The plaque on the star statue in Super Mario 64's courtyard is 32×32 pixels with 3–5 px tall letters, so you can't identify
the face by eye. I tried to do it forensically instead: rebuild the artist's process (canvas size, point size, tracking,
resize filter, blur, gamma) and let each candidate font find its best settings against the real texture.
- ~530 fonts a 1996 Mac/SGI artist could have had: Palatino Bold Italic wins against Times, New Century Schoolbook, Bookman,
Georgia, Zapf Chancery, Helvetica, Courier… and against the game's own bitmap dialog font.
- Between Palatino digitisations (Adobe 1990 Type 1, Apple 1996 TrueType, Linotype 1998, URW clones), Adobe's original fits
best, and the free URW clone and Apple's version independently converge on the same recipe (23 px, tracking +1, bilinear).
- Open question for the type nerds: one pixel in the "W" is dark in the real texture, but every Palatino renders it lit.
Is there a Palatino BI version or hinting quirk of that era that would explain it?
Report + code: github.com/supermochi64/sm64-plaque-decode