fortunately DOSBox-x can be booted in PC98 mode which is compatible enough to make it work

okay now I'm hacking on the game itself and... oh dear.
the fopen takes the char* in SI, which it then stuffs into a global, then yanks it back out (?) to pass to DOS.

this is some assembly nonsense. that's not a good sign for reverse engineering

and now it's broken ghidra

Princess Maker 2 has an unusual error handler in the text drawing routine: a missing glyph in the font? stop drawing the string!

so, like, "before\x01after" will render as just "before".

that's unusual, text engines usually just render a wrong glyph (sometimes an intentional one, usually just whatever's at the pointer) or crash.

but the weird part of that? it does successfully error out for most glyphs, except when you go above 140ish it hangs completely

maybe I'm accidentally triggering a scripting/expression language

also I can't get the text engine to render a space. I don't know what the fuck that is about

@foone I remember encoding spaces specially, because Every Space IS A Precious Fucking Snowflake. Some are "normal". Some are longer. Some are NBSP. Some are "we highly recommend you break here". Some are zero-length, but do allow breaks. etc etc etc.