Notices by Damien Guard (damieng@mastodon.social)

8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 21

Shadow of the Beast ZXCPC

Shadow of the Beast was a gorgeous atmospheric Amiga game that struggled to fit into less powerful machines.

The Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum versions while graphically constrained did however include this gorgeous 8x8 bitmap font.

https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Shadow+of+the+Beast+ZXCPC.zip

#adventoffonts #bitmapfont #amstradcpc #zxspectrum

@foone He has a DiskWrangler tool that's good for exploring the contents of those disc images https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/

There's a video of it in action at https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/DiskWrangler.mp4

8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 17

Chylos

GEOS is a massively underappreciated piece of computing history providing usable Mac-like UI on 8-bit machines with a fraction of the available power.

It was also home to many great proportional and varied-sized bitmap fonts including this absolute gem found tucked away in a Glenn Holmer's "Cenbe Font Catalog" PDF.

I couldn't find any information beyond this such as the designer.

https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Chylos.zip

#adventoffonts #bitmapfont #geos

8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 13

Delphine

French software house Delphine produced some fine games in their time from point 'n click classics to rotoscoped cutting-edge platformers.

This bumper pack contains 4 fonts.

A neat wide sans from Future Wars/Operation Stealth....

the quirky UI font from Another World...

a high-contrast art-deco from Flashback...

and a striking bold font from the Genesis version of Shaq Fu!

https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Delphine.zip

#adventoffonts #pixelfont #sega #amiga

@patrick_h_lauke Is there a search/full-list?

I'd like to avoid duplicating the effort for the remaining advent days if I can!

@patrick_h_lauke Wow, that's quite the collection Love those colour conversions.

My toolchain is strictly 8x8 monochrome 😞

@patrick_h_lauke How do you go about doing yours?

I used to use screenshots to plot them into my editor (BASINC) but more lately have been using ROMs/DSKs/SNAs of the game with Binxelview to find them as I got tired of looking for screenshots with QZX and symbols.

@patrick_h_lauke Oh god that looks time consuming!

Hats off.

Some of my favourite things - early Apple, floppy drives, and low-level mastery - in a single article.

Be back in a bit...

https://thomasw.dev/post/mac-floppy-emu/

Bitmap font hunting in old machines is an interesting challenge.

Basically there's no file system and all you have is a memory dump. There's no magic markers, no signatures, so PixelWorld has a few different algorithms primarily aimed at the ZX Spectrum to try and hunt them down.

Let's run through them....

Got Star Trek: The Next Generation on in background while I work and I can help feeling that the response to about half the communicator calls is "This could have been an email."

They are not very async.

Perhaps @foone has some ideas?

Okay crowd.

What on earth is this machine?

It's not a KayPro 1/2/4, Northstar, TRS-80, Compaq, Osbourne, or Zenith.

Twin 5.25" full-height drives mounted either size of a small CRT. Almost portable form factor but not actually portable.

Some kind of forgotten S-100 clone from the early 80s? Closest seems to be an "Kaycomp II" prototype but still not 100%.

The image on the CRT is superimposed, almost certainly monochrome.

#kaypro #8bit #cpm

8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2023 Day 4

GEOS64

The GEOS desktop UI from Berkley Systems in 1986 is an incredible feat - achieving what took the Mac a 16-bit processor and over twice the memory.

The 64's resolution required carefully designed typography and "BSW" system fonts were proportionally rendered to great effect.

Included here are bold and non-bold as well as the tiny desktop icon font as a bonus!

https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/GEOS64.zip

#adventoffonts #8bit #geos #c64

@foone ah that makes sense. Copy protection is crazy. Some great coveage of the Apple 2 stuff based on 4ams works in PoC || GTFO..

@foone You can achieve the same effect just writing lots of disk-level 0's (not data 0's which will be MFM or FM encoded to not be 0's on the disk) - aka Weak Bits.