Grevier's missing links?

[Anonymous]

IOW, less than 255.  (As expected)

It's very very rare that any of the 'usual' Japanese standards are used in stuff like this.  (You'll note that the US version of FF8 certainly doesn't use ASCII encoding)

Kanji is only very very rarely allowed for players to use in names, and that's the main reason the double byte encoding standard was created.  Otherwise, you only need about 82 symbols for all katakana, 81 for all hiragana (not always used for naming), 26 or 52 for roman characters (depends if lower case letters are allowed; usually is), and that leaves you with a minimum of about 41 characters left for symbols (more if you dropped hiragana and lower case romanji).

For the record, the only games I've seen thus far that allowed kanji to be entered were FF6j (and only for Cayanne's Sword Techniques) and Radical Dreamers (which has a rather horridly large naming screen).

Hmmm.. not being an expert at Japanese characters doesn't help!

As for the English encoding it was just scrambled ASCII so people couldn't hack the save states my guess. (IE they couldn't figure out the save format easily), thats one reason for the CRC check.  I know with FF7 they subtracted 0x20 from each character (fairly easy).  They did something more cute with FF8 I haven't bothered yet with FF9 though I suppose I could check out the FF9 save states sometime.  FF7 is next on my list of things to do (though Qhimm pretty much has done all the work) I'll just called it Qhimms ported FF7 plugin <laughs>.  Anyhow back to what we were talking about.  I was afraid they did something cute with the encoding.. Oh well All I need is the symbol to SJIS maping of the LEFT and Right byte in the sequence.  My guess is you are right.. no standard or even close to one.   Since I don't know many encoding standards for such fonts Japanese support might be rudimentary or just a direct <FF8> code to unicode maping and hope the person has japanese support installed on there machine.