community fonts for NES Dev

I was working on a font earlier for an NES game and decided that I would share it with the community for anyone who could put it to use in their own NES creations, and to encourage others to share their own fonts. If anyone would like to use this font or share a creation of their own, please feel free to do so

This font is a simple one, based on the "retro" computer fonts that you have probably seen on TV (think Dexter's Lab, or 90% of computer movies from the 70s and 80s). Hopefully someone can put it to use.

Wow, I really love this font! Great contribution!

It looks very similar to the Megaman 4 weapon get font, but it's slightly different.

WhoaMan: Let me guess, this is your interpretation of Westminster, itself an expansion of the MICR characters used on checks.

There's always my 8x8 collection. Most are rips from games, but two are my own interpretations of Chicago (marked "who's cuter") and Wasted Collection (marked "mbmenu").

I've attached a VWF and a few 8x16 fonts.

in a roundabout way i suppose. I was more so looking at various pictures from the 70s and 80s and basing it off of that. would have been easier to look at the Westminster font though. hehe.

also, sorry about not posting under NES Graphics...i tend to forget about this section.

Are there any character graphic sets out there? Something like the Sharp MZ-700 or Mattel Aquarius?

I love threads like this; too bad I don't have much to add other than these right now:

Generic aka "the family picross font", but with Japanese and accented characters. Also includes various menu tiles.


A Mother 2/Earthbound-ish 1bpp font, meant for VWF usage. (I haven't figured this out myself; need to check tepples' demo in more detail when I have the time.)


Four Various 16x16 fonts; if viewing these in YY-CHR, be sure to set "FC/NES x16" mode for proper viewing.

My favorite font was always a combination of the IBM 8x8 font, Super Mario Bros font, and FF3 Fan Translation font. I'm not the font artist, I just stuck the three fonts together. SMB1 for the numbers, uppercase letters, and exclamation point, IBM font for other punctuation and symbols, and FF3 fan translation (itself based on SNES Final Fantasy II) for the lowercase letters.

Word to the wise: be very careful about fonts up (i.e. "hosting" them in some way, including file uploads here) if they're literal copies of fonts/graphics used in commercial games. There are companies out there who go looking for this stuff and crack down on it citing DMCA. Screenshots are one thing, raw digital data is another. Boy I sure love the United States...

Note that, at least in the US, bitmap fonts are deemed too utilitarian for copyright, so not copyrightable, so not subject to the DMCA.

Doesn't mean some jerk isn't going to file one, but don't let it stop you.

(Vector fonts would also be deemed too utilitarian, if separated from the microcode that runs the hinting algorithms.)

Wow, didn't know this -- thanks lidnariq, especially for the reference material.

CARRY ON MY SONS hahaha

There are other formats for fonts, though. For example, there is METAFONT, which uses a program which contains vector outlines and whatever other stuff is needed (including hinting, parameters, etc) and then a device-independent metric file is generated, and a graphic file is generated which is specific to the device. (However, you do not need vector fonts for use with NES/Famicom.)

The IBM CP437 font used in PC is also a bitmap font and I do not expect anyone to file a lawsuit against you for using this though.

Other possible fonts you might want to have available for use with NES/Famicom includes the Commodore 64 font (it has two shift states; this could be the two pattern tables, two CHR ROM banks, or you could combine two characters into one as shown below), or a font ordered for use with the Famicom keyboard, or a font for use with Z-machine.

If you are just using monochrome text, you could encode two chaacters into one character, so that it is selected by the attribute table (or the sprite color). There is the limitation due to the 16x16 attribute areas (except MMC5), and this might still be suitable for some purposes, although you can also use sprites (but in this case you still have the limit; you have eight characters per row only).

Tepples,

I've been using your 8x8 font resources for a lot of projects, not just NES-related It's an excellent resource, and this is a great accompaniment.

To the others, I offer this challenge: when, in the history of the US legal system, has innocence been an affirmative defense? Just because you didn't do anything wrong doesn't mean you won't have legal action taken against you.

That's a triple negative. Beat that!

This actually reminds me of the font that was used on the title screen of the 1983 PC game "Digger" by Windmill Software.

Awesome work! That's the kind of stuff I'd love to see on some NES homebrew.

These fonts are good for any other 8x8 tile based system, too. Good for Genesis dev. If I'm gonna use a font, I just redraw it in a tile editor. It could also be done programmatically but I find repixeling fonts to be strangely comforting

Here's my westminster ripoff I made in 2006 to use in a DOS game i was making but never really got anymhere with it...

that is a shame, any plans to pick the game back up and work on it some more? what type of game was it?

What's the point of this thread when there is already a large font collection on RHDN ?

I was 15 or 16 at that time, making a nice sidescrolling run 'n' gun ended up being a too big bite. Software rendering ate a ton of CPU time, also will to continue

I don't have the full set converted, but if someone were to need only the parts that would be used in games like SMB, Zelda 1, or Wheel of Fortune, then I have it in NES tile format already, as part of some personal "C64 font hacks" that I've done to replace the Namco font with the C64 one.

Figure I'd provide the font I mangled, mentioned in this post.

Nice font, koitsu. The only real issue I have after studying it would be that thick crossbar on the H. I personally think it would mesh better with some of the other glyphs (B, E, F) if its bottom line were erased, making it one pixel thick. For NES usage, it's a nice "small-cap" font.

It's not "my" font -- see the reference post for where it comes from. If someone doesn't like something about it, by all means they can do whatever they wish to it. :-)

I'd say it's a great font, but the way it's layed out is weird, why is the hiragana split in two speparate halves ?

If it bothers you, you can go right ahead and "fix" it -- the CHR file is there, have fun! And be sure to voice your discontent to Atlus/Namco since Megami Tensei 2 has the same "weirdness"! ;-)

I think I have an hypothesis to explain this weird layout.
If the katakanas were originally stored at $b0 - $df, then it might have been in an effort to follow the first JIS standard. Then they fitted hiraganas and other symbols where there was room.

EDIT : Here is the CHR-File with the kana order touched up so it makes more sense. I also used the empty room to fit all 80 of the 1st grade kanjis. (they are not directly readable in the CHR file as they take all 8 pixels of height, but if you add some whitespace between them vast majority of them are very readable).

Here's a typeface I made for my military style games, feel free to use it! The small caps characters and some symbols are leftovers from another font.

Looks like the X g and j characters are messed up (you should probably shift the font 1 pixel higher ?)

Just ignore those small caps font, it's just a leftover from my attempt to do a DOS-like font... not sure where's the problem with the X, though...?

It does not read as a X.

Apparently you tried to compensate the lack of a vertical empty row by adding an horizontal empty row, but in my opinion it doesn't work and the X character isn't really recognizable any longer.

I think the X needs to look sort of like a percent sign (%), if you think about it.

Ah I understand now. I tried to do it in another style but I'm awful at art apparently. That one should do it for now...

Previous topic

When there are duplicate topics, it might be time to gather what was said and put it on the wiki.

Can I make request? If so, this is a request for the following font (if someone is good to make such a font):

• Fix pitch 8x8
• Using color 1 for background and 2 for foreground, not color 0 and 3
• ASCII characters 0x20 to 0x5F are in their places.
• The uppercase letters are duplicated in the positions of lowercase
• One of the unused slots will then be filled in with the cursor icon, which uses color 3 for foreground (so that it can blink)
• Looks fine if used as a font for a text adventure game in all uppercase
• The 0x80 to 0xFF are like 0x00 to 0x7F but are distinguished from the main ones, such as: reverse video, or bold, or italic, or something else

Here you go:



With CHR RAM, you could have made the colors 1 and 2 expansion and the inverse video in the program.

Thank you; this should be pretty good. I have downloaded it into my computer. (Maybe other people will find it useful too, so don't remove it)

I guess I can unload these here :

http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/32/
http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/37/
http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/38/

These are pixelated characters of my handwriting (yes, I write ampersands).

So I required a font that would fit in a 7x7 area so that the bit packer I programed in this project can discard the gray lines.
Recently I finished the sans-serif font that I've been designing since Flight Minigames.

This font is released into the public domain.

note: I moved this post from my project thread.

Guess they didn't have enough pixels on the Spectrum to make Bomberman (the purple guys) look right.

Um no the original game actually looked like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzimJopP5rE

Also the author died a month ago =(

Here's an 8x8 monospaced font I call SDS 8x8! The SDS stands for Super Dragonsin Saga, which is the project I originally made this for.

It's a multi-purpose font I made years ago and I've slowly honed it to perfection over the years as I've used it for my projects. If you want to add this font to a CHR page, I suggest you download it and manually type it into a 128x128 image. This method works well and allows for a lot of flexibility as far as the arrangement of tiles.

SWF with no fallback? Ew.


Registration is required to download.

SWF...no fallback? lolwut? I'm guessing SDS is an abbreviation for something related to Flash? That one really went over my head.

Here's a direct link since FontStruct is being such a pain.

EDIT:

Screenshot of le font:

What it means is that the viewer on FontStruct is a Flash object, and the site provides no static image to which a browser that doesn't support Flash can fall back.


SWF is the file format first used by Adobe Flash.


Thanks. Here's another mirror: