Gameboy text antics

[Kelvin]

it's a good idea, but i wonder just when in a game that would be worth it

see, the gameboy could only load and use 256 sprite tiles at a time, much like the nes except there were almost no expansion chips sold in gameboy cartiridges
so you'd be limited to only showing text in those moments when you want text

plus, text in games are stored inside the ram in a highly optimised manner (there aren't many characters, so you can make yourself a low byte-per-character memory storage method)
and so, you would ideally have the console dynamically calculate the occurences of these characters whose tiles are to be joined together when shown onscreen
that is, except for the fact that having slow hardware like a gameboy do all these loops while the game is running might cause some minor slowdown

the other solution is to have the writers for your game actually type their dialogs with these additional characters being used and so the ingame text would be stored that way

but i don't know which is more important, between keeping the ROM a little lighter or having the machine execute less code per frame (even then i say per frame, but it would only have to do the text conversion when loading it)

in any case the big game-changer is that this would use up an entire sprite bank, and that's pretty annoying
perhaps there would be a way to have it load up just the characters that are needed for the text to be displayed

They could make a special parser that merges the listed character pairs before packing the text into the rom, then the writers wouldn't have to make any changes or remember to use those characters in the first place.