Looking for exact fonts from Golden Sun GBA

[Triyence]

Anyone have an exact font sheet of the regular and italic fonts in Golden Sun? I found a couple fonts online but there are characters that don't actually match the game and I'd like the exact characters.

[Rolina]

Whoa, deja vu...  I did the same thing, but for DD's.

Not sure, but Atrius might have something?  Dunno - he uses it for the editor, though.

[Atrius (He/Him)]

I used a bitmap version of the font, I'm not sure if anyone ever made a windows compatible font out of it.

Small font:


I can't seem to find my file of the larger font right now...

[Triyence]

Thanks Atrius, do you happen to have the italic font as well? The italic font doesn't seem to show up in the tile editor, not really sure why since the normal font does.

Nevermind, I was able to extract the italic font from the 'New Game' screen. Thanks Atrius.

[Atrius (He/Him)]

Sorry I was late with it, I still can't find the file since it was on my previous computer.  As I recall the font was stored as 1-bit per pixel, so trying to read it with the same settings as the other font would have failed since it was... 4-bit I think?...  It was definitely higher.  I want to say the italic font was at around 0x08682000 in The Lost Age... Maybe, maybe not, that may have been the location of the small font...   Either way each character of the font is stored as 16x16 pixels for 32 bytes per character with the first byte's value being the width of the character (The first 8 pixels are always blank)

EDIT:
Found it.  No shadow cause that's generated by code in-game.

[Rolina]

Geez, I'd love to have the shadow generated by the font itself if made into a windows font...  Wish I know how to do any of that.  I have the sets for DD fonts, after all (just not in BMP format).

[Atrius (He/Him)]

I don't think you can since you wouldn't be able to color it black and the letters white.  Fonts are designed to be one solid color by default.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

One solid color? How come when I zoom in on some fonts (Like this one, the text being used for posts) I can notice 2+ colors? (I did print screen and pasted in paint.net.)

In the attachment, you can see red appearing to left of black, and blue appearing to right of black... usually.

[Atrius (He/Him)]

It has to do with the way the text is anti-aliased to make it appear smoother, see Subpixel rendering.  The font doesn't contain color information to make that happen, it's just the way they get rendered.  Typically modern fonts on computer are stored in a vector format that only describes the shape of each character.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Oh. Anti-aliased... yeah, I think I remember some feature Paint.NET has for that, but never paid much mind into figuring out how that worked.

So? We have old fonts, and modern fonts? Is there even a special font type that would make it possible to do multiple colors? (If there was, I expect it to be rarely used.... so I guess it's worth investigating..)

Either way, at least we know GS shadowing and anti-aliased seem comparable in that coding applies the changes. (Any way to replace "anti-aliased" with "shadowing" in any case?)

[Atrius (He/Him)]

There are font types that can contain color information.  I don't know what they are off the top of my head, but they do exist.

Let's see if this works...

Normal text can be rendered with a shadow.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

There are font types that can contain color information.  I don't know what they are off the top of my head, but they do exist.

Let's see if this works...

<style>.test-shadow {
color: #FFFFFF;
text-shadow: #000000 1px 1px;
}</style>
<p class="test-shadow">Normal text can be rendered with a shadow.</p>

Cool!, but the HTML tag isn't available for regular members.  Any chance we'll have the option to use the GS font as a font for our posts in these forums? :) (And would it work as the default font, I don't know?) (I think it gets the font from the user, but I'm not sure if there is a more automated way of doing it... for those who don't actually want the font.)

[Rolina]

What if you use a shadow with the font?  Something that isn't solid, but has transparency?

[Atrius (He/Him)]

I don't think you can specify transparency either in most standard font formats, it's considered too expensive computationally.  Remember, they can be used to display thousands of characters on screen at once and have to work on the most under-powered computers.  Quick and simple were the key when designing how fonts work.

I don't really see us using a shadowed font on the forums for the same reason, it would be too much for people that are still stuck with crappy computers.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

I don't really see us using a shadowed font on the forums for the same reason, it would be too much for people that are still stuck with crappy computers.

It could still be part of the special effects feature that allows for falling snowflakes? (Although, if it's even worse than that, then I guess I don't know...)

Um? Isn't transparency mostly additive? (Depending on filter type), so if we already have anti-aliasing (Which I believe uses semi-transparency pixels.)... then I'm trying to figure out how that's a big difference.... as far as cpu cost goes.... but maybe I forgot to consider something.

(Now that I think about it, I would like some statistics showing how fast a screen refresh is with and without transparency. And whether the difference is faster or slower than a screen refresh by itself.)

[Atrius (He/Him)]

I'm by no means an expert on how fonts specifically work, but my experience with graphics programming in general has taught me that more transparent pixels = more calculations.  Consider this, to turn a pixel gray all you have to do is write a known value #808080 to it's location memory.  To turn a pixel gray with 50% transparency, you have to read the value currently at that location in memory, perform math to calculate the new color of that pixel, then write that color back to the location in memory.

This calculation looks like:
(Current Red value * transparency) + (New Red value * (1-transparency))
(Current Blue Value * transparency) + (New Blue Value * (1-transparency))
(Current Green value * transparency) + (New Green value * (1-transparency))

Those are a lot of extra operations compared to just overwriting 3 bytes in memory.

Isn't transparency mostly additive?

What?  Maybe I'm missing your definition of additive here, but that seems like the opposite what you want when talking about shadows.  True enough anti-aliasing uses transparency, and since it's likely that individual characters in the font would be pre-rendered to increase performance any transparency would be handled in a similar way.  Still, implementations differ so it's hard to make generalizations like that, and again more transparent pixels = more calculations pretty much no matter how you look at it.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

@additive:

Paint.NET => Layer Properties => Blending Mode => Set to additive... ; Well, I looked at that one as the primary example... so I probably should not have said "mostly." :/  (Adding is faster than multiplying, right?) And assumed.... adding black (#000000) to a color wouldn't change the color at all, while higher values add to the value. And yes, I noticed the GBA separates colors into R G B like that once for the calculation, but I forgot to check if we are multiplying by a transparency value or not. Edit: Wait, I vaguely remember something called Intensity! for R, G, and B.

And yes, more calculations... But it's likely that removing operations with + and - and of the like would probably be considered micro-optimizations, rather than macro-optimizations? (Unless maybe it's in a huge For event or something... Say maybe 10 million loops or more? And if the equation is only used when it's actually being displayed, do remember that it is also likely that crappy computers have smaller display resolutions as well.)

Just remembered something about graphics memory being faster than RAM memory? Try looking up GDDR5, if you want.

[Rolina]

I don't think you can specify transparency either in most standard font formats, it's considered too expensive computationally.  Remember, they can be used to display thousands of characters on screen at once and have to work on the most under-powered computers.  Quick and simple were the key when designing how fonts work.

I don't really see us using a shadowed font on the forums for the same reason, it would be too much for people that are still stuck with crappy computers.

Using it for an art program, on the other hand, I could see as hella handy...

[Atrius (He/Him)]

Using it for an art program, on the other hand, I could see as hella handy...

True enough, doesn't seem like there's been much advancement in that regard as far as standard font formats go though.  There have been proposals to extend them to add color information and more, but as far as I'm aware none of it has been officially implemented yet.

Just remembered something about graphics memory being faster than RAM memory? Try looking up GDDR5, if you want.

Not all computers have dedicated graphics memory though, it's not something you should count on.  Speaking of millions of calculations, even if you're using an underpowered netbook it's likely to be at least 1024x600 resolution, meaning 786432 pixels x 3 color channels = 2.3 million operations minimum, so yes micro-optimizations when rendering graphics are still very relevant.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Perhaps, but I was just saying how it seemed like Graphics was taken more seriously than RAM when comparing speeds. (Or at least, from what it sounded like... I never fully researched everything.)

1024 * 600 = 614400 ; 786432 comes from? (Although, it's not like the entire screen will contain text 100% of the time, and text is usually static on the screen, and not moving/animating..., I find marquees hard to read, anyway.)

How many operations can a 10 year old computer do in one second? Without the answer to a question like that, it's hard to compare... It's like having a numerator or denominator, and leaving out the other number.
(Anyway, I think one second is the ideal loading time for a web page? But for a "crappy computer,"/"crappy internet" we should expect several more seconds...) ; If a computer was so old it could barely lift a finger, might as well view plain-text documents? (Turn off Java/Javascript/Images/etc.) Or sell the old computer, and buy a new computer/device that is a cheap price.

Just for the record, does anyone actually know anyone who still uses a 10+ year old computer, and who does not also have access to a more modern computer? ; If it was used on a daily basis, I assume eventually the mother board or something else would die out, and they'd end up being best off getting a new compy. I'm waiting for the day that the average laptop computer no longer needs a noisy fan, hot heat-sink, nor charger.... But I think that'll be a long time from now. Can I take a random guess and hope for the next 20 years?  (I feel doubtful, though.) ; (@nor charger: For example, a charger could be replaced with something like a solar panel? It's likely the price of solar panels are going down. And even if that got in the way, well, I can still wait for something else.)