Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
as it so often is, it's time to do crimes against typography with pixel fonts
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

I need to copy a font off my windows 98 machine to my Raspberry Pi's framebuffer application.

obviously the way to do this is to just render out every character the font supports to bitmaps and then import those as spritesheet

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
based on file metadata, I've been trying to do this since April, and I think every time I've opened a text editor to write the simple python script I need, someone has messaged me on discord
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

fine I'll close discord and just be offline for an hour

and someone walks into my bedroom asking about help finding a cable

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

okay I generated it

and the part from April is wrong, and I need to fix it on Windows 98. DAMN IT

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I'm glad Pillow now has .get_flattened_data to match .getdata, especially since neither of them do what I want, and have never done what I want
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

future foone:

it's Image.tobytes() that you want

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
okay I have the font imported and a very simple (no wrapping or newline handling) text engine:
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
THIS IS THE WRONG FONT (SIZE)
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I've extracted MS Sans Serif 10 point. I need MS Sans Serif 8 point.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
every day is a good day to pull out Visual C++ 6.0!
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
just kidding, I've already crashed the OS in that screenshot. The cursor switched to the text cursor and is stuck that way, you can't click anything
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

oh no, I need unicode support
in windows 98

I need unicows

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
oh good there's an open source replacement, OpenCow:
https://opencow.sourceforge.net/
Opencow

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I do not recall how you do ASCII/Unicode dual-use source code. There's some macro you gotta wrap around your string literals, I seem to remember
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

oh here's some info on how to use it:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2001/october/mslu-develop-unicode-applications-for-windows-9x-platforms-with-the-microsoft-layer-for-unicode

and look, it was written by the late Michael Kaplan.

MSLU: Develop Unicode Applications for Windows 9x Platforms with the Microsoft Layer for Unicode

Feb 18 at 2:03amWeb
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
the secret macro is _T("foobar") which'll do nothing in ASCII mode, but if _UNICODE is defined, it turns "foobar" into "unicode", by which they mean UCS-2
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I copy-pasted UNICOWS.DLL into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM which of course crashed Explorer, because Windows 98
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I still don't have UNICOWS.LIB and it may be a pain to get it
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I think I can maybe get it from the Windows XP Platform SDK? Lets see if I can still get to it on a Windows 98 system.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
oh goody you have to install everything and win98 can't run the MSIs
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I do not currently have a local XP VM
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
okay it won't work. I think the API I'm using is not supported on win9x. I could check the docs but they pretend XP was the first windows
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
ok I went and remoted into another computer and used the XP compiler over there and got it done. I could have done this at the beginning but I was stubborn
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

ugh except this is ALMOST right.
The problem is: this is XP's MS Sans Serif, not Windows 98's.

Yeah they changed it a lot, mainly adding a bunch more characters for better language support.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I wonder if anyone has done a page showing
1. which fonts are included on windows
2. how they've changed over time
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

okay so the function call that I need that's missing from Windows 98 is called GetFontUnicodeRanges.

And the MSDN docs on my visual studio 6.0 discs does talk about it, but this is neat: it's a preliminary doc!

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
And here's the compatibility matrix!
NT needs 5.0, Windows 9x/me is unsupported, and CE is unsupported. You can't do this on your HP Jornada 720.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
This is Visual Studio 6.0, which came out in 1998, so Windows 2000 and Windows XP don't exist yet. The latest available NT is NT4.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I love the 90s-ness of "here's system call: you can't use this for two more years"
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
so, which will be less pain: hacking a replacement for this function call, or fucking up an XP machine's fonts by overwriting its copy of MS Sans Serif with the Windows 98 one?
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
lets fuck up an XP VM! that might be amusing to see
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

okay wait, I'm a fool: The font isn't different, this is a different font.

"Microsoft Sans Serif" and "MS Sans Serif" are two different fonts. obviously.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
Got it. I now have MS Sans Serif 8pt as a pseudo-deathgenerator font, and it's pixel identical to the Windows 98 text renderer.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
see?
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
now... wordwrapping...
Show threadRyan The Red 🖥️🚲🍺🏳️‍🌈Feb 18
@foone I fail to see the point of this point, but also WHAT ARE YOU HIDING with that blurred icon?
Show threadwyattFeb 18
@foone ahaha i forgot about that
Show threadFi 🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

@foone

....and this is the point at which I saw the thread, clearly indicating that something truly bizarre is going on in here.

Show threadAlex, the Hearth FireFeb 18
@munin @foone this
Show threadit/its kitten  Feb 18
@foone brb replacing Sans Undertale's dialog with MS Sans Serif
Show threadalysFeb 18
@foone feels extremely true to form to Microsoft to have two sans serif fonts with nearly the same (very generic) name.
Show threadMatilda LoveFeb 18
@foone VMs are like sims, sure you could build a good life for them but they exist primarily to torture and murder for amusement
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialFeb 18

@foone VM snapshots are free*, I'd go with the latter

(*ok technically not but it's an XP VM, what's the snapshot gonna consume, 100MB?)

Show threadPareFeb 18

@foone When I was taught C++ in the University, we were told about exceptions, they were in the specification.

But we still checked for null pointers because AIUI no compiler supported exceptions back then.

Show threadgloriouscowFeb 18
@foone I still have my Visual Studio 6 CD case around here somewhere....
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
@gloriouscow a good programmer always keeps their visual studio 6.0, just in case
Show threadgloriouscowFeb 18
@foone I got it through my Dad's job at the time - I think it was $5. Worth it.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
@gloriouscow oh absolutely
Show threadgloriouscowFeb 18

@foone I appreciate that MSVC is like, mostly unchanged still from a UI perspective. You still go in and set your include directories in the exact same way you did in 6.0.

I'm sure they'll fuck it up with AI at some point in a few years or something though.

Show threadwaldiFeb 18
@foone Depends on how you count. Windows 2000 is actually NT, Version 5.0. And Windows XP is 5.1. So the internal version is not the same as the consumer one.
Show threadwyattFeb 18
@foone i *know* i've seen one of these but i think it was in 2011 or 2012
Show threadPeter HoseyFeb 18

@foone I ran into this when making an SVG of California's “this product contains cannabis” symbol. The state's website had it as PNG, JPEG, and PDF, and the PDF used a particular font for the exclamation point. And only the Vista version has the *right* exclamation point.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:California_cannabis_universal_symbol.svg#filehistory

File:California cannabis universal symbol.svg - Wikimedia Commons

Show threadL. David BaronFeb 18
@foone I bet someone whose business is based on identifying users by fingerprinting has the data, at least at the newer end, but they probably wouldn't make it public...
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone Rendering each letter might be insufficient. Because of kerning and hinting. Might need every glyph pair instead. For non-monospace fonts at least.
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone I downloaded some old Win32 docs in *.HLP format from https://www.carabez.com/downloads.html
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone I also have a Dependency Walker like application that works on modern Windows. You can use it to check if an old DLL exports some API or not. Or you can use the original Dependency Walker if you are on old enough system. https://github.com/MarekKnapek/DependencyViewer
Show threadJbrown, EsqFeb 18
@foone moo.dll
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone Kaplan, not Kaplin. What we did back then was to write the code once, then compile twice. One for ANSI Windows, second for Unicode Windows. We used the _T and _TEXT macros. One was meant to be internal for CRT/MFC/whatever, the second macro was meant for us, the users.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

@MarekKnapek whoops, fixed. Thanks!

Interesting. I only need this code to run on Win9x, so I don't need two copies: I just need better unicode support if I'm gonna have it run on win98, since I need some unicode APIs