font2snes — font images to text tiles

The text module ships with a built-in font, so you may never need this tool. But when you want your own typeface — a chunky title font, a themed UI face — font2snes converts a font image into the SNES text tiles the text routines draw from.

What goes in, what comes out

In: an indexed .png holding exactly 96 characters (ASCII 32–127, so character 0 is the space), with dimensions that are multiples of 8.

Out: either a binary .pic of tiles (default), or a C header (-c) declaring const unsigned char <name>_data[] you can #include and upload at runtime.

The flags you will actually use

Flag	Meaning
-b N	bits per pixel: 2 (default) or 4 (4 for Mode 1 BG1/BG2 text)
-c	emit a C header instead of a binary .pic
-v	verbose

Note the argument style: font2snes takes positional input output, unlike gfx4snes's -i.

Worked examples

# 2bpp font as a C header (drop-in, no separate asset file):
font2snes -c myfont.png myfont.h
 
# 4bpp font for a 16-colour text layer:
font2snes -b 4 -c font.png font.h
 
# Binary tiles instead of a header:
font2snes myfont.png myfont.pic

Then load it at runtime and point the text engine at it — a custom font is just tiles in VRAM, uploaded like any other:

#include "myfont.h"
dmaCopyVram(myfont_data, FONT_VRAM_ADDR, sizeof(myfont_data));

Gotchas worth knowing up front

• Exactly 96 glyphs, ASCII 32–127. Character cell 0 must be the space (ASCII 32). The layout is auto-detected — a 128×48 grid (recommended), a 768×8 strip, or any N×M whose cell count is 96.
• Positional args. It is font2snes input output, not -i/-o.
• Optional tool. font2snes is not wired into the build and no example needs it — textLoadFont already gives you a usable font. Reach for font2snes only when you want a custom typeface; see the notes in the examples/text/ README.

Where it fits

A side-branch of the The OpenSNES toolbox pipeline: font.png → font2snes → text tiles. For drawing text with the built-in font (the common case), start from the text examples such as Print a string instead.