I was also very surprised to find out that the character ROM had not yet been archived and was not available anywhere on the net. Thanks to Nick Westgate and his genius idea to use the Super Serial Card (SSC) as a ROM reader, the image is now available on the web. You can also download it from my ftp site.

I got this Apple II j-plus from Japan Yahoo auction. It was super grubby, almost black actually, but after a bit of scrubbing it came up nice. Mechanically it was very sound.

I knew that the Apple II j-plus was slightly different from a regular Apple II plus in that it had a Japanese character ROM, a Japanese rated power supply, and a different keyboard. However, what I didn’t know was how to access the Japanese fonts contained within the ROM. Thanks to Sckop I now know how it works...

POKE -16291,0

Activates inverse english text.Turns KATAKANA off.

CTRL T

Toggles between regular and inverse text.

neoncluster.com

Apple IIj-plus. Note the Kana characters on the keys.

POKE -16292,0

Activates the KATAKANA font set.

CTRL T

Toggles between english and KATAKANA.