Guide 1 – Creating A Font Pack Using Mame – By Shaun Nichol

This procedure works for Ghouls ‘N’ Ghosts so I would imagine this works for a lot more games too. The instructions will work perfectly for anyone using Paint Shop Pro 8. I’m not sure how to Photoshop works so cannot help with anyone having problems with that.

1.                  Start mame32 and make sure it sees the rom that you want to create a font pack from.

2.                  Right click on the rom and select properties

3.                  Within the advanced tab untick “Stretch using hardware”.

4.                  Click “Ok” and load up the game. Wait until the rom has loaded, then press F4 to display the pallet. It should look like this on screen: -

5.                  Press the -> cursor key to display the first GFXSet.

6.                  By pressing the page down and page up keys you can scroll through the different sprites, hopefully near the bottom will be any fonts used within the game. If not, press the -> cursor key to move to a bigger set of sprites and scroll through them. Here is the font as it appears in this rom: -

7.                  Before taking a snapshot of the letters and numbers, press the up and down cursor keys to display different colour formats. With the desired colour displayed, press the F12 key to save that image.

8.                  With the fonts now saved within the “Snap” folder where Mame32 is installed, enter the directory and open the image with “Paint Shop Pro”.

9.                  The first thing to do is change the black colour around the letters to a neutral colour, blue for this example. Use the “Colour Replacer” tool to do this.

10.             Now that colour has been changed, the slightly black colour around the fonts wants to be pure black 0,0,0. Use the “Colour Replacer” to do this too.

11.             Now that the colours have been modified, remove the garbage around the letters to leave them the only parts shown on the image. Just like the image below: -

12.             Now that the image is ready to use, open Font.gif from the “Sprites” folder within your Beats of Rage mod.

13.             With both fonts displayed onscreen, slowly copy each letter one by one from the first image to the font.gif image. You can do this by dragging around the letter, pressing control and C, then in the second image, press control and E to paste. Then drag the letter to its proper place.

14.             Do this with every letter and number till all are changed to the new set. Don’t worry if you cannot replace the hash and other signs as they aren’t used as far as I can tell. At this point you can modify the numbers to look a little better. You may notice that I’ve added a black shadow around the lowercase letters as the Ghouls ‘N’ Ghosts letter didn’t originally have outlines.

15.             With the font.gif fonts nearly complete, the last thing to do is to alter the colours to fit with the Beats of Rage palette. First, change the background colour to the 0 colour which is at the topleft of the palette shown in the screendump. Use the “Colour Replacer” to do this.

16.             Before we save this image, we have to change the colour of the letters too. When ripping sprites, its always best to change the colours afterwards as usually, Beats of Rage will have trouble displaying every colour used in the original image. I’m going to replace the colours with ones chosen from the palette but are close to the original colours.

17.             Font.gif is now complete, save this image in the “Sprites” folder. This image should also be saved as font3.gif aswell.

18.             Before we close this image we need to create a font2.gif. This font image is used as the selector within the main menu. This can be created very easily by using the “Colour Replacer” to replace the two colours of my fonts to white and grey colours. You can see this image below: -

19.             Now that the image is ready, save this image as font2.gif into the “Sprites” folder.

20.             If you followed this procedure, you should now be halfway to creating a full font pack. You should run your mod and see how the fonts look, then fix whatever problems arise, there shouldn’t be any (hopefully lol).

21.             The last image needing to be modified is font4.gif. By opening the rom and viewing the sprites, you “might” be able to find bigger fonts that may be useable. If not, you will have to follow my 2^nd Guide, which describes the long process of ripping sprites from the game as they happen. This rom won’t work with the 2^nd guide as you couldn’t find the bigger fonts within the sprite list so another game may have to be used with fonts that would work with the smaller set.

22.             If you can find bigger fonts within the rom, save the image of the fonts and follow this procedure again, modify the font4.gif letters and numbers. By viewing the image below you should see how it would look. Run your mod again and the new look should be complete J

This guide has been created by Shaun Nichol, if you have any queries or problems regarding this guide. Please email me at predator002@hotmail.com. Thanks!! See ya!!