WHAT'S NEW−ARCHIVE 2001/March

"Multi-Kanji OS Application Sectional Meeting" Inaugurated

The "Multi-Kanji OS Application Sectional Meeting" was inaugurated and commenced its activities in the TRON Association in January 2001. The goal of the group is to promote the application of the BTRON3-specification OS, which can freely handle 170,000 characters including the multilingual character sets of Japan, China, etc., in new fields. The group aims to propose new solutions in fields such as self governing body and library information systems, which are suffering due to the insufficient number of characters that can be used on current computer systems. This year, in the first year of its inauguration, the Multi-Kanji OS Application Sectional Meeting is planning to develop and carry out verification testing of a character code conversion system for use between current computer systems, such as the BTRON3-specification OS and Microsoft Corporation's Windows.

Sales of BTRON3-Specification "Cho Kanji 3" OS Begin

Personal Media Corporation began marketing on February 9 the latest version of the BTRON3-specification OS, "Cho Kanji 3," in which it enhanced the number of characters to more than 170,000 through the addition of the "GT Typeface Font," the characters collected in the second revised edition of the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, and i-mode picture characters. The GT Typeface Font is an unabridged kanji character set of 66,756 characters that was developed through joint research by the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Letters and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; it is something that is to become new infrastructure for kanji culture in the IT age. Cho Kanji 3 comes bundled with "System Selector" partition management software, which allows even novices to easily install Cho Kanji 3 in an IBM-PC/AT-compatible computer. In addition, Personal Media has carried out wide ranging enhancement of functions centering around many points that users requested, such as a ruby function and a layout function for mixing European scripts with vertically written Japanese for word processing, a multi-kanji compatible browser, a function to customize the screen and menus, and compatibility with USB peripherals. For further details (in Japanese), see: http://www.chokanji.com/ To request a catalog and/or other information, contact: sales@personal-media.co.jp

ITRON Development Platform "HI Application Engine"

Hitachi ULSI Systems Co., Ltd., is offering "HI Application Engine," an application development platform for Hitachi HI series OSs (μITRON-specification OSs). OSs, device drivers, middleware, and a debugger bonded to the SH Solution Engine standard board lend strong support to rapid development of applications. Together with quickly making it compatible with new SH microcomputers, Hitachi is planning to successively expand device drivers and middleware. For details, see: http://www.hitachi-ul.co.jp/SH-SE/HIAPL/index.html For inquiries, contact: sh-sengn@hitachi-ul.co.jp