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If you haven't seen this font or something similar to it by now, you've no doubt been living in a cave for several decades.

Seriously, though, this is one of the variations of that ubiquitous screen font used in numerous console and arcade games of the '80s (and still used, to a lesser extent, even today). The characters in the font are actually derived from screen captures of various Namco games' character sets found at this web site in Japan; specifically, I used the character sets from "Gaplus" and, to a lesser extent, "Legend of the Valkyrie".

As an added bonus, I've added some accented characters and various non-keyboard-accessible punctuation marks which weren't necessarily in the original games' character sets. Pour ceux qui parlent les langues européennes, c'est très important... (For those of you who'd prefer Japanese characters, Genshichi Yasui's site has some great offerings; it's finally back up at a new address as of November 2003.)

2 March 2001 - Now includes an alternate version, "Press Start K", based on the version of this font used for status messages in Steve Snake's quite awesome Kega emulator. The main differences are in the lowercase and some of the punctuation.

[Font Sample]

Download the "Press Start" font! [ PC | Mac ]

Brings back some memories, doesn't it? Yes, this is the font used in the console mode of myriad old computers; indeed, it can be found buried within the ROMs of video cards even today, but so few programs call upon it anymore (and with good reason, considering the much higher resolutions available!) that it's been more or less forgotten... until now.

Yes, I know such fonts as E. A. Behl's "Video Terminal Screen" exist, but that particular font is a conversion of the default 8x16 VGA font. I wanted to go back even further to the long-forgotten but nostalgia-inducing 8x8 font used on CGA cards (and, for that matter, in the 320x240 graphics mode on VGA adapters), but I hadn't seen a TrueType version of that font around anywhere, so I decided I'd create one myself.

Background information: This font was converted using Softy and Font Creator Program from character bitmaps found on the Internet, including a public-domain Windows bitmap font which can be downloaded below.

And yes, the name is a pun on IBM's PC Jr, now a veritable dinosaur of a computer...

Updated 24 September 2001 - Version 1.0. Finally contains some characters from the 128-255 set. Yay. (Incidentally, I'm mapping the higher characters to their locations in the Windows/Mac ISO character set rather than the old and rather outdated DOS code page; however, I may release another version with that character set if there's enough demand.)

Download the "PC Senior" font! [ PC | Mac ]
Download the original PC8x8 bitmap font on which this was based.

This is, of course, the font from Squaresoft's classic Super Nintendo RPG Secret of Mana.

I chose the name because at the time, more and more games (such as Zelda 3, for instance) were gravitating toward the use of proportionally-spaced fonts to display dialogue, but Secret of Mana still used a monospaced font (albeit a newly and nicely designed one) to display its text.

Download the Manaspace font! [ PC | Mac ]

Yet another retro video game font for your typographic pleasure. Be sure to check out these glyphs for some nifty special characters: # * @ ^ ` ~

Updated 21 October 2001 - Version 1.01. In the original version I had accidentally swapped the single and double "smart quotes" around; it's been fixed now.

Download the Return of Ganon font! [ PC | Mac ]

Ever use Electronic Arts' DeluxePaint II for Amiga or MS-DOS? If so, you probably recognize this somewhat distinctive bitmap font from its menus and dialogs. The capital Y, among certain other characters, is quite unusually shaped...

Download DeluxeFont! [ PC | Mac ]

NEW! 28 July 2003 Another of the fonts from that old abandonware workhorse DeluxePaint II. Fans of the Unicorn Jelly comic strip might recognize this one...

Download DPComic! [ PC | Mac ]

Soulblazer. Illusion of Gaia. And of course, the elusive Terranigma. What do they have in common? Besides being quite awesome Super Nintendo RPGs, they all used this font for their dialogue, of course.

As for the rather unusual font name? I discovered, while trying to glean the character bitmaps for this font, that Illusion of Gaia was re-titled Illusion of Time when it was released in Europe. That, of course, made me think of a certain quote from early on in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes, I know I'm an utter geek, thank you...

Download the Lunchtime Doubly So font! [ PC | Mac ]

Another video game font, converted to TrueType format by yours truly. For those who don't recognize it, this is the font used to render the dialogue of those cuddly little alien creatures named Mr. Saturn in Earthbound, a cult classic RPG for Super Nintendo.

Though this is a TrueType font, the characters are actually bitmapped. Hey, it preserves the original character shapes (not to mention the video game "feel" of the font), and at 12 points it works quite well as a screen font. If you really want a scalable version, there's one available at Starmen.net which was apparently redrawn by hand...

Goes well with Orange Kid from Larabie Fonts (the regular Earthbound dialogue font), natch...

Download the Señor Saturno font! [ PC | Mac ]

NEW! 30 July 2003 Remember Donkey Kong Country for SNES? Then you'll probably remember having seen this pixel font in Cranky Kong's rants on how good games used to be...

Download Kongtext! [ PC | Mac ]

NEW! 30 July 2003 Ever want to use that rather cartoonish screen font from Yoshi's Island in your Flash animations, Photoshopped images, or printed publications? Probably not. Still, here it is anyway. ::grin::

Download Yoster Island! [ PC | Mac ]

...has been moved onto a separate page.

Collaborations with Others

I've also helped optimize, convert, or tweak fonts that other designers have created. Here are links to some of the sites where I've helped out:

Tepid Monkey [link goes to 1001fonts, since tepidmonkey.com has expired] - tweaked version of the November font, based on the Amiga Workbench system font
Secrets of the Seven Stars - conversion of the Mario RPG bitmap font to Windows TrueType format

Last, but not least, I've decided to make the script for my Font Previewer freely available as of 12 December 2002, having been able to find no other such scripts readily available for download. If you're interested in offering a font preview feature on your own web site and if your web host supports PHP, simply download the PHP Font Previewer source code here and customize it to your liking.

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