Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

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damieng
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Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by damieng »

Hi there! Some of you might already know but just in case you haven't heard I've been publishing lots of 8x8 pixel fonts for the Speccy (I previously made a whole bunch that shipped with BASIN many years ago).

They're now up at https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/ (currently 108 typefaces and 177 individual fonts when you count all the weights/styles). Note that with the exception of 3-4 fonts with the "ZX" prefix these are all my own personal creations - not rips from existing games.

Each page has a bunch of sample-screens that render it in the selected font (HTML5 canvas browser support required). The downloads can be found in the left-hand bar with the .zip containing RAW 768 byte files for use with AGD etc. as well as a .TAP that contains all the various styles for that typeface with a built-in Speccy BASIC preview tool.

(Each also contains a .PSF, .BDF and .TTF but they'll probably of much less use to this crowd).

These fonts are free to use in your games commercial or otherwise (email me to get permission for non-games). A credit is nice if you have a place for that but don't sweat if you don't. Either way, let me know about your game so I can add it to the list of real games using each font too.

Have fun,

[)amien
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by Alessandro »

Hi Damien,

my games Funky Fungus and its forthcoming improved and enhanced edition, Funky Fungus Reloaded (check Al's Spectrum Annual 2020 for more information), employ a modified version of your Daddy Cool font (with added accents, umlaut etc. for the various translations). You have been credited in the user manual for FFR - back in 2013 when FF was made, I didn't know the font had been designed by you.

I also employed your Spec5 Bold font for the +3 disk image files for several Infocom adventures that Einar asked me to add to the database recently. It replaced the original Commodore 128 font for better readability. The titles are: A Mind Forever Voyaging, Beyond Zork, Bureaucracy, Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It, Trinity, Zork, Zork II, Zork III.
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by uglifruit »

Damien, these are great (and so well organised!).

If you don't mind, I might try "proportionalising" some of them, with my proportinal font editor. It's not at the top of my list, but I'd be interested to see how some of them look.
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damieng
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by damieng »

Cool, glad to see they are already in use [mention]Alessandro[/mention] ! I'll check those out soon.

[mention]uglifruit[/mention] I'd love to be able to include proportional versions - is there a specific file format? I like to automate as much of my production pipeline as possible so that I can concentrate on designing the 8x8 font and then use a custom script to generate the psf, bdf, ttf, png etc. Then another script to combine up all the variants into a .tap and upload the whole thing to AWS. Literally the only manual part apart from designing the font is writing the inspiration bit for the web page but even that is really just a chunk of YML and markdown.

I'm hoping to republish them all soon with some additional formats including Atari and C64 but need to write the tools to do it.

I have created a few custom versions that are proportional and/or taller for better ascenders or descenders mostly for use with Adventuron.
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by Bedazzle »

Totally amazing! Great work!
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by Joefish »

There's some great stuff there.
Do you have room for hosting other people's fonts on your site?
Or do you take requests for adapting the styles of some more popular Windows or cinematic fonts? :D
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by uglifruit »

I've been importing these fonts into my proportional font editor (so trying to squeeze each character into 7 bytes, and using the eighth byte for width and vertical offset). I'm super impressed with the variety and readability Damien has gotten in his designs.

A couple of them, in my editor:

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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by damieng »

They're looking great!
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by damieng »

Just updated the collection - every one of the - now 200 - fonts includes a proportional FZX version with hand-tuned height, leading, and word spacing. Some of them also include tweaked descenders etc.
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by IvanBasic »

damieng wrote: Mon Apr 27, 2020 3:23 am Just updated the collection - every one of the - now 200 - fonts includes a proportional FZX version with hand-tuned height, leading, and word spacing. Some of them also include tweaked descenders etc.
Dear Damieng,

Can I share with you a font I tried to construct? It is based on 80's price labels in a General Store in Spain (El Corte Ingles). I couldn't find this font in any website, the closer font I found is this:

http://www.barcodesoft.org/semi-font
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Looking to your expertise in building fonts, perhaps you can make this font more "regular" acording to shape and size rules for each character. If you like it, you can add it to your collection, of course. What I am sure about my font are the numbers, while my doubt are letters and symbols.

Thanks!

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damieng
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by damieng »

That SEMI font looks a bit like OCR-A which I already have a version of so I had a go at adapting my OCR-A to the SEMI one you posted - find it attached.

Feel free to borrow some glyphs for it. The lower-case is tricky as most of these machine-readable fonts did not actually ship with them so we don't have a feel for them even across the MOCR style. I took a queue from the chunky full-stop to do the dots on other characters.

The other problem is that the distinguishing features on the uppers/numerics - those sharp angles can't be done on the lower-case as there aren't enough pixels. I went with a rounded top and squarer bottom to avoid being too round or too square.

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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by IvanBasic »

damieng wrote: Sun May 03, 2020 5:07 pm That SEMI font looks a bit like OCR-A ...
So many thanks for the quick solving. I had already seen your font and yes it was close. Thanks to your clues, I found that the font is OCR-A, widely persent on fonts websites.

What I didn´t explain well is that the numbers I had already drawn match with the old price label numbers, so I wanted just to perfectionate the letters and symbols, and you did it. It is a pitty I have no examples of letters in those price labels, just the "Y" and "X". Numbers "6" and "9" are not in the label, but I remember them and the OCR-A font confirmed the design.

I am arranging the font set according to all explained.

Thanks!!!

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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by IvanBasic »

A little step forward: the OCR-A is related to the font in "old" credit and bank documents (checks, credit cards), so I found the font "Kredit", which matches what I was looking for:

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So, little arrangements made the spectrum font to be done (but subjected to possible revisions):

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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by Patrik Rak »

damieng wrote: Tue Mar 10, 2020 6:23 am They're now up at https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/ (currently 108 typefaces and 177 individual fonts when you count all the weights/styles).
Amazing collection.

If I may, little suggestion - it would help when you hover over the font image, it would show up in 2x or maybe even 3x zoomed up version. As they are, they are quite small on modern LCD monitors to figure out the subtle details. I know you can view the simulated usage in magnified versions, but that's still not quite the same as looking at the whole font.

Thanks for considering this.

Patrik
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by presh »

Fantastic resource! I nabbed Deaf Metal for use in my game HELL YEAH! :mrgreen:

I've credited you and added a link to the website in the instructions :)

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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by Quantum Sheep »

These are wonderful and useful!

The guy who makes Lantern http://retroteacher.net/lantern/index.htmlhas intimated to me that he's got custom fonts working, so expect to see some of these in future Sheepy games!

Thanks so much!

*sheepyhugs*

QS =D
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by presh »

Hey [mention]damieng[/mention], just downloaded Nicety but seems to be missing the Speccy font files? Just BASIC loader in the .tap, nothing else.

Was hoping to use the semi-bold variant in my next effort :)

https://download.damieng.com/fonts/zx-o ... Nicety.zip

Edit: Orbiter seems to have the same issue (another one I had plans for) ;)
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by damieng »

Both those download issue should have been fixed a while back.

https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/ is now up to 166 typefaces and 310 fonts and now helpfully includes a bunch of filtering options by category/tag on the index page.

[)amien
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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by XoRRoX »

Already shared it on Facebook sometime but thought it also appropriate to share in this thread:
I used the FZX version of Scribe in the Prologue section of Pi-Dentity 128.

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Re: Free 8x8 ZX fonts for games

Post by damieng »

Looks great! Will give it a try and link to it from the Scribe page.
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