It all depends on the game. Most old DOS games use their own custom fonts, where each letter is a bitmap. Who knows how they store it? How big is each file? Have you tried opening them in a hex editor to see what's in them?

There are resource viewers out there for some games, but even if you are able to extract them, they will not be in TTF format. They will most likely be in a raster format and not a vector format. I haven't looked in a long time, but there used to be programs like ScanFont that you could create TTFs from scanned images.

[Moved to Milliways Section]

actually in a lot of dos games the letters/numbers are stored in a single graphic file
most fonts in dos games will look like this

I'll look for a hex editor and see what I can find. I've considered trying to get image shots of each character and creating a font with those, but I'm not looking forward to all that work if there's an easier and more complete way of getting all the characters. Maybe one of these files, or another file, will turn out to be a graphic like Davros suggested.

Time to search for a hex editor and Scanfont (or a similar program)...

Given that the game was released for the Amiga at the same time, I reckon some of the graphics might be in the extremely common IFF/LBM format.

Try opening each of the files in IrfanView, and see if anything gets recognized.

Hello.

I've tried to use IrFanView, as suggested to see which file, if any, were possible graphic files. Of the four files I listed, one has the most promise: TOSFONT.OBT, as it states the following when I open it:

Warning !

The file: "TOSFONT.OBT" is a WMF file with
incorrect extension !

Rename ? YES or NO

However, no matter if I choose YES or NO, I get this message:

TOSFONT.wmf : Decode error!

Invalid or unsupported Metafile file. (save bugs)

When I say YES, it changes the file's icon into a MS Paint graphic file. But when I try to open it, I get this:

Paint cannot read this file.
This is not a valid bitmap file, or its format is not currently supported.

WMF is a "Windows Metafile File", which apparently has to do with vector graphics. So after reading some other forum posts on IrFanView about similar problems, someone suggested using Inkspace, a free vector graphics program. But I get this when I open tosfont.obt:

Failed to load the requested file

I may try to ask about file compatibilities for IrFanView, Inkscape, and even MS Paint, but those ultimately might not work.

I might have better luck opening it with MS Word, as .OBT could be a "Office Binder Template" file. MS Word used to have an old binder program which bundled Word, Excel and other Office programs together in one file. But I'm not sure if I have an older version of Word lying around.

I'll let you know what I find out.

Thanks,
winebaron

No, no, no, there is very little probability that this file is actually a WMF file. IrfanView is mistaken.

In fact, that gives me a much better idea: you should try TrID. This is a program that looks really, really hard at the contents of a file and will give you a percentage probability of what file type it is. If this game is in fact using file formats that could be opened by some other program, TrID will tell you.

I've tried TrID and, at first, it kept telling me that all four files were unknown.

However, I luckily noticed that there was an online TrID feature. It came up with this for TOSFONT.OBT:

-----
File size: 3KB

Match Ext File type Related URL Def's author
90,0% CEL Lumena CEL bitmap (63/63) Marco Pontello
10,0% CEL Autodesk FLIC Image File (extensions: flc, fli, cel) (7/3) Alex Paven
The .cel extension is used much less often than the others.
-----

So, it appears to be a graphic file after all. But, I don't know if Lumena and/or Autodesk is around anymore (or what they are, for that matter). From what I can tell, Corel Painter may have absorbed this previous Time Arts software program.

If I can't open/view it in this way, I'm hoping that MS Word's binder program will show me something useful. I wish that I could post the file, as it is only 3KB, but I'll see if I can post a link to it somehow.

I'll keep trying...

Thanks,
winebaron

winebaron wrote:

I've tried TrID and, at first, it kept telling me that all four files were unknown.

If the online TrID worked but not the offline, then you were using it wrong. Perhaps you forgot to download the definitions file?

Anyway, Autodesk Animator FLIC animations were extremely common back in the day, and a bit of Googling suggests that .CEL is actually identical in format to a FLIC animation. A bit of Googling suggests that Media Player Classic should be able to open FLIC animations.

So, try opening this OBT file with Media Player Classic. Maybe that will do it. (It is actually a bit surprising that Irfanview can't do anything with it. Did you download IrfanView's format plugins?)

And give up on Microsoft Binder. That is just plain ridiculous.

This is what FONT.ADT contains:

Care to share how you got that into PNG format?

Was I right or was I right 😁

I wrote a small QBasic program that I ran in DOSBox and then I made a screenshot.

But it's also possible to open the file with Wombat and then selecting the Data view tab and then selecting the VGA mode and for width and height using the values 8 and 8. Easy isn't it? 😉

Oops, I forgot about Wombat.

Yes, Davros -- you called it. 😀 Nicely done, Calvero.

However, what is shown in the graphic (from the FONT.ADT file) is not the same font style as in the game. The "a" and "s" are wrong, for starters. Here's an example image:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

I remember reading that in order for the images in Darkseed to get the proper look that H.R. Giger wanted, each image was shaded and colored individually -- otherwise, they'd never appear correctly in DOS. Perhaps this applies to the font in some way. TOSFONT.OBT may still have what I need. Could FONT.ADT be simply a list of all the characters that they used? If so, I don't recall ever seeing the # or other weird characters in the game.

For fun, I tried TrID again and I did forget the plugins. What I got for FONT.ADT now is:

Warning: file seems to be plain text/ASCII
TrID is best suited to analyze binary files!

Funny stuff. But still, nothing new for TOSFONT.OBT except for the (63/63) and (7/3) that I added to my original post above. I also ran the files through IrFanView, with updated plugins, and it still didn't help. That's odd.

I'll keep digging.

Thanks,
winebaron

This grows tiresome. I shall have a look myself.

FONT.ADT is just a text file. It is functionally equivalent to ASCII art.

Furthermore, even XnView, which explicitly states it is capable of opening Lumena CEL files - whatever those are - is not capable of deriving useful information from TOSFONT.OBT. If the developers did in fact use something like that format for that particular file (as TrID suggests), it would seem they have done something to it that makes it incompatible with that particular viewer, and probably others too.

Actually, opening up TOSFONT.OBT in a hex editor doesn't suggest it contains much useful data at all. TOSFONT.NSP is vaguely more promising, except TrID has no information on that one.

Really, in the time you've spent on this so far, you could have copy-pasted the letters from that screenshot you posted and gotten a "font" much like the image Davros pasted. As Collector stated, you're definitely not going to get a TrueType font from the unmodified game data.

winebaron wrote:

I remember reading that in order for the images in Darkseed to get the proper look that H.R. Giger wanted, each image was shaded and colored individually -- otherwise, they'd never appear correctly in DOS.

Also, I don't know what you read, but that makes no sense.

Darkseed's two main fonts are proportional, so trying to decode them using tile-based methods is problematic. Because the game code already knows how to decode the fonts, it's easier to hack some text to display all symbols. If you don't like the drop-shadow effect that the game uses on the fonts, it's easy to edit the image palettes to remove it. A couple of strange things to note: the large font does not contain the letter Q; and the small font does not display a hyphen although TOSTEXT.BIN contains sentences that use it.

Yes, I noticed that the hyphen was missing as well. I thought that was odd. But the missing "Q" is quite strange altogether!

A little editing of the "O" will give me what I need.

I do like the shadow effects on the letters, so I personally wouldn't edit them out. But I suppose I could create a set of each to suit everyone's tastes.

Sorry, but I had also tried XnView and was disappointed that it couldn't read the file, so I didn't mention it.

I think that TOSFONT.NSP has to do with speech in some way, even though all the sound files are in .VOC format -- perhaps not relevant here.

About the images, I don't remember exactly what the programmers had to do to each one in order to make it look more Giger-esque but I guess that's no longer relevant either.

Thanks to everyone that helped. I don't know how I can repay you all. Now to find a graphics-to-font program.

Thanks,
winebaron