/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10720029
Japanese loads its entire alphabet into memory at once and can just display each character wherever it wants almost instantly because it conforms to the same 8x8 tile size (it's split across multiple tiles, but they're all the same relative size).
English uses a proportional font instead of fixed-width glyphs and has to fill the tiles on-the-fly by taking additional steps such as
>load the text
>fill the tiles with each letter, glyph-by-glyph, and calculate the width of the current one so it can position the next one correctly in the tiles (usually this is how proportional fonts are handled on these kinds of systems)
this takes forever in comparison to just having them all in vram ready to place anywhere at a moment's notice.
If it was a small amount of screen text printing slowly, such as dialogue, it wouldn't be noticeable, but for a mass amount of text getting puked out all at once, it's very noticeable.