Bug squashing and unicode names

Ah so v0.940 is almost ready. I've been adding some new features that Tommy has requested for the game browser and it took much longer than I wanted. I had to recode certain aspects of the browser so that it was easier to maintain and was more extensible. Over the last week I have been squashing a lot of bugs all over the place.



I've also been working on new features, and one of them is the ability to see more of the .GAME file info. Our editors put a lot of work into them and RetroCopy is maturing now to be able to show more of it. One item in particular is the native names of some games :-



In the above screenshot where native name is, you can see just a series of square boxes to represent it. Why is this so? Well it's all about FONTS and which characters they can display. RetroCopy's main font can't display Japanese characters because it doesn't have them.



The .GAME Database Editor shown above can display them fine, and it's using the same code base as RetroCopy. We have a unicode font that we use for the database editor that allows you to show all the characters correctly.

What will end up happening is we will allow unicode fonts to be loaded into RetroCopy, simply by putting a file named unicodefont.ttf in the RetroCopy directory. The reason we can't include the font into RetroCopy itself is they are too large! About 13MB compressed just for one standard set. Is it no surprise western software usually doesn't attract many Japanese and Asian users?