ZX Origins

June 2008 • 6,734 views • 2 responses

I created many fonts for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum which used 8×8 pixel monospaced fonts much like other 8-bit computers of the time such as the Commodore 64, Atari 400/800/XL/XE, Amstrad CPC and some modes of the BBC Micro.

A number of them were created back in the 80′s and early 90′s right on the Spectrum itself and a number much later in 2005 when I was asked to provide fonts for the excellent BASIN Spectrum-based programming system for Windows.

It is my intention to provide them in a monospaced and proportional versions where possible in a number of bitmap formats including ZX, BDF and Windows FON. I also intend to produce pseudo-scalable TrueType versions of each.

Artistic

Decorative fonts where the imagination ran as wild as 8×8 pixels will allow.

  • Blood Rain rusted-metal or dripping-blood?
  • Broadway
  • Cinemax
  • Dead Forest wilderness adventure
  • Death Metal
  • Eclipse
  • Fresh Box
  • Isofell
  • Pitstop
  • Stars
  • Truffle Shuffle
  • Unwanted Attention
  • Woody Tastic

Outline

  • Bubblegum
  • Little shadow
  • Bubblegum
  • Sinclair Outline
  • Small Outline
  • Square Outline

Reproductions

These are fonts I did not design myself but reproduced from other systems normally from screen-shots.

  • Almost Chicago
  • Amstrad CPC
  • Atari 8-bit
  • BBC Micro
  • Commodore 64
  • Kugel
  • Palm OS
  • Ramona
  • Spectrum
  • Teletext

Sans Serif

  • Chest Burster
  • Envious
  • Nicety
  • OCR-A optical character recognition
  • OCR-B
  • Plotter
  • Plotter 2005
  • Spec5
  • Tall Order

Script

  • Dunny on the Woe
  • First Pass

Serif

Techno

  • Bad 64 Port
  • Computing 60s
  • Datel Tribute
  • Egyptian Mercy
  • Franopix
  • Frontier
  • Insigbyte
  • Magneto
  • Mark of
  • Needlecast
  • Sketcher
  • Specmatic
  • Top Heavy
  • You Square

Traditional

  • Oriental
  • Pixharmonix
  • Unical

2 responses  

  1. roger on March 5th, 2010

    do any of your fonts use push to dump 16 pixels onto speccy screen with one 11 tstate instruciton or do you have to use rst 10? seems a bit of a waste when there are 16 registers with push possibilities! ta ta hope u liked th evids?

  2. Damien Guard on March 5th, 2010

    The fonts are 8×8 not just because of the time it takes to put them on the screen but also because of the low-resolution of the display device.

    16×16 fonts would give a very low text-resolution of 16×12 characters.

    [)amien

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