CHARSET.DTA
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) |