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Nopaz

Topaz.font. Ack! Phft! Ptui!

1992.06.15

Last updated: 2020.11.02

Amiga has this built-in fixed-width font named Topaz. Under OS version 1.3, it was pretty ugly. However, when version 2.04 finally came out, Commodore somehow managed to make it uglier.

Today, we take font-sensitive applications for granted. But back then, they were still rare. And many old programs still hard-coded Topaz to appear in their windows and screens. So when you ran them under 2.04, they suddenly looked much worse. (At least I thought so.)

I decided to do something about this, and wrote Nopaz. What it basically does is find the system's internal data structure which describes Topaz, and then overwrites it with new information pointing to the font imagery of your choice. This way, even applications which insist on Topaz will dereference through the modified data structure, and get your preferred font; your dumb application won't know the difference.

There are a couple of restrictions. The first is that the font you use to replace Topaz must be a fixed-width font, and it must be identical in size to Topaz (8 * 8 or 10 * 9 character cells).

Included in the archive is my favorite Topaz-compatible font, which I named DarkParticle. It's a sans-serif font which I still use to this day, and even went so far as to make a copy of it for my Mac at work. You might care to check it out. (I named it DarkParticle because I ripped it out of LightWave v1.0.)

Download nopaz.lha (9K)

What You'll Get

Listing of archive 'nopaz.lha':
Original  Packed Ratio    Date     Time    Name
-------- ------- ----- --------- --------  -------------
     524      48 90.8% 08-Jun-92 20:49:26  fonts/DarkParticle.font
    2536    1310 48.3% 08-Jun-92 20:49:26  fonts/DarkParticle/8
    3112    1603 48.4% 08-Jun-92 20:49:26  fonts/DarkParticle/9
    4988    3040 39.0% 08-Jun-92 23:10:56  nopaz
    6653    2425 63.5% 08-Jun-92 23:10:54  nopaz.c
    1670     885 47.0% 08-Jun-92 23:18:58  README
-------- ------- ----- --------- --------
   19483    9311 52.2% 29-Oct-96 00:04:34   6 files