7 ms·

Arcade Game Typography

• jordn 7y ago
  These are beautiful and very on-trend rn. Anyone have links to good webfont versions?
  • CmdrKrool 7y ago
    Not webfonts as such, but this site will generate you some images: https://nfggames.com/games/fontmaker/ https://nfggames.com/games/fontmaker/ (I feel the book must have been inspired by this site somehow, particularly when you read the various 'notes' that pop up after selecting a font from the dropdown.)
    • rob74 7y ago
      Great site! Unfortunately they're limiting themselves to arcade machines. For instance, the font from Lemmings looks great too: http://www.lemmingsuniverse.net/shots/images/amigashot03.png http://www.lemmingsuniverse.net/shots/images/amigashot03.png
      • onion2k 7y ago
        Unfortunately they're limiting themselves to arcade machines. There are thousands of different bitmap fonts from the 8- and 16-bit era of gaming. Any book about them has to be limited in some way.
        • rob74 7y ago
          I wasn't talking about the book, but about the site CmdrKrool mentioned.
  • touchpadder 7y ago
    Many years ago I made this website with free webfonts, I processed dafont.com database dump, extracted the free ones and processed them into webfonts. http://fontsforweb.com/fontcategories/show/catid/35/Free-Square-Font http://fontsforweb.com/fontcategories/show/catid/35/Free-Squ... http://fontsforweb.com/fontcategories/show/catid/39/Free-Pixel,%20Bitmap-Font http://fontsforweb.com/fontcategories/show/catid/39/Free-Pix...
    • Moru 7y ago
      Seems you have gotten your domain blacklisted here: https://hosts-file.net/emd.txt https://hosts-file.net/emd.txt
      • nebulous1 7y ago
        EMD: Sites engaged in malware distribution They should really just put that in the comment at the top. https://hosts-file.net/?s=Classifications https://hosts-file.net/?s=Classifications
      • touchpadder 7y ago
        Moru thanks for that! The website is not maintained anymore but it doesn't distribute any malware. Maybe that's why the amount of views is slowly dropping every year. Added a false positive report https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/254447-fontsforwebcom-false-positive/ https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/254447-fontsforwebcom-...
      • touchpadder 7y ago
        The website has been removed from this website but it's still on the emd.txt list, hopefully it's just a cached leftover. Thanks again :)
        • Moru 7y ago
          My pi-hole has updated now and I can access your site :-)
  • pvg 7y ago
    http://deathgenerator.com/ http://deathgenerator.com/
• atum47 7y ago
  It would be interesting to pass all those fonts trough a neural network so a GAN try to generate some new ones
  • gwern 7y ago
    In a sense, any GAN which generates fonts, like https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1095603397179396098 https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1095603397179396098 or http://www.machinelearningfont.com/ http://www.machinelearningfont.com/ or https://medium.com/@robert.munro/creating-new-scripts-with-stylegan-c16473a50fd0 https://medium.com/@robert.munro/creating-new-scripts-with-s... , is already generating bitmap fonts, because the generator is upscaling through multiple resolutions. If you want the 'bitmap' version, you'd just grab the 32px layer output etc. But the pixel art I've seen from GANs hasn't been too good. I think it's ultimately because it's very impoverished a representation and pixel art relies heavily on us already knowing what we might be looking at, and a GAN doesn't know that. Imagine trying to learn to generate Pokemon when there's only a few hundred examples of them and you've never seen any of the millions of plant or animal species they are based off of?
    • atum47 7y ago
      I'm doing some experiments with GAN. I think I'm halfway done. I don't want to talk much about it now, cause I'm afraid of failure, but... if things goes well, I'm might post something interesting here this weekend.
• mnem 7y ago
  In case you’re looking for a cheaper copy (or that sells out) I think that’s just a hardback version of https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0500021740 https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0500021740
  • bartread 7y ago
    Damn: I wish I'd seen that before. No comments on this when I ordered. Would also have dodged their annoying checkout process.
    • erickhill 7y ago
      Or in the US: Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type https://www.amazon.com/dp/0500021740/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_hNr6Db6ERYHEP https://www.amazon.com/dp/0500021740/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_hN...
    • jiofih 7y ago
      It’s mentioned in the page itself, third paragraph. I think the extra 20 is definitely worth it for the hard cover. What annoyed you during checkout? Took 30s on mobile for me.
      • bartread 7y ago
        On reflection I'm actually pretty happy with the decision to go with hardcover. Nowadays I've got quite used to Paypal checkout for sites I've not bought from before, which has the advantage that you generally don't need to enter any details or digout your card.
    • playpause 7y ago
      What did you find annoying about their checkout process? Seemed smooth to me.
      • bartread 7y ago
        Believe it or not I've come to love checkout with Paypal because when integrated well you don't need to enter any details, or dig out your card.
• phkahler 7y ago
  Does it have the vector fonts?
  • Jolter 7y ago
    Looks like it's about pixel fonts specifically.
  • proc0 7y ago
    Yeah was looking for the zip to check out some syntax in this font and then I realized it was an actual book.
  • hcs 7y ago
    I also came here wondering about the Battlezone font.
• workthrowaway 7y ago
  this looks so good! thanks.
• bronlund 7y ago
  So no fonts included?
  • slacka 7y ago
    You can make your own. Here is guide to rip fonts from your favorite childhood arcade machine using MAME: https://web.archive.org/web/20170107110149/https://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/623 https://web.archive.org/web/20170107110149/https://nfgworld....
• ArtWomb 7y ago
  Don't sunset bitmap fonts just yet (or many old school gamedev dark arts). They can be more portable and faster to render than vectors ;)
  • matthewfcarlson 7y ago
    The software I work on at work uses bitmap fonts. We actually have a system that renders windows fonts without subpixel rendering on a few backgrounds and then saves the output to header files for us to include in the project. It's mainly for space saving reasons and the fact that getting a proper text rendering system was more work than it was worth.
• richrichardsson 7y ago
  Used to love making bitmap fonts in DPaint on the Amiga, something quite meditative about it almost.
• ungzd 7y ago
  On ZX Spectrum, games often had fonts based on MICR[1] or OCR-A[2]. Example: [3]. I still don't understand why. I see these fonts in the wild very, very rarely. Was they popular in UK in 80s maybe? Was they used even outside bank cheques? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A [3] https://archive.org/serve/zx_Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_Game_a/Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_Game_a_screenshot.gif https://archive.org/serve/zx_Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_...
  • AndrewStephens 7y ago
    That's an easy question to answer - because they looked cool and futuristic. If you watch old episodes of Doctor Who or 70s films you will often see props and displays with similar fonts, and video games followed that aesthetic. I guess those fonts had just started to appear on cheques and machine readable tickets so people associated those typefaces with computers.
    • sedatk 7y ago
      Exactly, the cheque font was synonymous with sci-fi back then.
  • Razengan 7y ago
    I love the MICR'ish fonts and still try to imitate them.
  • bitwize 7y ago
    Because in the 1970s, those fonts were visual code for "computer", and there was some spillover into the 1980s. Books with a computer theme, such as type-in program books and young adult novels, often had part or all of their title set in such a font. You see it also on electronic products of the era, such as the Waddingtons Game Machine.
• gavanwoolery 7y ago
  I'm an even bigger fan of the slightly larger and more detailed bitmap fonts used in the early 90s, popularized on Amiga, arcade machines, and in particular the demoscene. These fonts were the inspiration for the Voxel Quest logo [1]. [1] https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/011/631/892/83281ea18b64eab16462df01b2f10908_original.png?ixlib=rb-2.1.0&crop=faces&w=1552&h=873&fit=crop&v=1463685891&auto=format&frame=1&q=92&s=2b5a3fdab8c787c280dc6a8b25277744 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/011/631/892/83281ea18b64eab...
• tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  So what's your favorite, HN? Personally I'm a big fan of - the Apple ][ font, - what I call the "Nintendo Font" that was in many 8-bit NES games and arcade games. It's the font in Pac-man. I believe some Atari games from the 70's used it, - The VT220 font - I use the GlassTTY font in PuTTY, I really like it.
  • mmphosis 7y ago
    - the Apple ][ font, I sometimes use it in Terminal as it is compact and retro. https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml
    • smallduck 7y ago
      re the apple 2 font, yes i instantly recognized the space invaders page in the book to be exactly, or nearly so, the upper case 40-column character set used on the apple 2. ha, i used the condensed (ie. 80-column) version of this font in my terminal too, and for coding as well. see the xcode theme i made... https://smallduck.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/throwback-xcode-theme/ https://smallduck.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/throwback-xcode-t...
• colanderman 7y ago
  It's a shame these are all presented with giant blocky pixels. It makes some of the fonts look really ugly (ex. Lady Bug). Better IMO to present them as they would appear on the medium for which the designers intended them, a CRT. https://www.hottechzone.com/is-an-old-crt-television-perfect-for-retro-gaming/ https://www.hottechzone.com/is-an-old-crt-television-perfect... has some good examples of the difference. Another post from the same site, with a high-quality image of a Space Invaders CRT for direct comparison with the first example in the article: https://www.hottechzone.com/taito-space-invaders-arcade-machine/ https://www.hottechzone.com/taito-space-invaders-arcade-mach...
  • Rooster61 7y ago
    I dunno, I think it's good to look at these typefaces from a different perspective. An analogy would be examining a butterfly that has been pinned so that its anatomy can be examined up close. It's not as pretty or elegant as seeing it fluttering around outside, but it does let you experience it in a way that gives you information you wouldn't normally get.
    • colanderman 7y ago
      I don't disagree, but to continue the analogy, pictures of live butterflies in flight are nonetheless invaluable to a researcher, and difficult to obtain. Although emulation helps, the "original look" of many of these fonts may be forever lost to time as the original hardware dies out.
• wernsey 7y ago
  I'm a sucker for these old bitmap fonts. Here's a collection of links I've bookmarked over the years: * https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys... and https://damieng.com/blog/2011/03/27/typography-in-16-bits-system-fonts https://damieng.com/blog/2011/03/27/typography-in-16-bits-sy... * http://www.type-invaders.com/sinclair/8bitfonts/ http://www.type-invaders.com/sinclair/8bitfonts/ * https://opengameart.org/content/the-collection-of-8-bit-fonts-for-grafx2 https://opengameart.org/content/the-collection-of-8-bit-font... * https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8440 https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8440 (scroll down a bit)