Date   : Thu, 13 Dec 2001 22:50:52 -0500 (EST)
From   : Victor Rozanov <vic792r@...>
Subject: Re: International fonts & mode 7

>
> There are two places to find fonts on a BBC Micro - the ones used in modes
> 0-6 are bitmaps stored in the OS ROM. The mode 7 fonts live in the SAA5050
> teletext chip. Other SAA505X chips had different character sets for other
> countries.

This is not quite true. As far as I remember SAA5050 has several writable
memory registers to program the additional symbols.
There are not many of them. And it is definitelly not enough to put
another coding table there. The way they put cyrillic in there
was weird. They used the same letters (I mean "A" in cyrillic is still "á" but
"B" is "â" but we still have letter which looks the same as "B" but pronounced
"va" ("÷") Hopefully I  pronounced it correctly:)). If you have the cyrillic
encoding in your mail client you can see what I am talking about.)
Also in cirillyc alphabet we have 33 letters instead of 26.
After all you have approximatelly 15 letters which are totaly
different from the latin alphabet. What you get there in mode 7 you get very
weird code table which is not compatible to any other code table in any
other mode or any other computer and I believe they patched it in the OSROM.
I probably do not remember all the  details of how exactly it was done
but it was done and it worked. That is all I can tell you and this all came
from the deep deep part of my memory.

Regards.

Victor.