Spectrum Computing

Just throwing around a few idle ideas and playing around with something I began work on some time ago. I've been trying to find a look that works. I like Arcade looking character sets (fonts in modern speak!), but they often lack polish with their odd spacing when a lot of text, something like back story, instructions etc are displayed. So I've been trying to decide upon something that will give the arcade sort of look, but be proportional. I came up with this, but I'm not entirely convinced. Its based upon something called Grape Soda but with quite a few alterations.



Any thoughts, suggestions (apart from to stop messing around with this and get on with writing the Chess game! )

I think this looks great. (You know I’m partial to typefaces and proportional fonts on the Spectrum.) I think all this needs is custom kerning (or predefined kern pairs), because those “Ke” and “ues" could certainly be tighter.

In my proportional-width font routine, I allow for both. (Well, predefined kern pairs come in the form of the most common ligatures like, ff, fl, fi, etc.) They’re usually unnecessary for low-resolution fonts, though, and simple control codes for manual kerning work fine.

The font is lovely!

I like it

Of course I'm not an expert on fonts. These guy would probably give you a lecture about some strict font design rules.
That you may care about or not

But I just like what I see

This looks terrific, a nice 'fun' font. Wont be suitable for some genres, but what is? Love it.

Still needs work, but it getting there. I agree about the spacing. It will be a case of how I encode this, a it might be used for a scroller too.

That's really good. I think the capital 'B' could be rounder somehow, and I'm not keen on the uneven gaps under the lower case 'm', but I love the way it displays overall. Is it all encoded as 16-pixels high to include the letters with tails? If so, maybe it could all be moved down so the capitals could be slightly taller.

Just a quick reply to concur with what others have said that does look very good indeed.

I really love this!!

The text is only a rough idea, nothing final. Just to demonstrate the appearance of the Character Set.

Its actually a total of 13 bits high from the tops of the higher characters to the bottoms of the descenders. So its likely it'll be encoded as 16 bits high just for simplicity. As it contains characters of widths anywhere from 4 to 12 bits wide it may prove useful to encode an index at the start to point to the character data, allowing for characters of any width.

Pandamonium is a game by the way. In the very very early stages of development!

Reminds of one of the quotes from Warcraft 3, where Pandaren Brewmaster says, “I bring pandamonium!”

As a game name it opens up a multitude of possibilities, and Pandas fit well into the Speccys colour limitations!

I, for one, welcome our new panda overlords.

How about a name for the little angry fella? Any suggestions?

Uh, Lee?

I thought Bernard personally. Not enough Bernards around these days. Bernie Winters and Schnorbitz? Schnorbitz, although canine in origin, did have something of the Panda about him. Or how about a female Panda, Janice? Pam?

The Adventures of Pam the Panda

Pam Panda sounds OK.
Andy Panda is too much like Watch-With-Mother's Andy Pandy from the 70s.
Alexander Panda?
Miranda Panda?
Melander Panda?
Stephander Panda?
Mandy Panda?
Swedish-P*n*s-Ex-Panda?

Miranda the Angry Panda!

'The Swedish-Made P*n*s-Ex-Panda-Pump And Me: (This Sort Of Thing Is My Bag Baby)', by Austin 'Danger' Powers?

Matilda
Gwendolyn
Ezra
Brent
Alois
Thelonious

Wanda the Angry Panda.

Yolanda Panda.
The aim of the game is to grow Coriander and Oleander on your Verandah.
Out to stop you are Salamanders from Rwanda. Who get upset if you Slander their Commander.

That’ll do now children, thank you!!

Yes, I'm already getting tired of this Curséd Ursid!

After lots of tinkering, I've set upon a decent encoding format that can be used for both scrolling and printing text. To overcome a few of the spacing issues, I've made a few special characters (glyphs I suppose) by combining some of the character pairs. Anyway, hopefully its not too jerky, but heres a GIF recording of some example text scrolling;



The scroller routine is just 73 bytes

Looks smooth enough to me. I’d increase the space by at least one pixel. Depending on the slant of some of the letters, the spacing between words look a bit on the tight side.