Games
64 Pixel Fonts: Cave’s CV1000 Games
TL;DR – Cave’s CV1000-based games were graphics-hurling monsters. They had modern processors and enormous heaps of storage, by arcade standards they were without practicable limit, at least in a 2D sense. This power changed the way things were done.
Let’s get into it.
First, a pre-amble, if you’ll allow me. There are a few things in life I really enjoy. Like video games, particularly shmups. I like fonts – I used to have hundreds of them in the 80s, before large font collections were really a thing. And I like pixels.
And so pixel fonts from video games is a Venn intersection that I cannot resist. I’ve collected over 180 pixel fonts over on my font engine and I am fascinated by the endless creativity involved in making legible, attractive fonts in an 8 x 8 pixel grid. 64 pixels isn’t a lot, really. Making it work is impressive.
Older game hardware would play with palettes and animate gradients and other effects using as little storage and as much CPU power as they could spare, re-using every element possible to save space.
Consider this Time Pilot ’84 high score table. There’s only one set of letters in the game’s ROM, so to get different colours the game just… changed the colour. Typically arcade games have a number of small palettes, and the text is thrown on screen, modified with whatever palette is required at the time.
Most older games are easy to scour for their fonts, thanks to MAME and other emulators with built-in tools that allow anyone to view the raw image storage. Some games are less easy, especially those based on more modern hardware, where the graphics are not stored in a uniform or easily accessible way.
Two different games viewed through MAME’s ROM viewer
Often these games are simply opaque to me, and I have to resign myself to the fact that I’ll probably never get access to the raw fonts. But sometimes someone makes a tool that cracks these games open.
Buffi made such a tool for Cave’s CV1000 games, and recently I managed to pull out all the fonts from games like Mushihimesama, DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, and Ibara.
With the help of this tool I had over eight hundred 256 x 256 image files, per game, dumped into a folder, a full account of every image asset these games contained.
15 of over 800 images from Mushihimesama
These games have fonts that are much newer than most arcade games, as they were released between 2004 and 2011 (ish). They did a lot of things differently, compared to the games that came before them.
They had tons of storage space, and they crammed that space full of pre-rendered graphics and, interestingly, pre-animated fonts as well. I’m sure there are many other things going on, but no matter how long I look at these games, it always seems like it’s little more than a reasonably fast CPU (even if it was ten years old already) connected to a single purpose, very fast blitter, a component which moves chunks of data – usually graphics – very quickly.
It makes sense. Cave was filling a niche, making arcade shmups that were probably going to be played on old CRT monitors with low resolutions. They didn’t need polygons or fancy graphics, they needed to draw a lot of bullets, and quickly.
Mushihimesama Futari had a lot of bullets
But these Cave games had so much storage that they simply drew everything they needed, every colour of every letter and every frame of every animation, in advance. These pre-made images were stored on the game board ready to go, and the game board just threw them onto the screen.
This is exactly what Nintendo did with their earth shattering (at the time) Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo system. The SNES though was a multi-purpose machine with powerful image manipulation capabilities. Using it for such simple purposes… Well, I would argue that pre-rendered graphics, these 2D images created from 3D models, are ugly, but no one listens to me.
Cave’s CV1000 boards and all the games they released on them are fascinating as an evolutionary step in game design. Producing games at a 240×320 resolution in 2011 was anachronistic as fuck, and creating everything on powerful computers to be shown on CRTs by a fast single-purpose board with all the storage anyone would ever want is…
Well I have mixed feelings about it, honestly. Beyond the interesting place it occupies on the gaming evolution timeline I think it’s kind of a dull thing. The CV1000 board is so dull and simple that perfect replicas exist, bootleg boards that are identical to the originals. Because it’s modern hardware doing simple things, and that’s not hard to copy, apparently.
Art is often the result of challenge and overcoming limitations. Without limits things quickly become less interesting, and there are very few limits here.
And I guess it does everything it needed to do, but it makes me a little bit sad.
Anyway, the fonts.
The basic font. Note the different numbers.
Every one of these games contains a basic font that isn’t modified, except the numbers sometimes. In older arcade games a font might be re-used, or it might be tweaked, or drawn anew, but there would only be that one font in the game’s ROMs. These Cave games have so much extra storage that they just jammed more fonts in there. Larger and smaller, slim and wide, and when they wanted an animated font they just drew one and put that in there too.
This animated Player 1 is made of simple 8 x 8 characters, but they’re not stored individually in the ROM. Instead, the whole phrase is stored over and over, once for each frame of this animation. The whole alphabet isn’t included anywhere, it’s just these pre-made images, stacked up and ready to be shown to the player.
DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu had the same font as Mushihimesama, with different numbers, but it also had at least seven other sets of numbers of varying sizes and colours. 5 x 7 and 8 x 7, two different 16 x 16 fonts, 8 x 16 and 8 x 13, 16 x 23 and 15 x 15. Why make the CPU resize a font when you can just put every font you might conceivably want in the game ROM? It’s decadent.
And these are good looking fonts. Great, even! But I look at these, which are not pre-rendered but painstakingly hand made, and I wonder, what would the whole game have looked like if they’d done it this way?
Anyway, I digress.
Play games, they’re fun.
--NFG
[ Dec 18 2025 ]
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