Recreating Font Art on the ZX81—With Some Limits

It’s funny how a random video can spark an idea. One moment I’m watching someone play around with ASCII art, and the next I’m thinking, “Hey, I could make something like that on the ZX81.” That little spark turned into a weekend project: a simple banner program using different fonts. How fun!

# The Idea

I have fond memories of creating art using typewriters and characters. We had a typewriter in our house when I was around 8 or 9, and I remember spending hours just typing on it. Once I got into D&D, I used it extensively to write up character sheets and campaign ideas. But I also used it to generate doodles and art—TIE Fighters and cartoons were a staple.

It should be no surprise that some of my first computer programs were character art. I still have a Medusa head lying around somewhere from the PDP my school had. Terminals and consoles notoriously lacked graphics—or at least support from most programs for them. As such, ASCII art became a common way to create doodles and fun images.

# Fast Forward

In the ’90s, there was a resurgence—or perhaps an organization—of online ASCII art creation. During this time, entire fonts were created using basic characters and symbols. I came across a great example of these FIGlet Fonts, which got me thinking about using them in a program.

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The ZX81, with its blocky characters, was ripe for this kind of art—especially if you wanted to do anything visually interesting. Sadly, it lacks many of the standard characters that FIGlet fonts use, such as the backslash and apostrophe. Even the hash symbol (often called pound) and the exclamation mark are absent from the ZX81’s character set. Sad times.

# Making Do

Not to be deterred, I decided to give a few of the fonts a try. Creating a simple font display program, I was able to recreate a few using “ZX81” as the sample text. Some fit nicely on screen, but others required scrolling to get the full effect. To save space, I only reproduced the letters and numbers needed. Maybe a full-font program will be a future project.

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I tried to use fonts with characters already available. For a few, I adjusted the characters where needed—for example, swapping out the hash symbol for the literal pound symbol. I think the fonts worked pretty well and look decent overall. A few spacing issues popped up since the ZX81’s pixels are more square than rectangular. I adjusted a few fonts to make the letters cleaner.

# All Done

The program itself is modular. You could easily add more examples or swap in different display techniques. I used string slicing for much of the display. The effect is slow in BASIC—so slow that I moved from printing each line individually to using a buffer technique to avoid jarring lag during rendering.

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A more practical use for this program might be as an intro screen for a game. That said, I’d probably redo it in assembly for better speed. Having a complete font set could be fun for a banner program, but memory constraints would be a challenge. Alternatively, you could use the ZX81’s graphic symbols to make something even more visually compelling.

What ideas do you have?