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CHARSET.DTA

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Revision as of 01:30, 27 July 2021 by Ligfx (talk | contribs)
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CHARSET.DTA is the font used in Creatures 1 and Creatures 2. It contains 128 characters, matching the standard ASCII text encoding. Creatures 2 additionally has EuroCharset.dta, which contains 256 characters, matching the CP-1252 encoding with support for accented characters common to European languages.

The file format is as follows:

size description
72 bytes Data for a single character - 6 pixels wide, 12 pixels high. It's not clear how pixels are mapped to colors.
... Additional characters (128 total in CHARSET.DTA, 256 total in EuroCharset.dta)
16-bit integer Width when rendered of character at this index. Character data is left-aligned.
... Additional character widths when rendered

Japanese version

There is a hypothesized Japanese font for Creatures 2, which would include katakana in addition to the normal ASCII characters (and use CP-932 encoding internally).

Creatures prototypes

Prototypes prior to Creatures 1 used a different format. CHARSET.DTA contained the same 128 characters, but each was 4 pixels wide and 32 pixels high. Character width information was not included as all characters simply rendered as 4 pixels wide.

size description
32 bytes Data for a single character - 4 pixels wide, 8 pixels high.
... Additional characters (128 total)