Unicode Text Support?

[Amaryllis]

Hello!, I am Amaryllis, some random guy currently studying japanese and english.

First I would like to thank for this amazing emulator!. Now, back to topic, I have been getting into NGCD and I wanted to do some speedruns with Rainew 0.64.16, but was faced by this problem that prevents me from loading my games properly because of the folder name.

I like to organize my games with JP nomenclature, with goes (release)year, month, day, game, developer, and star symbols for Wii/PSN viability, like in this picture: 

 

But then, when I try loading these at the emulator, this happens: 

 

 

Looks like unicode issues, but I am already running Raine in japanese locale.

If I try loading a game anyway, it runs, but this way I can barely know what game is, for the most part(and that looks horrible, lol).

Is there a way to work around this issue, without having to rename my folders to non-unicode text? ^^, sure I could just rename it but then I wouldn't be able to organize it the way I like and that would somewhat ruin the mood and not be good for my OCD...

Thanks!

Edited March 23, 2020 by Amaryllis

[Tux]

Oh, there was a problem with unicode filenames a very long time ago, I don't remember what the conclusion was, but I guess nothing was done since you still have it...

Well bad news : my main ssd burnt recently (bad motherboard design, it was a m2 port and these dummies stuck it under the video card, probably the hottest spot on the motherboard, so it just burnt !), I had to reinstall my main linux setup, and I totally forgot about reinstalling the cross compiler tools to be able to make windows binaries, so for now I can't compile raine for windows (it works in linux though !).

So well I'll try to reinstall this and see again what can be done, but don't hold your breath, plus no guarantee, I would love that someone loving windows (it exists somewhere, right ?) would handle the windows binary, I start to get tired of this...

edit : after looking some more, now I remember why nothing was done : because windows uses a big mess of 2 separate function sets to handle this kind of filenames, and unicode encoding (uf16), while the rest of the world uses utf8 by default. It's all good for a native windows program (not so good because you must avoid the standard char* and use some wchar* instead), but for some portable C code it's a nightmare, all these functions using utf16 characters are totally not standard and do not exist anywhere else.

I'd say, try to find some other way to encode your info then, it's a real mess to handle this internally... (utf8 has its drawbacks too, it created more than 10 years of bugs, and all this just to be able to mix occidental and oriental characters, it was not worth the trouble for most of the world but we had it anyway... !).

Edited March 23, 2020 by Tux

[Amaryllis]

Oh boy, that's too bad, but even though I am not a programer I think I can feel your pain. ;_;

I have been using Windows because I am a normal user, but I heard it is not good for programing since you are not really the "owner" of the system for security reasons, what does not happen in Linux.

Well, since I can still run the games, I am now inserting what is know as "ZIP names" used in arcade ROMS at the end of the names so I know what is what, such as "1995年03月31日 得点王（SNK）☆ ＜SSDK＞" for Tokuten Ou (Super Sidekicks), it is not cool when loading the games on the emulator, but at least my collection is still well organized. ^^

 

But, thank you very much for explaining everything and helping me, mister Tux!, all the best! (^_^)b

[Tux]

Thanks, sorry not to be able to help more about that, it's something annoying, there might be a way to do something, but it would require something specific to windows, well with someone used to programming unicode in windows it could probably be done, but I am not used to that and I don't want to try that for now...

But anyway I tried to create such a file in linux with some japenese characters and failed, oh well I didn't try very hard and it might be something stupid like a file manager which can handle such fancy file names which I didn't use but anyway I can't see the japenese characters here (although if I copy and paste what I see in a browser, then the japenese characters appear in the browser !). Oh well, at least I tried, it's not my specialty, clearly !

 

[Amaryllis]

Even if it failed, it makes me happy that you tried!. Thank you very much! ^^

[Tux]

There "might" be an easy solution to your problem though, the Vera font used by default by raine doesn't seem to contain any japanese character, so try to replace it by one which contains some, that was my problem in linux.

I used ipag.ttf, available for free on internet, you can grab a copy there : https://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/old/ipafont/download.html

page in japanese cut the links are in clear text, get this one : IPAfont00303.zip(19.1 MB)

Then replace the Vera.ttf in raine's font directory by one of these fonts. It works by the occidental characters are not very nice, I prefered Vera of course, too bad it has no japanese character... I might find a better solution later... (not tested in windows, but in linux with the correct font I finally see correctly my files with japanese characters in their name).

edit : yes, all the bigest fonts in the windows default Fonts directory seem to work. msjhl.ttc seems like a good choice. This font is not free though, I guess I should not distribute it with raine then... oh well, I might find something for that later...

Edited March 24, 2020 by Tux