but for japanese or even (traditional) Mongolian
OMG THE BEEPS, you lost me at 9 seconds
6:08 5.25" floppy... Shows picture of 3.5" floppy alongside Apple ][ which never used 3.5" disks :)
I think the earliest 3.5" disks held about 800kb, which was mind blowing at the time.
The switch to 3.5 disks was controversial at the time because most people had floppy disk cases full of 5.25" software already.
Imagine having this in China back in the 1980s...
How do you switch to Pinyin mode?
Should be ctrl+p
@@InkboxSoftware It works! the letters must be capitalized for the chinese characters to appear.
Somethings really wrong with the subtitles
windows 11? na, I prefer apple 11.(what do you mean, "roman numerals")
6 seconds in and I feel like Homelander smacked me in the ears, ow.
Neat but ...there's plenty of open source IMEs out there...ready tobe ported over
well, good luck with that
not just doing the input but also rendering the text itself
you have 144KiB
Shh, the mods are asleep, post chinese propoganda! Fr tho, this is actually really impressive.
my fucking ears blew up lmfao
:)
i am now deaf
MY EARS!!!!
my ears dude
Now make one for Japanese
Done long ago. This is why Japanese computers of the early '80s had such high-resolution graphics (640x200) compared to western computers: they wanted to be able to display kanji well. And why they almost all had 128 KB ROM cards storing a couple of thousand glyphs for kanji characters available. The early Japanese microcomputers were designed for exactly this.
My ears hurt so bad bro that beep was crazy
"Now that Windows 11 is out, I'm switching to-" :)
"Apple" >:(
+999,999,999 social credit points ending
I can't watch this, the beeps are way too loud and your voice is way too soft. Please fix the volume so I can see this video.
Real
loud bep
do you not listen to your video before you upload it??
How isn’t important
WHY is
do arabic
The letters: DLROW OLLEH
Holy shit! Those beeps make this unwatchable. I'm not going to get assaulted just to watch some 7k views minidoc.
Jeez how long winded
Its only 20 minutes