24 ZX Spectrum Fonts
14/03/2020At some point in the Speccy's lifetime it suddenly became uncool to just stick to the gorgeous default font that was bestowed upon us in the ROM. If your game didn't have a fancy font it wasn't worth playing... Apparently!
I recently reached the point in my journey of rediscovery where I needed a new font, but I have the design skills of a new born cucumber! A quick google search and I found some lovely fonts created by a mysterious individual called EPTO.
These fonts were not created specifically for the ZX Spectrum and had a range of sizes, there were however a good selection of 8x8 fonts which I have converted into something the Speccy can understand.
Within the archive I have provided asm files for you to copy and paste into your own stuff, bin files (generated with org of 64000) and some demo tap files as well the images on this very page.
Assuming you've got one of the bin files onto tape you can use it with the following code:
10 CLEAR 63999 20 LOAD ""CODE 64000 30 POKE 23607,249 40 PRINT "Boobies!" 50 GOTO 40
Alternatively if you're using the ZXBASIC compiler you can embed the ASM like so:
fontdata: ASM ; pasted asm here END ASM POKE 23607,(@fontdata-256)/256 POKE 23606,@fontdata-256*(@fontdata/256) PRINT "Hello!"
Some of the fonts have some characters missing or a different character in place of what you would expect to find, but all in all I think EPTO has done a wonderful job and I thank them for their hard work.
You can download the zip archive right here (91k) and if you're on the github please give EPTO's repository a nice little star!