I am proud to present FontKnox, one of the more popular fonts in GEOS on the Commodore 64. I took a bit longer with this one but it was well worth it. The font is meant to look kind of embossed and metallic, hence its original name.
As it's decorative, I've included only its original characters; I've used the bottom of the semicolon to make quotation marks.
Orient, from The Print Shop Companion for the Commodore 64 by Broderbund Software.
I never got to use Orient - my copy of PS Companion had two bad files, the fonts Orient and Deco (which were my two favourites from the samples in the manual! Go figure). Whilst many Asian-style fonts exist, they weren't as wide as this one. Orient is much more... inelegant.
Characters are all that were in Print Shop... if anything I should fix the pairs kerning.
Wizard, platform game for the Commodore 64. This font replicates its pixelled medieval character set at its usual size. After first doing a monospaced version, cloned it to make a proportional font and have tried to set reasonable kerning of character pairs. Some redefined characters in the game also appear here...
This is a cloneLewis from GEOS FontPack PLUS for the Commodore 64.
Another Old West font... normally I don't care much for them, I never warmed to Playbill. Lewis feels like it's got a bit more space - almost a cross between Playbill and Italian Print.
Stern from GEOS FontPack PLUS on the Commodore 64. Script font with joins. I haven't done more than basic kerning on this so it may be a bit "rough" in places. Still, it's the full basic ASCII set, and it's easier to read than Mistral.
Angle font from The Print Shop Companion.
This was a tricky one. Going pixel for pixel from C64 screen grabs would have made this thing huge - it could have been done but I didn't want to do a major project here. I ended up eyeballing the letters and doing it freehand, roughly 5x9 but a few characters are 6x9. This also let me work more with the angled pieces (no pun intended) in Fontstruct as I want to learn them better.
As you may have guessed, this is an unshadowed version of Pioneer. Print Shop's fonts were more often than not replicas of commercial fonts. I wasn't able to locate a solid Pioneer so this will do for now - plus it only has a descender on the Q. Only characters in the Print Shop font have been produced.
Etcheverry, a font from GEOS. Named after Etcheverry Hall, UC Berkeley College of Engineering.
The upper case characters look like Glaser Stencil, but that was produced by URW++ in 1994. Etcheverry was produced and included in GEOS' FontPack PLUS in 1987-88. I wonder if they're both based on an older font? I created this copy of Etcheverry because I wanted lower case characters, which Glaster Stencil doesn't have.
Block font from The Print Shop by Broderbund Software.
Using VICE, I used Print Shop's Screen Magic option with every character in the set to generate a screen dump. I like Block because it's got the Western feel but isn't as condensed as Playbill.
University font from GEOS for the Commodore 64. This was one of the default fonts included with GEOS and GeoWrite. I think it's based on one of Susan Kare's Mac fonts, can't remember which one. Elegant and may even work its way back into regular use for me...
Well, it's been a while, work has ramped up during this school term. I never complain about that though. I'd rather be busy with work I'm comfortable doing. But I digress.
This font is Spruce, as seen in GEOS FontPack PLUS on the Commodore 64. Not sure whether you'd call this stencilled or segmented. It's got an odd set of descenders, and I've corrected some glyps so they're symmetrical top and bottom, even if that gives them ascenders. This may not spruce up your font collection as such (groan)...
I found a font rip from "Footballer of the Year" and the upper case letters were identical to Gauntlet, so I took the lower case ones and added them. Have called it "Gauntlet Potion" as "Gauntlet Deeper Dungeons" was too long. I don't really care for the lower case letters that much... it's here if anyone wants it for variety.
This is a clone of GauntletTemple of Apshai was the first game published by Epyx, back in 1979 when they were called Automated Simulations. A trilogy of Apshai games came out on Commodore 64 in 1985 and this font is taken from that. Now you can mix 8-bit with RPG.
This is some random set labelled "BX_1" from Peter Kofler's web site. I don't know what game or software it's from. I just remember I made a bitmap font of this years ago with "Fony". Now it's a TrueType. Do with it as you will :)
Boalt from GEOS FontPack 1 on the Commodore 64.
Apparently Boalt was so popular that it was included in FontPack PLUS too. Personally, I didn't care much for Boalt. It's heavy, wide, big serifs - not my kind of thing. But without much else to create, and wanting to keep in the Fontstruct game, here it is. Rescuing these fonts from obscurity is the main prize!
Unkerned, and no extra characters other than what the original had.
Stadium, 24-point "banner" font from GEOS on the Commodore 64. Suitable for headings. The original is upper case only, 0-9, and limited punctuation. I've made lower case identical to upper case, and added closing bars to the grave and pipe characters to achieve a couple of effects.
There was no direct TTF alternative to this one, I've been seeking it for a long time, now it's here :)
Another Commodore character set. From Summer Games II's Fencing event, this is the font that appears on the computer terminal. Upper case, digits and full stop only. It's also correctly monospaced as the terminal is meant to be an early 1980s machine. G and Q will touch adjacent characters, that's by design.
Fell back on this as I want to work with curves BUT they're kind of limited. I work in 1x1 pixel space but I want a curve that can span a 2x2 space. At the moment Fontstruct doesn't let us scale a brick up in size, only downward (i.e. composite bricks)... so the only curves you can do, your letters look like rounded rectangles.
Triad published by Livewire. One of the first games I ever played on the C64 back in 1985, loaded this up off tape - probably the first game I ever mastered and advanced through the levels. And the first place I ever heard Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor :)
Latimer. Originally provided in GEOS FontPack PLUS. Not one of my favourite fonts back in the day (i.e. when I was 13) but unique enough that it warrants a FontStruction. And it seems to have brushed up pretty well. I've added extra characters so it fills out the base ASCII set.
The original had some quirks: some letters didn't touch the baseline, some uneven glyphs, some below the baseline, lowercase all sat one pixel higher etc. I've tried to correct for these. Lower case letters J, S, U, T are all as originally set, whereas upper case are all corrected.
15-minute quickie font. This is from Staff Of Karnath for the Commodore 64. Only characters in the game are presented here, except the comma which I put in so I had something with a descender (and thus some space between lines).
UPDATE 01 Jun 2018.
Turns out the same character set appeared in Blackwyche! I've added a few graphics from that game to various characters. Try entering [{|}] and see what you get! Also added the pentagram from Staff Of Karnath to the asterisk... that took MUCH more than 15 minutes, having to do a stack of composite bricks...
Second of two quickies in an hour tonight. BC Bill, from Imagine Software, used this great little character set in its high score table. Given the game it's meant to look like stone scratchings or even bones. Unfortunately even after extracting the charset from the game ROM, I found it's just alphanumeric - I made up a full stop character (yeah like that's a big ask LOL). At some point I'll add extra punctuation, I just wanted to get this out there.