Old Vintage Computing Research

Ultrafont+ is a fairly popular character set editor and the first one I ever used, originating from the COMPUTE! type-in magazine world as yet another Charles "SpeedScript" Brannon tour de force. This is "V.2" from the September 1986 COMPUTE!'s Gazette, an update of Ultrafont+ from July 1984 which was itself an update of the original Ultrafont in COMPUTE!'s First Book of 64 Sound and Graphics. I couldn't afford a subscription back then but I did periodically buy copies off the newsstand and fortunately I was able to get the disk for this one too, which had some great games like the massively sprite multiplexed "Eagles and Gators" and an exceptionally flexible text windowing package called Window Wizard. I personally found Gazette to be at its peak around the mid-late 1980s (with a later local maximum during the General Media days when yours truly actually got some of my own articles published) and this issue was a great example.

As a rule Gazette type-ins weren't generally multiloads and Ultrafont+ as published was already in one file. However, I ran across a nice version (no idea who did this) with a BASIC stub that printed the keystroke commands, which I thought was a handy addition. My own Perl-based BASIC cross-linker can one-part a BASIC program and any number of additional modules, so I took the original BASIC loader and made the following changes and deletions:

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