Playstation 2 Font Project

Changelog

Update 2013/01/01: Major bugfix.

Update 2012/06/26: Initial publication.

Introduction

The Playstation 2 console has at least two JIS X 0208 fonts in it's ROM chip, and the two that are supported by the libraries within this release are rom0:FONTM and rom0:KROM.

Neither rom0:KROM nor rom0:FONTM contain all the characters in the JIS X 0208 character set, as both of them lack all level 2 Kanji (Tables 48 and above).

rom0:FONTM is the font file used by the OSD (rom0:OSDSYS) and contains some special characters that are unique to the Playstation 2 and that are not in the JIS X 0208 specification.

rom0:FONTM is supported by gsKit, but the implementation within gsKit was not very good. It was not only complicated in structure, but it does not support most of the characters in the JIS X 0208 character set as it mostly supported only ASCII characters.

I do not know what uses rom0:KROM, but it's a headerless FONTX2 font file that does not have any blank characters.

rom0:KROM is a 1-bit font, and hence is not very nice to look at. It's more difficult to use, considering that the Playstation 2's graphics hardware seems to only be capable of handling textures that are at least 4-bit in colour dept.

Since rom0:FONTM looks better and is better for usage with the Playstation 2, I did not put as much effort into completing the library for utilizing rom0:KROM. Maybe one day I'll rewrite the KROM library to have a more complete implementation like the FONTM library does, but for now, it's included for informative purposes.

Working on developing these libraries requires a rather solid understanding of how the JIS, SHIFT-JIS and ASCII encodings work, the design of the JIS X 0208 character set and a strong understanding that a character set is NOT an encoding.

A short write-up on the KROM library is included (Read KROM.txt) for documentation on this rarely-discussed font file and its library that is included within this package.

Note: the KROM FONTX2 font is considerably smaller than the FONTM font file, hence I recommend you to jack up the text scale value by about twice. Setting it too low may cause parts of some characters to disappear due to how scaling is done.

Downloads/Links

FONTM and KROM font support libraries for gsKit http://www.mediafire.com/?3lo5j3icuanklnc

FONTM and KROM font bitmap converter utilities and the converted fonts: http://www.mediafire.com/?7d2v7fy951ikel6

FONTM and KROM font bitmap converter utilities (Source code): http://www.mediafire.com/?947ok2g1i3407ch

As usual, please do not hotlink to the file as the link/filename will change with every release.