15-minute quickie font. This is from Staff Of Karnath for the Commodore 64. Only characters in the game are presented here, except the comma which I put in so I had something with a descender (and thus some space between lines).
UPDATE 01 Jun 2018.
Turns out the same character set appeared in Blackwyche! I've added a few graphics from that game to various characters. Try entering [{|}] and see what you get! Also added the pentagram from Staff Of Karnath to the asterisk... that took MUCH more than 15 minutes, having to do a stack of composite bricks...
On Reddit a discussion came up about the "Universal S", made up of straight lines, apparently there's been some form of it around the world for over 50 years, nobody truly knows where it came from.
Someone said they tried making other letters... I figured it'd be possible to do a full alphabet. And I've done it here in Fontstruct. Originally it was pixels only so it was jagged. I've now used the angled blocks to smooth it out.
There are a couple of cheats in play, e.g. extra wide M and W, and Q stepping outside the main lines. Was tricky trying to differentiate U and V so there are a couple of versions. Ultimately it's up to you, the user, to put these together as you want! Minimal punctuation as it's for headings and logos.
Another font inspired by Margaret Shepherd's blog. This one is called Notch and is based around cutting squares of paper. I've tried to tidy the rough look but I kept over-thinking it. For the lower case I remembered some of the old block lettering I used to do in primary school for projects.
Haven't finished this one. What I may do if I have more time (and patience) is try to make it look a bit more haphazard, so that it looks more like cut paper.
Second of two quickies in an hour tonight. BC Bill, from Imagine Software, used this great little character set in its high score table. Given the game it's meant to look like stone scratchings or even bones. Unfortunately even after extracting the charset from the game ROM, I found it's just alphanumeric - I made up a full stop character (yeah like that's a big ask LOL). At some point I'll add extra punctuation, I just wanted to get this out there.
Galacto Honoris!
This font appeared in Cosmic Cruiser by Imagine Software on the Commodore 64. It hasn't got much in the way of glyphs - I'm going to progressively work on this.
Have tried making the capitals more curvy to match some of the original game's intent (a rotating space station featured heavily) but it fell down on the A, D, K, V and Y (and almost the X). Big problem is trying to make a curve take up 2x2 when working in 1x1, the right core bricks don't exist. You can make a 1x1 brick based on a 2x2 design, but you can't make a 2x2 brick based on a 1x1 design.
Spats, based on the original from GEOS FontPack PLUS on Commodore 64 by Berkeley Softworks.
This one took me a lot longer than usual. Rather than just a straight pixel rendering, I used Fontstruct's diagonal blocks to make smoother glyphs. What we have is a balance between the original's square letterforms and a modern take on the diagonal stripes.
The glyphs included are only what was in the original. If it proves popular enough I'll do some more glyphs.
Temple of Apshai was the first game published by Epyx, back in 1979 when they were called Automated Simulations. A trilogy of Apshai games came out on Commodore 64 in 1985 and this font is taken from that. Now you can mix 8-bit with RPG.
Stadium, 24-point "banner" font from GEOS on the Commodore 64. Suitable for headings. The original is upper case only, 0-9, and limited punctuation. I've made lower case identical to upper case, and added closing bars to the grave and pipe characters to achieve a couple of effects.
There was no direct TTF alternative to this one, I've been seeking it for a long time, now it's here :)
Alternate character set (to standard CBM) from Rolf Harris' Picture Builder. Given Rolf's incarceration for sex offences, I chose to name the font "Wobble Board" after the musical instrument he devised in 1959.
Lower case is pixeled, upper case is me experimenting with the blocks (first time I've used block-stacking). This character set didn't use punctuation, it was designed for building pictures character by character; I've preserved a couple of the graphic characters, but also imagined a few glyphs based on the thick lettering style. I like the look of these thick letters with proportional spacing so that's what we have.
The hash symbol (#) can be used to build a brick wall.
Inspired by a post on Margaret Shepherd's blog. "Stiffen" is the name she gave it, and it's built with a 30-degree tilt on the pen.
"This completely rectilinear alphabet conveys a strong, heavy, almost machine-made effect."
No caps but I can't see why I couldn't add caps later.
Well, it's been a while because I've run out of fonts I want to convert/build. This one is LeConte from GEOS on the Commodore 64. It is pretty much a clone of Susan Kare's Chicago for the Apple systems, so you can use it as a pixelly Apple font in your works.
Wouldn't have minded redoing this with curves, but decided on going with full retro pixelled corners, as that's my main schtick.
Angle font from The Print Shop Companion.
This was a tricky one. Going pixel for pixel from C64 screen grabs would have made this thing huge - it could have been done but I didn't want to do a major project here. I ended up eyeballing the letters and doing it freehand, roughly 5x9 but a few characters are 6x9. This also let me work more with the angled pieces (no pun intended) in Fontstruct as I want to learn them better.
As you may have guessed, this is an unshadowed version of Pioneer. Print Shop's fonts were more often than not replicas of commercial fonts. I wasn't able to locate a solid Pioneer so this will do for now - plus it only has a descender on the Q. Only characters in the Print Shop font have been produced.
Wizard, platform game for the Commodore 64. This font replicates its pixelled medieval character set at its usual size. After first doing a monospaced version, cloned it to make a proportional font and have tried to set reasonable kerning of character pairs. Some redefined characters in the game also appear here...
This is a cloneROUND 1... FIGHT!
I call this one CPS-1 Fighter because it's not just a Street Fighter font, and it's a pretty generic one. Capcom used this in their arcade games on the CPS-1 platform, in particular Final Fight and Street Fighter II.
For full effect, use this in PowerPoint, give it a gradient fill and a dull olive-gray shadow.
I am proud to present FontKnox, one of the more popular fonts in GEOS on the Commodore 64. I took a bit longer with this one but it was well worth it. The font is meant to look kind of embossed and metallic, hence its original name.
As it's decorative, I've included only its original characters; I've used the bottom of the semicolon to make quotation marks.
Well, it's been a while, work has ramped up during this school term. I never complain about that though. I'd rather be busy with work I'm comfortable doing. But I digress.
This font is Spruce, as seen in GEOS FontPack PLUS on the Commodore 64. Not sure whether you'd call this stencilled or segmented. It's got an odd set of descenders, and I've corrected some glyps so they're symmetrical top and bottom, even if that gives them ascenders. This may not spruce up your font collection as such (groan)...
I found a font rip from "Footballer of the Year" and the upper case letters were identical to Gauntlet, so I took the lower case ones and added them. Have called it "Gauntlet Potion" as "Gauntlet Deeper Dungeons" was too long. I don't really care for the lower case letters that much... it's here if anyone wants it for variety.
This is a clone of GauntletWhere in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Many of us asked that back in the 1980s as we learned our international geography through a computer game. If you played it on the Commodore 64, this is the font used on the computer readouts, and yes it was proportionally spaced! Which would be why it wasn't resource-ripped before. I had enough screen shots to work with, then worked out what the missing punctuation marks might look like.