Re: CBM International CHAROMs

On 2014-09-14 at 17:59:21, Anders Carlsson (anders.carlsson@sfks.se) wrote:

> > IIRC the conclusion was that commodore never offically procuded any roms
> > for Denmark or Norway as those markets were too small, only Sweden.
>  
> It sounds plausible. Also, I still believe that Datatronic had a very
> specific relation with Commodore International, on a deeper level than any
> other international Commodore importer/agent had. Datatronic at a very early
> stage equipped the PET computers with Swedish characters, developed a vast
> range of PET business applications for the Swedish market which they made a
> lot of profit from. I'm not sure the same kind of market was worked up in
> any other non-English speaking countries, at least not relative to
> population.
>  
> You have some character sets here, including a Norwegian PET character set,
> but I don't know if it is original or home grown. There is also a Norwegian
> C128 character ROM based on VIC-20 but it sounds very much home grown.
>  
> http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/firmware/characters/index.html

I see - so far no "proper" C64 font there. It might be the case that it's never been officially supported in a similar way the strong importer could establish a standard in Sweden.

> Also you have to ask yourself how many different character sets there could
> be:
>  
> Swedish/Finnish (A-Z + ÅÄÖ, total 29 letters)
> Norwegian/Danish (A-z + ÆØÅ, total 29 characters)
> German/Austria (A-Z + ÄÖÛ and small ß, total 30 characters)
> French (A-Z + 18 diacritics and ligatures, total 44 characters)
> Spanish (A-Z + Ñ, total 27 characters)
> 
> I wouldn't expect any Eastern European character sets, perhaps Polish.

There was no official one I've ever heard of. All the Central European countries have their own diacritics and we had to do and redo them again and again for different purposes and for what needed to stay-in. Eastern European countries didn't use Latin alphabet at the time. They still mostly don't but I've seen Cyryllic on a C16 long time ago. I don't know who made it though. Again - I don't expect CBM did. Now I understand that the Swedish importer could have had its part in Seden having "proper" language support.


-- 
SD!

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