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Star Raiders Font/Text wanted!


SoundGammon

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How complete is the font in the original ROM? I guess it's highly likely to only contain the needed characters, numbers & symbols, probably not even a full 1K.

 

There's a lot of the "Computer" or "MICR Ink" type fonts that are "close", but not quite, especially when comparing the "K" character in the screensot above...

 

Here's a quick reference catalogue I made up in the past from the github repo as per @asommer:

 

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46 minutes ago, Nezgar said:

How complete is the font in the original ROM? I guess it's highly likely to only contain the needed characters, numbers & symbols, probably not even a full 1K.

 

There's a lot of the "Computer" or "MICR Ink" type fonts that are "close", but not quite, especially when comparing the "K" character in the screensot above...

 

Here's a quick reference catalogue I made up in the past from the github repo as per @asommer:

 

The character set is about 1K in both the 8-bit and the 5200. Best to replace it as a "set" so everything is in the right place. I saw a couple of interesting fonts from the link above, but surprised there was no TRON set! I have a Compute disk in my collection that lets one make their own character/font set that has it. I believe it has a view mode that lets you see what it will look like in different graphic modes. Here's a screen shot of my custom 5200 font: 

5200 PolePosition.jpg

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Just now, SoundGammon said:

The character set is about 1K in both the 8-bit and the 5200.

Indeed it is exactly 1K. 1024 bytes. But when used in the Graphics 1/2 modes it only uses half of it, 512 bytes... hence my pondering if there's actually 1KB of character set in the 8KB star raiders ROM - there's not much wiggle room in that ROM. ROM space could be saved by copying only certain characters out to a RAM location for CHBAS....

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I think the programmer did custom characters for the letters. The same way the guys that did the 5200 version of Baseball, note the 0! Also holds the same for Centipede. In my custom rom for the 5200, River Raids far right 0 is actually eye-candy! It's just put there to make the score look bigger! I got M.U.L.E. on cart for the 5200 and only some of the character set is used from the original system rom!

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4 hours ago, tsom said:

The custom font is defined in the source code here:

https://github.com/lwiest/StarRaiders/blob/2c7741941f2f821ead8f1f3025fce8c95f73b446/StarRaiders.source.asm.txt#L2641

 

There's only a handful of redefined characters.

Ah yep! cool. Loading the ROM into Omnivore, we can see those defined characters at the beginning of the binary.

star-raiders-font.thumb.png.d9527448b4b1712bef9c809587ef0684.png

 

Also, we can see in the code where CHBASE is set to use it:

Symbols:
02270 CHBASE          = $D409                           ; Character set base address (high byte)
02274 ROMCHARSET      = $E000                           ; ROM character set
02683 CHARSET                                           ;*** Custom character set ******************************************************

VBI Handler:
04048                 LDA #>ROMCHARSET        ; Switch character set to ROM character set
04049                 STA CHBASE              ;

In the DLI Handler:

04097 ; This subroutine is executed during the Display List Interrupt (DLI). It
04098 ; switches the character set to the ROM character set if the DLI occurs at ANTIC
04099 ; line 96 (video line 192), otherwise to the custom character set. The former
04100 ; happens in the Galactic Chart view where the ROM character set is used in the
04101 ; Galactic Chart Panel Display.

04114                 LDA #>ROMCHARSET        ; Switch to ROM charset if ANTIC line counter = 96
04115                 LDY VCOUNT              ; ...else switch to custom character set
04116                 CPY #96                 ;
04117                 BEQ SKIP047             ;
04118                 LDA #>CHARSET           ;
04119 SKIP047         STA CHBASE              ;

So.... I guess you could simply load your "replacement" character set into some other 1K-aligned location in RAM, and repoint the symbol for "ROMCHARSET" wherever it occurs. :)

 

Looks like it's at offset 0x0573 in the binary: 99 ee 00 ( STA $00ee,Y )

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Just a few hours ago I was thinking about firing up Envision again, and do a font. Just for fun :) Should I try this one?

 

Edit: OK, started working on it. Upper case is done. Working on lower case now. Stay tuned ;)

Edited by ivop
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1 minute ago, ivop said:

 

microreg.thumb.png.4747c1bd2eeb0e4f4c94a48fe611a5b0.png

 

Version 5 already :)  Top two lines are done, and all lower case characters. Rest is left alone. Kept as close to the Micr-Font-Regular as possible, except for the X. That one really looked horrible. Like an H.

 

Now there's 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 I would like to upgrade, too ;)

 

micrreg5.fnt 1 kB · 1 download

Like it! Thanks!

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Version 6. Not 100% true to the original anymore, but better numerals IMHO, and still in the same style.

 

micrreg6.thumb.png.ab148fb4db5cff049f60dbd6e5b2aa3a.png

 

The # and * were not defined in the original font. Not sure about the asterisk, but I like my slanted hash sign ;)

Also note that the only difference between () and [] is the height of the bracket, as per the original font.

micrreg6.fnt

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