The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

They say history repeats itself... This was discussed previously, and someone showed a screen of the Death Egg in Knuckles' LRZ1, but it turned out to be in an area he could only get to with debug mode.

 

Thanks man! I've been messing with the graphics recently and I was about to delete that sprite to free up more tiles. Good thing I asked here though and found this out. I was pretty shocked too, I mean come on, I just found that through dumb luck!

 

You can get there quite easily with Knuckles with no debug mode, super, or any other trickery. There's a path leading onto Sonic's route right at the start, and it's quite deliberate, definitely not a glitch. Then you pretty much only need to follow it straight to get there later in the act.

 

Sad bug that I was disappointed to see back in 1994. My guess is they just offset the BG instead of replacing, but one span wasn't enough as it is repeating.

 

We can always argue these are the remnants of the Death Egg after it exploded

 

Yup, the entire face plate crash landed intact back in Hidden Palace. :specialed:

I'd rather take the "Knuckles is hallucinating" theory over that.

 

So, I was cruising around some sites, and a typeface caught my eye...



I like "Whoa... that's almost dead on the face used in Sonic 2", and I tried, for some time, to investigate it and see what it was called.

After some digging, I found something called Roco:



It's one and the same. This even includes the extra letters not used (J, V, X) in the game.

Some searching later, and today, I came across a digitized version. An author made it as freeware, and only one place had the link to it: a Russian-speaking forum that required registration and at least one post to get the link. I managed to make a slightly-better-than-spam one (you thought I'd actually spam for it), and quickly grabbed the download.

This is exactly it. None of this 'maybe', or 'somewhat similar style' BS. This is the lettering Sonic Team adapted for use in-game.

I do notice, though, that the letters aren't all as square as they're supposed to be. I think it will require some editing in order to be usable for any Sonic-related purposes (say, Sonic 2 HD).

I can provide the TTF (and another that will come as quite the nice surprise) in an edit to this post if there's enough interest in it.

 

Isn't this font, Gaslight closer to the Sonic 2 font?

 

No, actually. Look at the 3's in both. IIRC the 3's (well, one 3, because it was only used once) in the Sonic 2 title cards match the 3 in the Roco font there.

 

Not to mention the A's and the M's.

 

Not only that, but:

- Thin lines are almost invisible (remember, you have to visualize these at 14x14 pixels)
- Several glyphs are much different:

A: not angled properly
M: not angled properly
U: stem is rounded on the left
V: not angled properly
W: not angled properly
Y: stem not straight


Go and play through Sonic 2 yourself. This newly-rediscovered font should be a 1-to-1 match.

 

Here's the font.

 

I tried that one first. Really cruddy-looking, with tons of retarded curves where there shouldn't be.


This is the one that took the effort to track down:

Roco font (with pleasant surprise)

 

Yup, that's spot on:



Only the "1" seems to be a bit different, but whoa :O

 

Only some very minor differences.

Most letters need stretched in a TrueType font editor so that they fit into a square area. Notice how, especially on the T, E, and L, they're taller than they are wide.

I'll have to see what I can do, but it might take some time. I intend this to be as perfect as possible for our community's purposes.

 

Interesting! Wouldn't have thought it was left undiscovered till now.

This is really obvious on the S, too.

 

Well, you did scale down the 1 more than necessary. The numerals on the title cards are bigger than the letters.

 

Obviously what nineko means is that its left bar spans the entire height in the game but ends halfway down in the font.

 

Oh yeah.

Well, it's not like the game artists couldn't have decided to touch up a few characters in the set here and there.

 

Speaking of Sonic 2's zone font, it seems to me that Action 52 uses a font that's similar to the Roco font.



I mean, it's not the same but it is kind of similar.