Back on the 13th April we posted a proposed font listing for the ROMXc & ROMXe Video ROM modules. To be honest we didn't get a heck of a lot of feedback, but there weren't any objections so we are pushing on with it with one minor change.

This is the production layout of the Video ROM for ROMXc and ROMXe :

The one change that we made was to switch the Euro fonts around. Since the only difference between Euro and US fonts is the pound/dollar sign, we thought that it might be useful to be able to switch between Enhanced and Un-enhanced fonts using the keyboard switch if using Text ROMs 0 or 1.

So to back-track a little, this is how it works. Through the ROMX menu you can associate a font 0 through F with a system ROM (or select a default font), but you actually have 2 banks of 16 fonts available, using the keyboard switch to toggle between the banks. If for example you have Font 0 selected (US Enhanced) as your default font, or linked specifically to a ROM, then you can switch to (Euro) Un-Enhanced by pressing the keyboard switch :

As mentioned previously, we have a MAP ROM Override board available should your alternate keyboard MAP be Dvorak - the MAP ROM Override lets you lock the keyboard MAP ROM so that the keyboard switch changes only the video ROM.

The list is mostly made up of Enhanced fonts which include MouseText. MouseText is a set of 32 graphical characters designed by Bruce Tognazzini, which replaced a redundant set of inverse uppercase characters and made it possible to display simple text user interfaces resembling the Macintosh GUI. The MouseText characters were introduced with the Apple IIc and later retrofitted to the Apple IIe via the Enhancement kit which included a 65C02 processor, the updated Video ROM and updated system ROMs. All Enhanced Apple IIe machines include MouseText, and MouseText was also carried over to the IIgs with a couple of changes (they replaced the running man characters shown in positions 7 and 8 below). The 32 MouseText characters for the IIc and IIe :

And the IIgs version of MouseText, which is included in the ReActiveMicro video ROM:

Henry was tired of dialling into (IIgs based) BBS's and seeing half the running man rather than the clean horizontal lines that the IIgs MouseText uses, so he included the IIgs version of the MouseText characters.

We have included a fair selection of un-enhanced fonts for older applications that may have used the alternate inverse character set (and would look pretty terrible with MouseText).

So let's run through the fonts that are included on the ROMXce Video ROM module.

Apple US Video ROM (Stock ROM) :

Clinton Turner V1 (Clinton based his font off the Commodore 64):

ReActiveMicro (Henry S. Courbis - includes the IIgs version of MouseText):

Dan Paymar:

Blippo Black (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Byte (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Colossal (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Count (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Flow (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Gothic (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Outline (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Pigfont (Keith Comer):

Pinocchio (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Slant (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Stop (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Apple Euro :

Clinton Turner V2 (Clinton created this version for viewing on LCD displays) :

Apple Improved German :

Apple French Canadian:

Hebrew:

Apple II Plus (Stock)

Katakana (adapted from Apple J-Plus):

Cyrillic (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Greek (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Esperanto (adapted from DOS toolkit):

Videx :

Phew! A decent list. There were more fonts that I converted but ran out of room on the flash - I'll make all of these ROMs available for download should anyone want to customise the video ROM (we'll make the programming adapters available also). I created enhanced and un-enhanced versions of each of these so have quite a few to share!

Lastly, these are the production boards for ROMXc and the ROMXce 28 pin video ROM which will ship with ROMXc and ROMXe (there is also a 24 pin ROMXce video ROM for non-international Apple IIe that has a header for an external switch to toggle the font banks).