The other day, I was browsing Cloanto’s collection of Kickstart ROMs (as one does), and the screenshots of the in-between Kickstart version 1.4 Alpha 18 caught my eye. The font looked interesting: it was already a sans-serif version, but also didn’t quite look like the 2.0 version of Topaz. Was I hallucinating, or was it an artifact of really bad JPEG compression?

To recap, if you’re not familiar with the Amiga’s system font, Topaz: There’s a serif version in older Kickstart versions and a sans-serif Topaz in the newer Kickstart ROMs (“new” as in 1990):

I whipped up a test program and sure enough, it’s a different font! It even feels like an actual mix of the 1.2 and 2.0 Topaz versions – look at the As, the G and the lowercase f:

Edit: While this was news to me, Topaz 1.4 has been unearthed before – AmigaLove.com user “LocalH” already extracted this “interesting hybrid between 1.3 and 2.x” in a post from February 2021.

On a whim, I turned to other “exotic” Kickstart versions, and a whole rabbit hole opened. Kickstart versions 0.7 and 1.0 also had different Topaz versions, with missing glyphs, weird replacement characters, and accents pointing in the wrong direction!

Edit: In the original post, I referenced Kickstart 1.1 instead of 1.0. They have the same font, but Kickstart 1.0 was the first one with changes in the font bitmaps.

I didn’t notice any subtle changes between the other versions, though (i. e. from 1.2 to 1.3, etc.), so this little animation should™ be complete – the evolution of the Topaz font:

Interactive version (JavaScript required, hover to change):

Version	Topaz 8	Topaz 9
Kickstart 0.7 Kickstart 1.0 Kickstart 1.2 Kickstart 1.4 Kickstart 2.0

ASCII artists will be happy to notice that /, \ and _ are fixtures across all versions! :)

PS: Interesting side note: I ran into an error when trying to load the Workbench under Kickstart 1.4, and would you look at that: A green recoverable alert! And it still said “Guru medititation” while the real guru already used the “Error: x Task: y” scheme! Stunning, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole for now…