Fanhua: Abao, stop here and pay me back.

Chapter 38 Using game cartridges to make Hanka
"Are you sure you want to use this idea?"

When Bai Zhi saw Gou Siji turning the topic to Hanka, he was a little hesitant, or subconsciously wanted to avoid it.

I have to say that Gou Siji's idea is too crazy.

Now the domestic Hanka market has been de facto monopolized by Lenovo.

Small shops like my own can only accept second-hand Chinese cards from Lenovo or traditional Chinese Chinese cards from Wanwan.

And not only the writing habits of the traditional Chinese characters in Wanwan are in line with the domestic groups that mainly use simplified characters.

In terms of the function of Hanka, the Hanka from Wanwan was also crushed by Lenovo.

If this situation is not solved by oneself, it will even continue until Windows launches its own Chinese character system.

In the intervening nearly ten years, computer vendors like Gou Siji had to live under the pressure of Lenovo.

To buy Lenovo’s Hanka, you must buy an AST computer represented by Lenovo.

Absolutely disgusting.

Lenovo can be said to be the first to implement bundled sales in China. With this move, it has directly become one of the leading computer companies in the country.

If Gou Siji wants to develop his own computer store, he must get rid of Lenovo's control, and developing Hanka is the only way to go.

In fact, now not only Gou Siji wants to make Hanka, but other manufacturers are also copying Lenovo's Hanka.

But Lenovo has a very deep domestic background, unlike Nintendo, which is far away overseas. The risk of random copycats is very high.

Later, Lenovo Hanka, under the leadership of Ni Guangnan, did have its own unique technology in it. Ordinary copycat factories can only make a four-dimensional image.

Today's Lenovo has Ni Guangnan's town, and it is not the assembly factory in later generations where only the outer casing is developed by itself.

Gou Siji could only choose to go his own way.

"I am sure."

Gou Siji affirmed.

"But Lenovo has integrated the font library and programs into Hanka. It is already a very successful product. There is no need to choose another path."

Bai Zhi is a rare persuader.

As a scientific researcher in the computer field in the 80s, Bai Zhi can be said to have a special kind of admiration for Ni Guangnan, like chasing a star.

There was no way, Ni Guangnan's brilliance was too great. In 1985, he launched the Lenovo-style Chinese card on the market with great success. In November 1985, the Lenovo-style Chinese character microcomputer LX-PC was successfully developed. In 11 and 1987, he was awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. First Prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award.

It can be said that Ni Guangnan is the guiding light of this generation of computer researchers.

"However, if we completely follow the path that Ni Guangnan has taken, let alone the financial expenditure required for research and development, which is far beyond what we can afford, and even if we make it, we can only drink the leftover soup behind Lenovo. . And because the technical lines are the same, the products produced must be very similar to the Lenovo Hanka, and it is easy for Lenovo to take advantage of this and sue us for copying."

Gou Siji once again emphasized his reasons.

The path taken by Ni Guangnan is equivalent to providing an external plug-in for the computer. All word processing information on the computer is handed over to Hanka for processing.

The advantage of doing this is very obvious, that is, it will hardly affect the performance of the microcomputer.

But such a Hanka card is like a graphics accelerator card, and its research and development costs are very high.

At the same time, the technical strength required is not something that Gou Siji and Bai Zhi, two students who have just left school for two years, can achieve.

As for being sued by Lenovo for being a copycat, it was just to scare Bai Zhi. In fact, in just two years, other copycat manufacturers will appear one after another, competing with Lenovo Hanka for the last glory, and then they will be swept into the garbage heap by Microsoft.

"Then what is your plan? Store the character library on the game cartridge and embed the program directly into the Windows 2.0 system of the microcomputer. Doing so will definitely affect the performance of the computer." Bai Zhi saw his idol on the road. Rejected, somewhat angrily.

"What game cartridge? It's ROM storage."

Gou Siji retorted.

"The biggest advantage of ROM storage is that it is cheap. If you look at a floppy disk with the same capacity as ROM storage, the price is five or six times higher. But the problem is that as a font library, we just need to read it."

Gou Siji emphasized his reasons.

Indeed, it is somewhat unseemly to directly use the carrier of the game cartridge as the font library.

But Musk also uses stainless steel to build rockets.

"We directly embed the program into the operating system's floppy disk, which can save a lot of research time and costs on hardware we are not familiar with."

As a pragmatist, Gou Siji would never spend a lot of money to do something thankless.

And what Gou Siji didn't tell Bai Zhi was that in a few years, things like Hanka would be eliminated by operating systems with built-in Chinese display.

However, if the program is embedded in the operating system now, the worst outcome is that it will survive like the input methods of later generations.

As for why the font library is not integrated into the floppy disk of the operating system now, on the one hand, it is because the current floppy disk capacity is small and expensive, and it is not cost-effective to install the font library into the floppy disk.

On the other hand, having an external hardware can benchmark Hanka to a certain extent.

There is no way. Now Hanka has developed usage habits and propaganda in China. It is easy to know what this thing is used for by directly benchmarking Hanka.

Instead of spending money to go to newspapers to explain that it is actually a system localization and input software.

"What about performance? If most of the performance of a personal computer is taken up by our software, it will definitely be very laggy to use. At the same time, there is no way to optimize it. After all, the performance of a personal computer is there."

Bai Zhi pointed out the most fatal problem. If you follow this approach to Chinese translation, it will inevitably occupy huge resources of the system at all times.

This is not because the software is too big, but because the computer performance of this era is really rubbish.

Just like Nintendo, if there is no other way, they will not choose to use assembly language instead of high-level language.

Doesn’t Nintendo know that writing the games on the game cartridges in assembly language will have various drawbacks such as non-portability?

I know, but the content written in assembly language occupies a small amount of space.

This one advantage kills them all instantly.

But it was impossible for Gou Siji to use assembly language on a microcomputer operating system, otherwise he would be exhausted.

"Then we will put a button on the interface, and when the computer needs performance to run the program, it will pause our program."

Gou Siji could only come up with this compromise.

"Okay, I know you want to be like Ni Guangnan, able to become the pillar of the country and the object of everyone's admiration. I promise you that you will have a chance in the future, but you must listen to me on this matter."

Gou Siji could only issue a death order.

“And the time is tight to get it right before the opening of our new store, which is less than three months.”

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(End of this chapter)