Guide 2 – Creating A Font Pack – By Shaun Nichol

This procedure will work for any game but is VERY time consuming. The best advice I can give is run the game you want to rip from using an emulator and play through it trying to find where the most letters appear. Any game that has scoreboard where the player put initials or an extensive option screen are better for copying letters and numbers from. 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 the game you want to create a font pack from. For this example I’m going to use Road Rash within Genecyst. The main reason for this game is that it has a password entry screen so can display all its letters and numbers at once. Some emulators allow taking of screen dumps; Genecyst doesn’t so I have to press the “PrtSc” button on the keyboard and paste within Paint Shop Pro. This is the image I have with all the letters displayed.

2.                  With the image displayed within Paint Shop Pro, change the background colour to something neutral. I’m going to change this to green.

3.                 Open Font.gif from the “Sprites” folder of your Beats of Rage mod and display it within the same Paint Shop Pro screen. If there are any colour issues, it’s best to correct them now. For example, black may not be exactly 0,0,0. Change this before we start copying.

4.                  With both fonts displayed onscreen, check that the letter size match where you are copying to. The screendump below shows that they are not the same.

5.                  To correct this problem, select the screen dumped image and click on “Image” at the top of the screen. From the drop down list, select “Resize”. This will display the resize window.

6.                  Through trial and error, change the pixel dimensions until the letter size is appropriate to the height used within font.gif. In this example I change the linked width and height to 50%. Now with both fonts displayed onscreen, slowly copy the selected letter 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.

7.                  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. For example you could add a black outline around the letter to make them stand out a little better.

8.                  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 top left of the palette shown in the screendump. Use the “Colour Replacer” to do this.

9.                  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 instead of blue, I’m gonna use red.

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

11.             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 the fonts to white and grey. You can see this image below: -

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

13.             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).

14.             The last image needing to be modified is font4.gif. This is the most difficult set of fonts to collect, as most games won’t display every letter of their big fonts. When playing through the game your using for fonts, try and notice when big letters appear. Most noticeable for these is at game over & continue points. For big numbers, use a game that has a timer and screen dump each number as it appears. When dumping big letters, the main ones to find are G.A.M.E.O.V.R.S.T.C.M.P.L.T. All other letters are secondary and not necessarily needed.

15.             With enough letters dumped from the game, use this procedure again to copy the letters individually from the screen dumps to font4.gif. With the image complete, save font4.gif and run your mod. You should now have a new set of working fonts. Hopefully there weren’t any problems.

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!!