I’ve worked on several MESS projects in the last two months, namely the NEC PC-6001, the NEC PC-9801 and the Apricot Xi/F1. While they all dies for conceptual flaws that needs some major overhaul (for example missing i386 protected mode for the 9801), Chack’n dumped a Sharp X1Turbo Model 40 machine like a real dumper professionist can do. First off, this gets rid of the silly “0x4ac00″ size of the kanji rom and gave me the chance to finally work out how the kanji decoding really works. Pratically, the key value is located in the 0x3800-0x3fff range, that contains the high part of the word index for the kanji hook-up.