ChanServ changed the topic of ##yamahasynths to: Channel dedicated to questions and discussion of Yamaha FM Synthesizer internals and corresponding REing. Discussion of synthesis methods similar to the Yamaha line of chips, Sound Blasters + clones, PCM chips like RF5C68, and CD theory of operation are also on-topic. Channel logs: https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/~h~yamahasynths
<Lord_Nightmare>
Foone: wait, so if you're not writing a .fon renderer are you writing a reimplementation of win3.1 GDI? I think wine already has/had that or parts of it which you could leverage
<Foone>
I'm extracting the font, but indirectly. I'm basically treating it as a black box and extracting it from screenshots
<Foone>
this makes sense because of how my automatic-font-extraction tools work, plus there's always the risk that MS customized their renderer for MessageBoxes and just rendering the .FON natively wouldn't accurately replicate that
<Foone>
they've done that shit before. The font used with Clippy is a standard TTF font, but it's rendered completely differently than how any other renderer would render it
<Foone>
they've done some kind of weird hinting to make the letters closer together
<Foone>
but yeah. I'm effectively extracting the .FON but I'm doing it while pretending that the files and the GDI is a big black box
<cr1901_modern>
This reminds me of old versions of solvespace (cc: whitequark) which would run a program on your machine during compilation which would render a window with a single character, and the program would save a bitmap of each character to build an atlas
<cr1901_modern>
it's not needed/used anymore but wonder if that's possible on 3.x
<Foone>
anything is possible on 3.1 if you do most of it outside the VM! :)
<Foone>
I mainly do this trick to, like, SNES & GBA games, so the option of running a program on them is usually not there
<Foone>
so I didn't really even think about it
<cr1901_modern>
ahh fair enough!
<Lord_Nightmare>
foone: the clippy thing, are they using an ancient version of the .ttf renderer forward-ported from microsoft bob, where clippy's animation format originated from?
<Lord_Nightmare>
i.e. nearest neighbor only, uses font bytecode
<Foone>
no idea. it's possible, I guess.
<Lord_Nightmare>
instead of rendering at 4x res and antialias/subpixel?
<Lord_Nightmare>
also apple had a patent on the ttf bytecode stuff which only expired around 2001
<Lord_Nightmare>
i think microsoft paid them fees for that for the truetype rendering built into win95+
<Foone>
Clippy started on Win95 when I don't think they were doing any sort of antialiasing/subpixel stuff yet
<Lord_Nightmare>
but win 3.1 didn't have ttf rendering, did it? I thought you had to use a 3rd party addon to render ttf fonts unless it was embedded into word and excel for win31
<Lord_Nightmare>
stuff like adobe type manager
<Foone>
that was 3.0. 3.1 added TTF
<Lord_Nightmare>
ah!
<Lord_Nightmare>
... so maybe clippy's font renderer is based on the win 3.1 renderer
<Lord_Nightmare>
or early ms bob
<cr1901_modern>
Pedantic: His name is Clippit
<Foone>
microsoft named him that. in the culture of the internet, he's clippy
<Lord_Nightmare>
if it uses an entirely different fork of microsoft's truetype renderer then i'll bet it still has the dozen or so ttf CVEs in it
<cr1901_modern>
I did give a pedantry warning :P. He was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried for commercials if memory serves. Before he ruined his reputation w/ tsunami jokes
<Lord_Nightmare>
superctr: did you submit a pull request to fix the mcs-96 core bug in MAME, btw?