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Lord Crucifier
Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 47 |
Thoughts on turning charsets into modern fonts
What are your thoughts on an hypothetical automated conversion of C64 1x1 charsets to OTF, TTF or WOFF font files, released as an archive in a similar fashion to SOASC=? |
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Isildur
Registered: Sep 2006
Posts: 275 |
What to say more... GREAT IDEA :D |
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CreaMD
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 3036 |
Nice idea. |
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McMeatLoaf
Registered: Jan 2005
Posts: 106 |
Info like "first usage/year" or so would be nice too. |
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Smasher
Registered: Feb 2003
Posts: 512 |
hey Lord Crucifier! ltns!
do update your userpage, u were a f4cg'er for a while yrs ago... :)
great idea about the font conversion! |
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chatGPZ
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11147 |
i'd find an archive that has the fonts in their native format much more useful |
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Lord Crucifier
Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 47 |
@ZeSmasher: Done! :)
@Groepaz: Cool, let me know how that goes!
Are charsets considered public domain? Are they under copyright when ripped from commercial releases? Any difference in charsets from games, intros or demos?
The technical challenge would be nice to think about: how would one go about downloading D64 images and starting each program on it, just so you can inspect the internal memory for charsets? How about charsets exposed in later parts, e.g. auto-loaded parts of demos, or games after space has been pressed in the intro? |
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Digger
Registered: Mar 2005
Posts: 422 |
I've used PixFont (http://www.kgroup.ru/products.html) in the past but it requires prepping a font a bit (by adding masks etc.) and it's $29 bucks.
https://fontstruct.com/ is free but you'd need to redraw the font unless you hack the XML font protocol and regenerate XML from C64 font binary ;-) |
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Lord Crucifier
Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 47 |
Once I have the charset (or a memory dump that contains a charset somewhere), the rest of the font stuff is easy to automate. It's grabbing it from crunched files that worries me. But I suppose an automated emulator trying to run each file on a disk and dumping the memory would be a crude way to get started. |
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Perplex
Registered: Feb 2009
Posts: 254 |
Shouldn't be too hard to make a program to check through the memory dump in every possible charset area to detect if the bytes in the slots for I and O look anything like those letters. Then use a visual tool to manually find those that can't be detected by the program. |
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Merman
Registered: Dec 2002
Posts: 140 |
Why limit it to 1x1?
A lot of demos and games use 2x2, which will be even more useful in modern font form. |
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JackAsser
Registered: Jun 2002
Posts: 1993 |
Quote: Once I have the charset (or a memory dump that contains a charset somewhere), the rest of the font stuff is easy to automate. It's grabbing it from crunched files that worries me. But I suppose an automated emulator trying to run each file on a disk and dumping the memory would be a crude way to get started.
For each d64, for each file, run unp64 by iancoog and scan for fontish-bytes |
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tlr
Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 1726 |
Nice idea!
Also: +1 for making the c64 binary version available. |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5028 |
https://codepo8.github.io/logo-o-matic/ |
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Monte Carlos
Registered: Jun 2004
Posts: 351 |
Instead of grabbing all the fonts maybe we could use the fonts directly from the CSDB database |
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Lord Crucifier
Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 47 |
Are ripped charsets available on CSDb? |
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Shine
Registered: Jul 2012
Posts: 331 |
Quoting Lord CrucifierAre ripped charsets available on CSDb?
Not that i know but you can look here for example:
Font Creation Competition 2013 |
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Compyx
Registered: Jan 2005
Posts: 631 |
I fail to see how converting 1x1 charsets to modern formats would be a good idea. Just look at some websites that use the original chargen (Slarti's is a good example).
On the other hand, collecting fonts *is* a good idea. like the link Oswald posted. which has few multicolor/bitmap fonts.
I suppose a proper database of fonts (1x1 - big) could be done. Personally I'm most interested in the 1x1 and 2x2 fonts of old demos, usually there are no credits for those, so that should prove quite a challenge. |
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Stryyker
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 465 |
Useful for diskmag editing. I tried messing around with converting to bitmap fonts a year ago. I could never find good docs for .fon format used by Windows. All my attempts failed to work although I could manage to make .fnt files for Windows and manually load them in to my own code and Windows could draw them. |
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Rastah Bar
Registered: Oct 2012
Posts: 336 |
http://kofler.dot.at/c64/font_01.html |
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Digger
Registered: Mar 2005
Posts: 422 |
That font there "Alternate Reality Multi" (bottom middle column) looks like the font used in Hein's latest intro Warpzone. Just sayin' :) |
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Hein
Registered: Apr 2004
Posts: 933 |
Kinda, yeh. But I used the ROM font, because no more memory. |
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bugjam
Registered: Apr 2003
Posts: 2493 |
Quoting Lord CrucifierAre ripped charsets available on CSDb?
There are a few charset collections availble, partly ripped, partly self-made - e.g.
Phobos Fonts Disk
Charre Disk Nr 1
Devil's Fontcollection
Charset Collection 1
Charset Collection #1
AEG Char Collection
The First Commodore Character-Set Collection
Contribution 2 (+ The Magic Font's Collection)
Also many old noters/writers came with a collection of (usually ripped) charsets to choose from or to load from disk. |
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Lord Crucifier
Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 47 |
Compyx: Care to elaborate on why making them available as modern font files is a bad idea?
I supposed 1x1 charsets could be detected relatively easy from a memory dump, but 1x2, 2x1 etc. would be considerably harder as you'd have to detect and piece together two different parts of the memory.
But all in all I see that offering the original charset would be a welcome addition. Noted! |
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Hein
Registered: Apr 2004
Posts: 933 |
Speaking of modern fonts, does anybody know of a version of a ttf of the ROM font that doesn't need a mapping? Meaning, screencodes instead of PETSCII. |
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Compyx
Registered: Jan 2005
Posts: 631 |
@Lord Crucifier:
My reasoning is that they won't upscale nicely, I've seen websites that use the standard chargen extensively (as the default text font), and that doesn't work well.
But I'm all for collecting all the old (and new) fonts; personally I'm curious who created some of the really classic 1x1 and 2x2 fonts. There's one I've used a lot before I did my own fonts, I'll try to find it and post here, maybe some graphic dude older than I knows something. |
