I’ve been wondering for a long time how SA1 draws its “Now Saving” and DLC timer strings. Apart from being italicized (and looking glitchy with letters overlapping each other) the font looks thicker than the font used in debug menus, and the 0 character looks different, and I started thinking it was a different font altogether.
Today Exant figured it out, and the answer to all this is just… Weird. It’s the same font, but there’s code that… replaces the zeroes in text with the letter O. The rest is a lot more believable: the font looks thicker because the letters are stretched horizontally, and the italics are done by offsetting the top right X coordinate of the letter’s rectangle.
I’ll be updating DC Conversion and the DLCs mod to improve the look of the font, though I also want to rework the DLCs mod from the ground up. I want to make it possible to load the data produced by the SA1 DLC tool I made for SA Tools. That way you’ll be able to convert DLCs between SA1 and SADX. There’s some fundamental incompatibility with sounds and music, which I won’t be able to resolve in a while, so it will probably be only partially compatible, but anyway I’ll save that for another post.