Recreation of the small pixel font from the european/north american release of Climax Entertainment/Sonic! Software Planning's "Shining Force" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.
This font is unusual, as each character not only comprises two tiles (for its height), but also features characters that are wider than the maximum 8px tiles. In the game's tile set, this was achieved by using a custom encoding, where a single tile contains the combined values for two horizontal tiles.
See this short Twitter thread for a little dissection of the tile set.
The width of each character is also variable and encoded in the bottom tile for each character. Unfortunately, I was unable to work out the logic behind the width information bits - so, for characters used in the game, the correct width was matched manually, and for any characters not encountered (yet) in any of the dialog boxes, I took an educated guess...
Due to the complexity of this encoding, I won't tackle the hiragana/katakana large font from the japanese release.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included
Recreation of the pixel font from Supersonic Software/Codemasters' hybrid adventure/platform game "Cosmic Spacehead" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the regular pixel font from HOT・B/Flying Edge's "Steel Empire" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.
This font is used for intro animation, and on the end-of-level stats screen. The game also includes a custom compound character for "'s" (apostrophe followed by an "s") - this has not been recreated here as it lacks an appropriate unicode code point.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Codemasters' "Dizzy III - Fantasy World Dizzy" (1989) on the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum.
The same font is used in all subsequent "Dizzy" adventure games - "Dizzy 3 and a Half - Into Magicland" (1991), "Dizzy IV - Magicland Dizzy" (1991), "Dizzy V - Spellbound Dizzy" (1991), and "Dizzy - Prince of the Yolkfolk" (1992).
Note that "Dizzy V - Spellbound Dizzy" (1991) uses the "66" style left quotation marks (U+201C) at the start of any speech, while in all other games the "Double High-Reversed-9 Quotation Mark" (U+201F) is used.
"Dizzy II - Treasure Island Dizzy" (1988) already used an early version of this font, but with fewer special characters. One major difference is the single quote/apostrophe character - compared to all later games, which use a "9" style apostrophe, "Dizzy II" used a straight diagonal small one. This has been included in this recreation, mapped to "Right Single Quotation Mark" (U+2019).
Also note that the egg character - used to indicate lives in game - is mapped to "black circle" (U+25CF).
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Updated 06/2023: added the apostrophe from "Dizzy II", added the "66" style left quotation mark, and confirmed that this same font is used for the rest of the series, and on all other 8-bit platforms.
Recreation of the pixel font from NMK/Tecmo's "GunNail" (1992).
The lowercase and most of the special characters are unused in the game itself.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Namco's "Splatterhouse 2" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis.
This recreation uses the special TTF+SVG format, which currently has limited support.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
This is a clone of Splatterhouse 2Recreation of the pixel font from Mix's "Dive On" (1992) on the Sharp x68000.
Slightly expanded, to include the "J", "Q", and "Z". Apart from those, only the characters used in the game have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Sims/Tecmo/Sega's "Ninja Gaiden" (1992) on the Sega Master System.
Note the "?!" character, which has been mapped to "‽" (U+203D).
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the large proportional antialiased pixel font from Westone/Hudson Soft's "Riot Zone" (aka "Crest of Wolf", 1992) on the PC Engine CD/TurboGrafx-CD.
This recreation uses the special TTF+SVG format, which currently has limited support.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Horror Soft/Adventure Soft's "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark" (1990). This font was also used in "Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus" (1991) and "Waxworks" (1992).
Slightly expanded to complete the set of accented characters, beyond the ones used in the French and German versions of the game. Apart from this, only the characters used in the game have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font used in Interplay's classic "Star Trek: 25th Anniversary" (1992) adventure game on the PC. It's mostly monospaced, with the exception of the unusual &, © and ® used on the splash screen and the ß from the German version. Also included are the original (fairly ugly, admittedly) extended characters from the German and French version.
Recreation of the 6px pixel font used in Nintendo's "Super Mario Kart" (1992) on the SNES. In the game, the font has a 2px spacing to account for the outline. In this recreation, I opted to just go for a 1px spacing - if you do use it outlined, make sure to add the extra pixel for authenticity.
Update Sept. 2019: added ":" and "," and fixed incorrect "Q", "V", "(" and ")"
Recreation of the large pixel font Zippo Games/Rare/Acclaim's "Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power" (1992).
Note that the "&" character is wider than 8px - in the game, it uses 4 separate 8×8 tiles. In this recreation, the character width is nonetheless set to 8px, with the ampersand overlapping the following letter (usually, a space character) by one pixel.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the main pixel font from Jaleco's "Rival Turf!" (aka "Rushing Beat", 1992) on the SNES.
This font is used for the main menu, intro/outro cinematics, and end credits.
The font includes an almost complete set of hiragana and katakana characters. A few of the katakana characters were missing in the game's tile set, so I've attempted to include custom characters in a similar style. In the tile set, the dakuten and handakuten are separate tiles, positioned in a line above their respective character. In this recreation, characters that use them are pre-combined into a single glyph.
With the exception of the few additional katakana glyphs, only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Rainbow Arts/Imagineer/Factor 5's "Super Turrican" (1992) on the NES.
This recreation uses the special TTF+SVG format, which currently has limited support.
Only the characters presents in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Konami's "Contra III: The Alien Wars" (1992) on the SNES.
Note the "V" and "W", which are shifted up by one pixel and short, and the inconsistent weight of some of the characters.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Technōs/Tradewest's "Super Double Dragon" (1992) on the SNES.
This recreation uses the special TTF+SVG format, which currently has limited support.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.