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What are the fonts in this topic licensed as?

 

I have no idea, I didn't put it together, but since most collections use fonts from various console and arcade machines, the "license" is probably something along the lines of: "use at your own risk, this information is simply collected here and no claims are being made to its legal availability for any use".

 

I suspect most people realize a lot of this "stuff" (graphics, ROMs, programs, etc) were created by some corporate entity in the last 30 years, and at some point probably fell (or still falls) under some sort of legal license or copyright, even if grossly exaggerated (like the 100-year crap we now have in the U.S.)

 

Copyright and licensing is a "go nowhere" conversation when it comes to this kind of stuff, so let's not derail the thread. Everyone has their own opinion and beliefs on copyright, and right or wrong, you will never get consensus in a forum like this.

 

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Have you seen this webpage?

 

http://electrickeet....ine-itfont.html

 

I like the extra tiles defined from 0-31 and 128-255 (although these are not as obvious as 32-127), and how the extra tiles are geared for making a UI of some sort.

 

Yep, very nice. I think most of them are covered or very similar to another.

 

What are the fonts in this topic licensed as?

 

Fonts in this non-commercial collection are presented for reference and nostalgia purposes only. If an author or owner of a font wish it removed I will of course do so. Some fonts in the collection have notes about game, year and company (zip contains info), some fonts were found several places without any specific origin. Take for example the C64 and Atari 800 fonts (see below), they’re almost identical - except for the height, and lowercase is then identical (a bit of a surprise to me). A lot of fonts are very similar. Guess it’s limited how much you can tweak an “A” in an 8x8 or 7x7 pixel space and still have it somewhat readable. Anyway - if you want to use a font and give credit or ask permission, I’m afraid you have to try and dig up information yourself. Sorry if that puts anything off or something.

 

:)

 

atari800c64.png

 

Copyright and licensing is a "go nowhere" conversation when it comes to this kind of stuff, so let's not derail the thread. Everyone has their own opinion and beliefs on copyright, and right or wrong, you will never get consensus in a forum like this.

 

Yep, agree. :)

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I'd say making a public domain, general purpose font is the way to go. Avoids copyright issues altogether and provides a license open enough for anyone to use.

 

Avoiding copyrights issues altogether ? - I would guess that also being difficult in itself.

 

I took a look at your Nitebear on Sleepystreet. Looks great. I only looked at post #1, the pictures, downloaded the zip and looked around (didn’t try and play). There’s no mentioning of copyrights, licenses or fonts, as far as I can see, so I guess I’ll just go along and use my own best judgment. Hope you’re good with that.

 

:)

 

I always imagined something combining the best characters from the Sharp MZ-700, Mattel Aquarius and C64.

 

I'll try and see what I can do.

Edited by sometimes99er
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As far as I could figure out, here’s the VIC-20, MZ-700 Japanese and International versions. Very much alike. Among differences are $, comma, 4, 5, 6, 9, A, C, D, G, x, curly brackets and tilde.

 

vicmz700jpin.gif

 

Now the C64 font is bold (thick characters), so how would one combine these and choose the best. Guess beauty will be in the eye of the beholder. I suspect you may perhaps be more interested in the graphic characters ?

Edited by sometimes99er
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I'd say making a public domain, general purpose font is the way to go. Avoids copyright issues altogether and provides a license open enough for anyone to use.

 

Avoiding copyrights issues altogether ? - I would guess that also being difficult in itself.

 

I took a look at your Nitebear on Sleepystreet. Looks great. I only looked at post #1, the pictures, downloaded the zip and looked around (didn’t try and play). There’s no mentioning of copyrights, licenses or fonts, as far as I can see, so I guess I’ll just go along and use my own best judgment. Hope you’re good with that.

 

:)

 

I always imagined something combining the best characters from the Sharp MZ-700, Mattel Aquarius and C64.

 

I'll try and see what I can do.

I appreciate that!

 

Er, I'm not sure what your point is about Nitebear on Sleepystreet. I think it might be pointing out the irony of whining about copyrights and yet being so lax on my own work. Honestly, my homebrew to date is meant for my enjoyment. I hope that by providing source and no copyright notices people are encouraged to learn and share. The only boundaries are their own self respect and appreciation of others.

 

I'd rather people use my work, learn from it and give credit where credit is due. I'm trusting people instead of treating them like corporations that only respond to lawyers. I hope you DO go along and use YOUR own best judgment.

Edited by theloon
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I hope that by providing source and no copyright notices people are encouraged to learn and share.

 

By not providing copyright notices of some kind, you are defaulting to having a copyright. At least in the U.S., everything you write without a "copyright notice" has a copyright by default. That goes along with the 100+ year b.s. we now have. If you really want your work to be public domain, then you have to specifically say that, and also confirm that your work was not derived from some other work that had a copyright. It is all really stupid, and most people simply leave it alone.

 

I'd rather people use my work, learn from it and give credit where credit is due.

 

They won't, unless forced (by you having a copyright notice), especially if they stand to make money from it.

 

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True. I should properly CC license my work. As a side the people in the "they won't" category will pirate it anyway. It's not a matter of if you can win in court but can you afford the lawsuit.

 

I'm sorry if I offended you. I didn't mean to goad you into an argument over how I license or don't license Nitebear on Sleepystreet.

Edited by theloon
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I don't think anyone is offended (I'm not), we are just having a discussion. I'm not "sometimes99er" though either, and I only speak for myself.

 

I think the main thing is that conversations about copyright and such go no where, so most people don't bring it up. Copyright is such a mess everywhere, with strong arguments on all sides, that for what we do way down here in our retro-computer world, it can sometimes be impossible to determine *if* something even has a copyright, and if so, who owns it.

 

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I always imagined something combining the best characters from the Sharp MZ-700, Mattel Aquarius and C64.

 

Well, here they are, Sharp MZ-700, Mattel Aquarius and C64.

 

mz700aquariusc64.gif

 

Actually rather different styles, at least in this 8x8 (7x7) pixel space. One could make the first two fat (wider) as the C64, and then choose between the three on character by character basis.

 

mz700aquariusc64fat.gif

 

Er, I'm not sure what your point is about Nitebear on Sleepystreet. I think it might be pointing out the irony of whining about copyrights and yet being so lax on my own work.

 

Yep, spot on. No worries though.

 

icon_smile.gif

Edited by sometimes99er
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  • 4 weeks later...

I take it no owns the rights to this font. But can someone own the rights to ANY font?

 

Fonts are an interesting space in IP law. In the US, you can copyright a scalable font file if it contains rendering instructions (such as the hinting rules in TrueType and Postscript fonts). However, you can't copyright the actual typeface itself, so if you draw the same glyphs as someone else's typeface, you're generally in the clear. In any case, a font name can generally be trademarked, so even if you copy a font's typeface curve for curve, you may not be able to call it the same name. I'm pretty sure there's a gazillion pixel-for-pixel Helvetica clones out there by now, none of them named Helvetica. (That's not counting the Helvetica work-alikes such as the terminally ugly Arial.)

 

Other jurisdictions do recognize different rights. Read the linked page for more -- I won't reproduce it all here.

 

Here's more on the Microgramma font family. It looks like URW still sells an official version of this typeface. I don't know all the details on the OTF I found above, actually. For example, I don't know if it was redrawn.

 

More on Microgramma... Apparently this font really gets around!

 

Crossforumquote. Interesting.

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Just go ahead and do it. IF someone claims copyright, make sure you ask them to proove that they actually own the copyright.

 

I had an issue a few years ago where someone who claimed to have the copyright to a game sent me a threatening email. As is often the case, the *company* owns the copyrighted works as an asset, not an *individual*. The company had dissolved many years ago. He could produce nothing in writing claiming that the copyright reverted to him (he also declined to proove that he *ever* had copyright!). I told him to STFU and sue me.

 

Never heard anything more again.

 

The other tactic, if it ever gets as far as the lawyers, is to write his lawyer LOTS of letters, asking questions. So, if you have a list of 10 questions, send 10 letters, one or two weeks apart. His lawyer will then dutifully write to his client each time, charging him $150 each time. Before he knows it, his legal bill is $1500.

 

If any replies come back, write back *again* thanking the lawyer for the information, but requesting 'further clarification' on certain points.

 

His lawyer will love you.

 

Watch it get dropped PDQ.

 

Not that I've ever done that before, of course! No, not me ;-)

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I don't know who came up with this one. All I could do was trace it back to Namco Arcades 1979. Quickly used with many other games both arcade, home computers and more, with little or no variation. Seems to be almost public domain from the word go.

 

0000.preview.gif

 

It's the first one in the set (number 0000). Worn but still a favorite of many. Whoever made it, I would like to know why the letter E is only 6 and not 7 pixels wide as most. The answer could be, that E was chosen to supplement I, T and Y, which, to be totally symmetric, is only 6 pixels wide.

Edited by sometimes99er
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Very nice info on some 8-bit system fonts from the seven- and eighties:

 

http://damieng.com/b...ts-system-fonts

 

The upper-case, numbers and symbols were copied from the Signetics 64 × 8 × 5 character generator 2513 chip used in the Apple I and II in revision 0 to 6.

 

The later Texas Instruments TMS9918 Video Controller Chip used on Sega, Nintendo, Colecovision and TI/99 machines re-used this font with only a couple of pixels changed.

 

Signetics datasheet with the 8x5 pixel definition:

 

http://www.applefrit...gnetics2513.pdf

 

The 9918A datasheet has an almost identical font definition. Only exception is the $ sign with two pixels lowered.

 

Wonder who and why TI got the (crap) idea of making small uppercase characters (slightly different in the datasheet). The TI-99/8 went for proper lowercase. I could speculate in extra abandoned 9918(A) modes. The known 40 column text mode has cells with 6 pixels wide and the usual 24 lines - cells being 8 pixels high. This height could have been lowered to 6 pixels, giving 32 lines of text (=192/6) instead of 24.

 

32x24 = 768 screen locations.

40x24 = 960 (no sprites).

40x32 = 1280 (no sprites).

 

And then we might as well have the

32x32 = 1024 (32 columns and 32 lines, 8 pixels wide and 6 pixels high). This one of course offering sprites !

 

:)

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There is more to the Vulgus font. The arcade game has an 8K ROM just for the characters (not related to the tiles or sprites) and uses 2-bits per pixel, which equates to 512 characters. The character layer is on top and is not affected by sprites or scrolling. The game uses 12-bit color via a 256 color palette ROM.

 

I ripped the color codes and graphics from the coin-op ROMs, and the character sheet is shown below. For characters above 128 I removed the 1-pixel border between the individual characters. Even though most of these do not show up on the screen, they are still defined. Interesting to see lower case characters, and a little boy and girl at locations '^' and '_' (94 and 95).

 

The characters following could be used to animate the player's bullet on the character layer, but I don't see where that happens in the game (the player's bullet is defined in the sprite ROM).

 

The last characters are for the "Vulgus" banner that appears in the middle of the screen during attract mode. This is defined in the character ROM because this banner appears on top of everything else and does not scroll in attract mode. There is also a "Vulgus" defined in the tile ROM for the "how to play" mode where the banner moves.

 

The colors are from the palette ROM and are not necessarily the colors used for various text during game play. In the game you see red text, yellow text, white text, etc. Any character can be displayed with any group of 4 colors from the 256 color palette via a per-character palette select. This image simply uses the palette used to display the "Vulgus" characters during attract mode.

post-24952-0-68979900-1343741866_thumb.png

Edited by matthew180
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Very nice. Thanks. :)

 

There is more to the Vulgus font. The arcade game has an 8K ROM just for the characters (not related to the tiles or sprites) and uses 2-bits per pixel, which equates to 512 characters. The character layer is on top and is not affected by sprites or scrolling. The game uses 12-bit color via a 256 color palette ROM.

 

I ripped the color codes and graphics from the coin-op ROMs, and the character sheet is shown below. For characters above 128 I removed the 1-pixel border between the individual characters. Even though most of these do not show up on the screen, they are still defined. Interesting to see lower case characters, and a little boy and girl at locations '^' and '_' (94 and 95).

 

I would be very surprised if the ROM graphics themselves contain 1-pixel borders. This being the "hardware sprite and hardware layer" era (but very plausible only a few years later when blitting came around). This is what I get using some selected colors and a left to right fill approach.

 

vulgus.png

 

The characters following could be used to animate the player's bullet on the character layer, but I don't see where that happens in the game (the player's bullet is defined in the sprite ROM).

 

Using MAME, it looks like they do get on that character layer.

 

vulgus2.jpg

 

;)

Edited by sometimes99er
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I would be very surprised if the ROM graphics themselves contain 1-pixel borders.

 

Right. What I meant was, I removed "my" 1-pixel border. :-) The ROM data does not have any borders.

 

This is what I get using some selected colors and a left to right fill approach.

 

Yup, that is the correct orientation since the game is a vertical shooter, the graphics are stored in ROM in the orientation they are needed for display. I rotated the graphics for display.

 

Using MAME, it looks like they do get on that character layer.

 

Interesting. What do you use to bring that up? Also what are you using to rip?

 

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