KingMike wrote on Dec 8
th, 2008 at 9:42am:
Great to hear you're planning to make a "universal" hack.
But I imagine it'd still be a pain for games using tilemapped fonts.
(3x3 Eyes 1 uses one font routine for everything. Dialouge, menus. So, that left me with needed to rig up several control codes to control it (also printed multiple strings in parallel in some cases, meaning I need to include a tilemapped mode to avoid crossing the streams.

)
Support for tile mapped engines is being done as well. I am actually currently working on supporting a 4th engine right now which happens to be tile map based. I had planned for this in the initial concept work. It's going to use the same routines. The only difference is it will use a smaller chunk of RAM for only one character and spillover at a time, and require an extra DMA hack to transfer the data to VRAM rather than simply change the tilemap like the original game's routine. The rest of the mechanics should be identical.
As far as the control codes for tile mapped menu fonts, I already have support for that as well.

The design supports custom control code handling. The main menu in Tenshi already runs fine with custom control codes for tile boundaries to make things line up.
As for something really stretching it like needing parallel printing or tile mapped mode; That's kind of out of scope, however the design is modular enough that one would probably be able to create a new render module and the rest would potentially work. Just speculation without getting into the specifics.
Obviously 100% of every case cannot be supported. But in those instances where it is not possible, the code can act as a template for easy adaptation to whatever the needs may be. Aside from the truly reusable parts, the idea was creating a structured framework that could quickly be molded to fit into any game even if it does need something out of the ordinary. I never want to have to code a new VWF or text system from the ground up again. Perhaps that ideal is not totally or realistically achievable, but I'll take something close!

As I progress with supporting this tile mapped engine, I can give you more specifics on that. I will need some minor refinements for it. It is still a work in progress after all. And naturally, thus far, it's only really been tested in Tenshi No Uta. It will be quite some time before I give it a try in some other games to try and realize that potential.