Japanese text support on English Palm OS devices

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of great Japanese software for Palm OS. It has arguably the best selection of Hanafuda games on a single system, and more besides.

Palm OS took a lot of inspiration from the original Macintosh system and it shows. The OS can be hacked, edited and otherwise modified at runtime which allows for a lot of cool stuff to happen. In the days where the operating systems that we use are ever increasingly locked down (“for your own good”, they cry!) this type of low level access to the system seems really exciting and daring.

Anyway, Japanese Palm OS apps expect to be run on a system capable of displaying Japanese text, naturally. So running them on English Palm OS results in garbled text.


Official Japanese: goal	English: garbled

Solutions

There exist a number of solutions that will allow Japanese text to be displayed correctly, though each has their own pros/cons. I originally wrote about this in an issue on GitHub.

I had to survey them all just to be able to sleep at night! 🤣

app	pros	cons	availability
J-OS	works, good bundled fonts	multiple versions for different devices, uses multiple apps to achieve goal	discontinued, time-limited, but easy to reset trial (delete pref: Psys)
CJKOS	works, OS4 (4.23) & OS5 (4.63) versions	finding good fonts, managing fonts, bad default options	discontinued, time-limited, but easy to serialise
JaPon	slick installer, great minimal UI	doesn’t localise launcher app names, limited fonts with trial version, OS5-only	supported
Yomeru 5	open source	doesn’t localise launcher app names, default fonts are very poor	discontinued, time-limited
Yomeru 4	none	OS4 version crashes for me	discontinued, broken

Results


CJKOS + FJIS10L	Official Japanese: goal	CJKOS + Mplus10

Recommendations

OS5 or CLIÉ: J-OS (choose correct variant)
OS4 or when using both OS4+5: CJKOS

Notes

CJKOS My only comment would be these fonts are not as legible as the official Japanese font. So, you can install additional/replacement fonts: palm.roguelife.org/cjkos/. And uncheck both CJKOS > Support CJK boldFont and Enhance > Add Horizontal Spacing in CJK for better display.

J-OS (J-Suites for CLIÉ) Install two additional fonts: elisa.prc and dasaji-l.prc and convert them to J-OS format using the option in PowerFONT. You can delete choose to delete the originals after conversion. By setting these as the standard small and large fonts for lo-res any apps that run in low-resolution will look great. The bundled J-OS fonts are already great for stuff running in hi-res.

Get Info: #palm

Japanese text support on English Palm OS devices

Solutions

Results

Recommendations

Notes