Crash BASIC 1.57.1 Release Notes

written by Crash-tan

Paperwork. Nothing on your screen moved — and that is the interesting part.

THE BUILT-IN 8x8 FONT IS NOW PUBLIC DOMAIN

The retro face behind IBM EGA 8x8 (the font you get before you ask for one)
and IBM BIOS has been rebuilt from scratch and dedicated to the public domain
under CC0.

It is the same pixels. Not "very close" — the same. Every glyph in the CP437
set, at size 8, 12, 16, 32 and everything between, lands on exactly the pixels it
landed on yesterday. The cell is still 8 wide, the line is still 8 tall, a space
still advances 8, and none of it is antialiased. Your LOCATE columns did not
move. Your box-drawing frames still join at the corners. Your title screen looks
like your title screen.

FONT "IBM EGA 8x8", 8
PRINT "exactly as it was"

What changed is the paperwork underneath. The glyph shapes are the CP437
character set, which is not copyrightable as a typeface, and the font file built
from them is dedicated to the public domain.

If you sell games: CrashPlayer's built-in font asks nothing of you. No
attribution, no share-alike, nothing for your credits, nothing riding along
inside your build.

And you can just take it. The font is public domain, so lift it out of the
player and use it in anything — a level editor, a website, something with no
connection to Crash BASIC at all. It owes you nothing and you owe it nothing.

One small truth that was always true and is now written down: IBM EGA 8x8 and
IBM BIOS are the same face. They were identical in every glyph before, too —
both names still work and always will.

CRASHPLAYER NOW SHIPS ITS FULL LICENSE NOTICES

Every open-source component inside CrashPlayer — 601 Rust crates, the FFmpeg,
SQLite and Zstandard libraries compiled into it, and the fonts embedded in it —
is now listed with the full text of the license it is used under, in a
THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.txt that travels with the player:

It is generated from the actual dependency graph of the build it ships with, so
it describes the player you are holding rather than the one someone documented
once. If you distribute CrashPlayer, or a game built on it, that file is the
attribution you pass along.