Fonts
A typeface is a set of glyphs, or images that represent the characters in a script. A font is a physical embodiment of a typeface, such as a bitmap font or a scalable outline font.
Brand fonts
These typefaces have been used in branding for Nintendo products or NES licensees' products. Be careful when using these on a product so as to avoid confusion with the original product's trade dress.
- Nintendo logo
- The most consistently designed imitation of that lettering is Nu Hanafudaya. Others include Pretendo and Nintender.
- Game & Watch and Family Computer
- ITC Avant Garde, using oblique variant for 'A'
- Nintendo Entertainment System (and ColecoVision)
- Corporate (digitized as Corporatus by Alex Rosario)
- Game Boy
- Lighter weights of Gill Sans Italic. Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance use a custom bolder word mark, as the 'M' in the darker weights of Gill Sans is drawn differently
- Super NES
- Univers (digitized as U001 by URW)
- Nintendo 64
- Zurich Std Extra Black
- Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance
- Frapple + lettering inspired by Bank Gothic
- Wii and Wii U
- Custom lettering
- Nintendo Switch
- Room Black
- Capcom logo and Jeopardy! clues
- Korinna
8x8-pixel fonts
Most NES games draw text with fonts that occupy some fraction of an 8x8-pixel character cell, such as 6x7 or 7x7 pixels to leave space between glyphs. Many use a font that originated in Quiz Show, a 1976 arcade game published under Atari's Kee Games brand. Vertical strokes are often 2 pixels wide to counteract the NMOS quirk of voltage-dependent output impedance, which widens dark areas by a fraction of a pixel.
A few games with lowercase have ligatures, or glyphs that represent more than one character. The numerous uses of 'il' in Thwaite are an example, and several ligatures are present in EarthBound Beginnings.
8x16-pixel fonts
Proportional fonts
A proportional font or variable-width font has glyphs whose advance width differs. This is used, for example, to make 'm' wider than 'i'.
NES projects using a proportional font:
- Tile fonts, with glyph widths as one or more of 8, 16, and 24
- The Immortal
- FizzBuzz
- Pino's library that renders to CHR RAM
- Action 53, RHDE, robotfindskitten, 240p Test Suite, Nova the Squirrel
