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!
@patrick_h_lauke Wow, that's quite the collection Love those colour conversions.
My toolchain is strictly 8x8 monochrome
@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!
@damieng oh, don't get me wrong, it's not a case of duplication/"i've done this already". always happy to see people discover some of these gems as well. sadly too lazy to implement search on my site - used to be easy enough to google for site-specific results, but Goog has obviously dropped that feature to push AI down and ads down our throat. searching on fonstruct might work better https://fontstruct.com/fontstructors/145/redux
@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.
@damieng it varies. for mame/emulator ones, i try to use the tile map viewer (F4 in mame, other emulators vary). i've been known to binxelview amstrad/c64/spectrum roms. for some games, i do end up screenshotting like crazy and doing manual reconstructions (did that recently for some Amiga ones). if i DO manage to get to the tile view ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY7hoIeKcsQ
@patrick_h_lauke Oh god that looks time consuming!
Hats off.
@damieng it's ... a bit like cross-sticthing. nice thing to just switch my brain off, watch a movie or something on the second monitor...and at the end I get a font :)
@patrick_h_lauke @damieng I know exactly the feeling.
@foone @patrick_h_lauke It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle :)
@patrick_h_lauke @damieng Nobody asked, but I’d watch a charity livestream of both of you recreating pixel fonts.
@patrick_h_lauke @damieng I’d join you as an understudy if you accepted me
@mwichary @patrick_h_lauke How would that even work!?
I'm still in awe of your keyboard book. (Still on the first book, savouring it!)
Here's what I'm rocking these days btw.
@patrick_h_lauke Ah, yes, Toshi Omagari used MAME tile viewer extensively for his Arcade Game Typography book too.
Binxelview is unfortunately missing Amstrad CPC modes but I have found that WinAPE's graphics finder can be useful.
I need to further enhance https://github.com/damieng/pixelworld to hunt C64/CPC files next...
@patrick_h_lauke Or you could make your experiments RSS feed unbounded...
@damieng ah...good idea (took me longer than expected, as this surfaced lots of broken atom/xml in some of my early experiment descriptions) https://www.splintered.co.uk/feeds/experiments.xml
@patrick_h_lauke Just notice you got the lovely Iron Lord CPC font there too - how did you manage that?
I tried Binxelviewing the CPC disk image, ditto on extracted files using my own DiskImageManager and also the WinAPE graphics hunter but all I could find was lower-case and numbers. I tried reproducing the upper-case from screenshots but was missing KXRQZ.
It didn't help that I had to play in French.
@damieng binxelview 1 bit view, but had to piece it together/shift the bit range
@damieng ah, you said you already found the lowercase+numbers, which is what's there. i can't find it immediately just now, but fairly sure i then also managed to find the uppercase, but had to change byte and bit to align properly ... and before that, they were almost impossible to spot
@damieng dammit, you got me hunting for them again. i do remember them being a right ball-ache to find, until all of a sudden i did. like one of those magic eye puzzles...
@damieng christ, that took me FAR too long to find again. right at the very start of the disk...
@damieng however, one good thing that came out of this ... realised that i didn't recreate the extra large (16x16) letters... something to put on my to-do list...
@patrick_h_lauke Damn, I must have missed it! Multiple times...