Hi! The "real" PC-98 font (FONT.ROM) is different from the font bitmap that often ships with emulators. Kumdor comes with its own font data, though. My patch changes its single-quote character to look more like an actual apostrophe.

The PC-98 actually comes with a "kanji ROM" chip, that you poll 16x16 characters from one at a time. FONT.ROM is the data used to emulate this chip. Loading an entire font into RAM was not practical on old Japanese PCs. The earliest models, like the MSX, had 64kB of RAM, which was no match for the 3000×16×16 bits = 96kB of font data! (On the PC-98, it's something like 282kB of font data that would eat up half the available 640kB of RAM.)

I've seen games that have their own font data for drawing stylish hiragana/katakana/Latin characters but fall back to the "kanji ROM" for kanji. Kumdor's custom font only covers Latin characters. The typing tests in the game progress from QWERTY nonsense (sdfjkl jklsdf) to little texts in English and rōmaji. My translation patch leaves them perfectly untouched :)

Oh that's amazing that this is the original font from the game, it looks so good.

And great work on translating the game and writing about it!