Genecar by Cobra Soft

Genecar is a screen font editor for the PCW, released by the French company Cobra Soft. It is written in Mallard BASIC. As supplied the BASIC was protected, but source was available for ₣70.

Files

Fonts

GENECAR included three fonts in a format it calls .CAR. This is basically a raw dump of the font, but using a 16×16 character cell rather than the usual 16×8. The fonts are:

FIN.CAR: Thin, squared font
GRAS.CAR: Thick, squared font
STANDARD.CAR: The PCW system font

As supplied the fonts are (naturally enough) in the French variant of the Amstrad character set. In the files below, the .CAR files remain in the French variant, but the .COM and .PSF versions have been rearranged to US form.

Font	Preview	Download	Notes
Fin		FIN.COM: Self-loading font for PCW, CPC, Spectrum +3 and PcW16 FIN.CAR: Font in original .CAR format FIN.PSF: Font in PSF format
Gras		GRAS.COM: Self-loading font for PCW, CPC, Spectrum +3 and PcW16 GRAS.CAR: Font in original .CAR format GRAS.PSF: Font in .PSF format

Other files

The original GENECAR distribution contained the following files:

CODE.TXT: The machine code part of GENECAR, stored as a stream of decimal numbers suitable for being read by BASIC using the INPUT # statement.
EXEMPLE.BAS: Example BASIC code showing how to load a font, display characters in it and then revert to the original font.
G53.BAS: The main font editor (protected BASIC).
GENCONST.OVP: Font editor overlay (protected BASIC).
GENECAR.BAS: The launcher program (unprotected BASIC). All it does is show a splash screen and run G53.BAS.
GENECAR.DOC: Documentation (in LocoScript 1 format).
GENECODE.TXT: Machine-code helper functions used by GENECAR itself, in the same format as CODE.TXT.
GENEDATA.OVP: Character shapes used by GENECAR itself, as a series of BASIC DATA statements.
TITRE.TXT: The GENECAR title screen, intended to be rendered using the characters in GENEDATA.OVP.
USER.BAS: BASIC subroutines to load CODE.TXT and binary fonts; used by EXEMPLE.BAS and intended to be used in your own programs for the same purpose.