Advent of Fonts 2024

December 2024 sees the fourth year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.

Many will be original designs or significantly-extended (normally at least adding a lower-case) and make it into my ZX Origins the straight ports and conversions are listed here as they are not part of that collection.

Those ports needed a home, so as usual they are presented here.

Day 2 — Indiana Jones Atlantis

Lucas Arts point ‘n click adventures started on the Commodore 64 and Monkey Island took the C64 font with a slight mod to the x-height on ascenders.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis polished that further and introduced a non-bold weight and a tiny map font which I’ve fleshed out here to include lower-case and symbols.

Download Indiana Jones Atlantis fonts

Day 4 — Leander

The side-scroller Leander from Psygnosis bears more than a resemblance to their Shadow of the Beast and while the in-game fonts are okay it’s the title font that really stands out with it’s stylish curves and serif-induced strokes.

Here’s a conversion of the title font with some extra glyphs to round it off.

Download Leander font

Day 5 — IBM 3270

IBM’s 1971 terminal set the stage for “green screen” interfaces for a few decades even long after the addition of a few more colours.

The terminal font is surprisingly stylised for a business machine and it’s reproduced here as best as it can in an 8x8 pixel font with bold variant.

Download IBM 3270 fonts

Day 7 — Hydra

You might recognize Colin Brignall’s 1968 font Revue from Yu Suzuki’s 16-bit 1987 classic After Burner where it was used for the title screen and arcade livery.

Curiously the in-game font is an adaptation of Stop but Atari came through a few years later with a great adaptation of Revue in their 1990 coin-op Hydra.

Download Hydra font

Day 9 — Bomb Jack ZX

Tehkan’s 1984 arcade platformer Bomb Jack was a banger — instantly easy to get into and fun gameplay that was tricky to master.

While the arcade sported the now-famous Atari arcade font Elite System’s 1986 Sinclair Spectrum conversion by Paul Holmes, Andy Williams and Karen Trueman went with a completely custom and rustic font of their own. The upper case letters were later used on Elite’s Scooby-Doo game on both the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum.

Download Bomb Jack ZX font

Day 11 — Yie Ar Kung-Fu 128K

Home ports often neglect the arcade font of the original and the initial ZX Spectrum port of Yie Ar Kung Fu was no exception using the boring Speccy ROM font.

The 128K promoting Stars on the 128 bundle included an 128K only version by Brian Beuken that featured this beautiful and unique brush-stroke full-height font. I created symbols & small-caps lower case in the style.

Download Yie Ar Kung Fu font

Day 13 — Delphine

French software house Delphine produced some fine games in their time from point ‘n click classics to rotoscoped cutting-edge platformers.

This bumper pack contains 4 fonts. A neat wide sans from Future Wars/Operation Stealth, the quirky UI font from Another World, a high-contrast art-deco from Flashback, and a striking bold font from the Genesis version of Shaq Fu!

Download Delphine fonts

Day 15 — Colonization

Sid Meier is a legend in the empire-building sim games world. From Pirates! in 1987 to Civ 6 in 2016 you’d be hard pressed to find anyone else with more great sims under their belt let alone their name in the title.

This pack reproduces three complimentary fonts — a serif, a sans and a mini, all from the 1995 classic Sid Meier’s Colonization.

Download Colonization fonts

Day 17 — Chylos

GEOS is a massively underappreciated piece of computing history providing usable Mac-like UI on 8-bit machines with a fraction of the available power.

It was also home to many great proportional and varied-sized bitmap fonts including this absolute gem found tucked away in a Glenn Holmer’s “Cenbe Font Catalog” PDF. I couldn’t find any information beyond this such as the designer.

Download Chylos font

Day 19 — Rugrats: Time Travelers

This 1999 Game Boy Color game was based on the Nickelodeon kids TV show Rugrats and created by UK software firm Software Creations.

It features a fun, friendly, yet readable font that works very well in the constrained grid.

Download Rugrats: Time Travelers font

Day 21 — Shadow of the Beast (ZX/CPC)

Shadow of the Beast was a gorgeous atmospheric Amiga game that struggled to fit into less powerful machines.

The Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum versions while graphically constrained did however include this gorgeous 8x8 bitmap font.

Download Shadow of the Beast font

Day 23 — Revolution

Revolution Software published some of my favourite point’n click adventures — Beneath a Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress and of course the excellent Broken Sword series (which we deserve a movie or animated show of).

Included here is the fonts to those but alas the Broken Sword font didn’t fit so I took the GBA version which is just a render of OCR-B I think (so not pictured).

Download Revolution fonts

Day 25 — Z88

The Z80-powered Cambridge Z88 was an A4 lightweight portable that has built-in office-style apps and BBC Basic powered by 4xAA batteries for about 20 hours usage.

This pack includes the regular and bold versions of the Z88 font as well as the small font & lesser-used wide/bold font which I extended with lower-case.