One of the things that I always found interesting about the 8-bit era of computers is the difference in every machine's system font that either helped, or hurt, the readability of the text on the screen.

Because nearly all computers used an 8-pixel high font, each computer's designers had to choose whether to make their upper-case characters either 6 or 7 pixels high, depending upon whether they wanted the character shapes to look nicer (by using 7-pixel height), or whether they wanted to avoid the descenders of the "gpqy" characters hitting the tops of many upper-case characters on the line below (by using 6-pixel height).

One of the unusual, and really great, things about the Enterprise is that it has a 9-pixel high system font that could have allowed it to use both the nicer 7-pixel height for upper-case characters, and to still avoid the unpleasant look of having descenders hit the top of the upper-case characters on the line below.

Unfortunately, whoever it was at Intelligent Software that designed the font, didn't actually do that ... which is something that I always found annoying when I was using my Enterprise back in the 1980s.


Now that I am using EXOS 2.4, and can program my own EXOS EPROM, I decided to fix that, and to also modify a few other characters to make them look a little nicer (in my own personal opinion).


Long time Enterprise programmers will probably already know that the system font is stored compressed in the EXOS ROM, so I had to figure out how this worked, and then figure out how to patch the code to alter the compression a bit, and to then compress the new font into the same 630 byte memory space that the old font fits in ($E5D2-$E847 in EXOS 2.1).


Anyway, here is the result, showing the original EXOS 2.1 font on the left, and my updated font on the right.  The changes are easiest to see on the Hungarian version of Zozo's RAM test, but the Spanish and German versions also look better (to me).



Since "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", I understand that few people here may be interested in using this themselves, but if anyone is curious, I can post the source code for font-decoding patch, and for the utility that I wrote (on the PC) to apply the patch (and the font) to Zozo's EXOS 2.4 ROMs.

For editing bitmapped-fonts, I recommend that folks use Fony, because it is easy to use, and can export the font as raw binary data.

But... the character font goes on the keyboard driver, and the BRD.Rom and derivatives install modified Keyboard and Editor drivers, that come with an English(USA) and localised copies of the font... fortunately not packed.

Thanks, I had not checked out the BRD.rom/ESP.rom/HUN.rom language extensions, and so didn't see that they changed some characters in the font!

But those language ROMs don't actually redefine all of the characters in the font, they rely on the base font that is built into EXOS, and then they change just a few of the character definitions.

So it will be easy to modify those three language ROMs and just define different character designs that take advantage of the lower baseline in my modified font ... it is probably only a few hours of work.

So it will be easy to modify those three language ROMs and just define different character designs that take advantage of the lower baseline in my modified font ... it is probably only a few hours of work.

Done!

I'll send you a PM with some ROMs to try.

And here are the latest font files ...

Although there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in this (judging from the lack of comments), assembly-language programmers might be interested in seeing the EXOS font decompression code, and my modifications to it, so here it is.
 

Very cool. Some really nice looking tweaks to the font.

You talk about patching Zozo's rom in this thread. Did you know you can patch roms directly from sjasm using the INCBIN and CODE directives? I've successfully used this to make a custom EXOS 2.1 rom before.

Very cool. Some really nice looking tweaks to the font.

Thanks!

You talk about patching Zozo's rom in this thread. Did you know you can patch roms directly from sjasm using the INCBIN and CODE directives? I've successfully used this to make a custom EXOS 2.1 rom before.

I'm used to doing that on the PC Engine, and I had seen that sjasmplus supports it, but I'm not using it yet because the fonts need to be processed before they are imported, and the EXOS ROM needs to have its checksum recalculated after the patching is done, so it was easier to write a quick C program to do the work.

Yes, on a German Ep, the Language Rom is on the cartridge so, on some circumstances the internal font doesn't match the keyboard...