Sharp MZ character sets are character sets made by

Sharp Corporation is a Japanese multinational corporation that designs and manufactures electronic products, headquartered in Sakai-ku, Sakai, Osaka Prefecture. Since 2016 it has been majority owned by the Taiwan-based Foxconn Group. Sharp employs more tha ...

for

Sharp MZ The Sharp MZ is a series of personal computers sold in Japan and Europe (particularly Germany and Great Britain) by Sharp beginning in 1978. History Although commonly believed to stand for "Microcomputer Z80", the term MZ actually has i ...

computers. The European and Japanese versions of the software use different character sets.

Implementation

On Sharp MZ computers, there are two types of character sets: An interchange character set (called an "ASCII code" in the documentation) and a display character set. The interchange set is primarily used for keyboard input, while the display sets are primarily used for rendering text on the screen. Additionally, the European and Japanese versions of the software have different characters in each of their tables. On

MZ-700 The Sharp MZ is a series of personal computers sold in Japan and Europe (particularly Germany and Great Britain) by Sharp beginning in 1978. History Although commonly believed to stand for "Microcomputer Z80", the term MZ actually has i ...

and MZ-800 series computers, there are two distinct display character sets: the primary and alternate character tables. The alternate display table is accessible by setting a bit associated with the character in

V-RAM Video random-access memory (VRAM) is dedicated computer memory used to store the pixels and other graphics data as a framebuffer to be rendered on a computer monitor. This is often different technology than other computer memory, to facilitate b ...

, located in the same part of memory that controls the color and background color of the character. Characters from the alternate display character set are not supported by the

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

interpreter and cannot be typed directly from the keyboard; instead, they can be displayed by using the BASIC command POKE. In the Japanese version, the primary set contains

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

and uppercase Latin letters, while the alternate set contains

hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" ori ...

and lowercase Latin letters. In the European version, many of the characters in the primary Japanese set are replaced (including all Japanese language characters), and the lowercase Latin letters are now included in the primary set; the entire alternate Japanese set is replaced.

European

MZ-700/MZ-800

The following tables show the character sets used by European Sharp MZ-700/MZ-800 character sets. Each character is shown with a potential

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

equivalent. Space and control characters are represented by the abbreviations for their names.

Interchange

In both the European and Japanese versions, the code points in the range 0x20 to 0x5F of the interchange character set exactly match the printable characters in the 1963 version of

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

Display

MZ-80K

Interchange

The MZ-80K's European interchange character set is extremely similar to the MZ-700/MZ-800 European interchange character set, differing only at 0x80, 0x8B, 0x90, 0x93, 0x94, 0xBE, and 0xC0.

Display

The MZ-80K's European display character set is extremely similar to the MZ-700/MZ-800 European primary display character set, differing only at 0x40, 0x80, 0xA4, 0xA5, 0xBC, 0xBE, 0xBF, and 0xE5. (0xDC differs in appearance, but semantically remains the symbol for

delete Deletion or delete may refer to: Computing * File deletion, a way of removing a file from a computer's file system * Code cleanup, a way of removing unnecessary variables, data structures, cookies, and temporary files in a programming language * ...

MZ-80A

Interchange

The MZ-80A's European interchange character set is extremely similar to the MZ-700/MZ-800 European interchange character set, differing only at 0x6C, 0x6D, 0x7F and 0x90.

Display

The MZ-80A's European display character set is extremely similar to the MZ-700/MZ-800 European primary display character set, differing only at 0xBF, 0xE5 and 0xF0.

MZ-80B

The code points in the range 0x20 to 0x7E mostly match the printable characters in

; however, 0x5F is an

overline An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a '' vinculum'', a notation for grouping symbols which is expressed in m ...

instead of an

underscore An underscore, ; also called an underline, low line, or low dash; is a line drawn under a segment of text. In proofreading, underscoring is a convention that says "set this text in italic type", traditionally used on manuscript or typescript as ...

. Likewise, 0xA0 to 0x7E are the

inverse video Reverse video (or invert video or inverse video or reverse screen) is a computer display technique whereby the background and text color values are inverted. On older computers, displays were usually designed to display text on a black backgroun ...

counterparts of these characters.

Japanese

MZ-700/MZ-800

The following tables show the character sets used by Japanese Sharp MZ-700/MZ-800 character sets. Each character is shown with a potential

equivalent. Space and control characters are represented by the abbreviations for their names.

Interchange

In both the European and Japanese versions, the code points in the range 0x20 to 0x5F of the interchange character set exactly match the printable characters in the 1963 version of

Display

MZ-80 series

Interchange

The MZ-80 series' Japanese interchange character set is extremely similar to the MZ-700/MZ-800 Japanese interchange character set, differing only at 0x80 and 0xC0.

Display

The MZ-80 series' Japanese display character set is extremely similar to the MZ-700/MZ-800 Japanese primary display character set, differing only at 0x40 and 0x80.

References

{{character encodings Character sets