Bending the latest #WeeklyTeletextArt prompt “Pirates” a bit to do a little Teletext conversion of Unit A’s famous cracktro from 1988:

…because, you know, software pirates are pirates, too. :)

Source code as editor link, reference.

A propos reference: On Twitter @elkmoose pointed me to the reference’s reference, the box art of Ultima V. Nice, I didn’t know that!

PS: As usual, pixel OCD set in hours after posting and I had to do some adjustments that look 25% better and are 100% invisible to the casual observer… (plus a scrolltext adjustment)

Boring web-dev stuff, yay!

After a little pause of twenty years, I decided to freshen up my favicon foo. All those previews, browser tab headings and search results I’m seeing are giving me the impression that a 16×16-pixel bitmap in an obscure Microsoft file format doesn’t cut it anymore…

At least on my ancient low-dpi desktop, Google Chrome still uses the 16×16 version in its native resolution, and because low-res is cool, this size shall be the starting point.

After handpixelling three versions for the smaller sizes (16×16, 32×32, 64×64) it turned out that I cannot use the 32 px one. For the browser tab icon, Google Chrome will always load the 32×32 version and squish it down to 16×16 pixels if both versions are referenced.

Well, that was fun. Let’s never touch favicons again until 2044.

Hmm, where does this quote come from? I could swear it was a punchline somewhere; was it Arrested Development or the IT Crowd? Simpsons, maybe?

Anyhoo, it’s finally here: I got my copy of Demoscene – the Amiga renaissance, the latest installment of Éditions64’s glamorous demoscene coffee table books.

And we’re in it, with a little feature of Blood Sugar Rises!

It’s a bit weird to be featured with a tongue-in-cheek production, but I’ll take it! In the end, it did win the Revision Amiga demo compo…

Also, the editors understood the assignment (as today’s younglings would put it) and placed it right after Batman Rises, the masterpiece of a demo that was the blueprint for this production. Heh, heh! :)

Randomly stumbled upon this post in the “Amiga Germany” Facebook group the other day: Zerosphere running on the Analogue Pocket!

You can also play Amiga games on the Analogue Pocket just enchantingly well. I had bought Zerosphere from polyplay as a digital version one year ago, and it’s really fun on a handheld as well

I’m taken away by how awesome this looks! And by the fact that they sell Analogue Pocket in cases that match Zerosphere’s title screen. :)

Obligatory shameless plug: Various editions of Zerosphere are available at polyplay.xyz.

This is a little addition to the evolution of the Amiga Topaz font. Surprise! The rabbit hole goes deeper…

Just nine months ago, former Commodore employee Peter Cherna wrote on Hacker News:

I worked at Commodore and was responsible (ish) for the new Topaz for OS 2.0. We had been told to replace Topaz with a sans-serif font, and we replaced it with a font originally called "Clear" that was on one of the Fred Fish disks.

Maybe the font we used was called "Clean", not "Clear".

[…]

"Clean" was the source of the interim font, not of new Topaz.

In the same thread, commenter LocalH (who also posted an extracted Topaz 1.4 font on the AmigaLove.com forums in 2021) adds:

The font "Clean" that's part of the NewFonts package on Fish disk 34 is pretty much identical to the font I've seen that was included in 1.4 prototypes.

Interesting! On a closer look, though, there is no font named “clean” in that specific package, neither in the preview picture nor in the disk contents.

I did however find a clean.font on Fred Fish disk 256, used as an asset in a game called “NameGame”. If you look at the green text, this does look a lot like Topaz 1.4:

It’s hard to tell if this is the original version – was that font specifically created for NameGame and picked up by a Commodore dev? Or has this font has been floating around elsewhere at the time?

There are hints for that:

• DiskMaster2.guide mentions clean.font as a configuration example
• Amiga-Magazin PD 5/93 disk 2 contains an animation program called “CAGS” which comes with clean.font
• Searching for “clean.font” on discmaster.textfiles.com yields 268 results!

Phew! So it’s a mess. There are several incarnations of clean.font, in different sizes and different styles. Apparently a lot of Amiga users thought to themselves: “Let’s chop off those serifs and use it as my clean.font!”

If we look at the preview images provided by discmaster.textfiles.com, we find:

Specimen	Count
	84 occurences
	64 occurences
	21 occurences
	31 occurences
	2 occurences

Lovely!

No, really: Aren’t all these variations a charming testament to the creative do-it-yourself spirit of Amiga users back then? “I like a zero without a slash better!” – “How about a super-slim asterisk?” – “That ß isn’t wonky enough!” etc.

If we go with the most popular version, the lineage from Kickstart 1.2 to the interim 1.4 font may look like this:

A closing fun fact to this little investigation, coming back to the commentary of Peter Cherna:

As I mentioned, we used Clear, maybe with a few mods (ampersand maybe) […]

Hehe, the ampersand & is one of the few characters that hasn’t been altered in any version of clean.font – and neither has the weirdest letter of them all. :)