Edit: If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s an update to this little saga.
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!
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 |
|---|---|---|
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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…
