Hi NightWolve! Yeah I became aware of the previous project partway through. In fact their teaser on youtube inspired me to change my font for the level dialogs to make it proportional. But no I don't have any connection to that project.
The variable-width font wasn't that big of a deal to be honest. I had ripped an 8x8 font I found on the System Card (it's the same font used in the Backup RAM menu, but the BIOS API doesn't make it available for games). So I adjusted the glyphs horizontally on my font sheet, then made an extra table for the x width of each glyph. The BIOS text drawing function itself takes care of drawing on the background at a specified X/Y coord and supports an external (non-BIOS) font.
For the cutscenes I still use a monospaced font because the subs are sprites (can't use the BIOS routine above) and because the rendering engine I made needs a fixed grid of 10x10 cells to be able to outline the letters fast enough. Outlining is crucial because the game cutscenes weren't designed with subs in mind so the contrast is rather poor in many scenes (e.g. very light background). It should be possible to upgrade it for proportional fonts though. Maybe a future upgrade.
There's a gold mine of great but not-yet-localized games on the PCE, especially CDROM² games. It's just the perfect system for audio narration over cutscenes so unfortunately they didn't bother with text most of the time, which makes it harder to localize. I'm working on the first Spriggan game right now, but there's many more that people have suggested.
The variable-width font wasn't that big of a deal to be honest. I had ripped an 8x8 font I found on the System Card (it's the same font used in the Backup RAM menu, but the BIOS API doesn't make it available for games). So I adjusted the glyphs horizontally on my font sheet, then made an extra table for the x width of each glyph. The BIOS text drawing function itself takes care of drawing on the background at a specified X/Y coord and supports an external (non-BIOS) font.
For the cutscenes I still use a monospaced font because the subs are sprites (can't use the BIOS routine above) and because the rendering engine I made needs a fixed grid of 10x10 cells to be able to outline the letters fast enough. Outlining is crucial because the game cutscenes weren't designed with subs in mind so the contrast is rather poor in many scenes (e.g. very light background). It should be possible to upgrade it for proportional fonts though. Maybe a future upgrade.
There's a gold mine of great but not-yet-localized games on the PCE, especially CDROM² games. It's just the perfect system for audio narration over cutscenes so unfortunately they didn't bother with text most of the time, which makes it harder to localize. I'm working on the first Spriggan game right now, but there's many more that people have suggested.