Sears Tele-Games label for Harmony Cart

waynel · September 25, 2022

Today I decided it was time to start learning Affinity Photo. I've used Photoshop since ~1.0, so this is a new adventure for me, and very different from what I'm used to. (I switched because I don't believe in renting software.)

To teach myself this new thing, I decided to make a Sears Tele-Games label for my Harmony cartridge.

Thanks to the helpful people on this forum, I was able to locate a couple of fonts that almost work.

Seven-segment fonts are easy to find for the "Tele-Games" part, and the one I picked is almost correct, except that the middle part of the M (does this have a name?) isn't quite long enough.
I went with a Bauhaus font for the main text. I checked a couple of dozen web sites, but none of the fonts were right, and of the ones that were close, almost all of the fonts were poorly encoded, incompletely coded, or full of errors. I think the people who run amateur font sites just copy them from one another and don't bother to verify that they work.
For the ®, I just used Helvetica Neue, because it's the best Helvetica.

I think the result is pretty good.

On the left is an original Sears Speedway II cart. In the middle is the label printed on plain paper. On the right is the Harmony cart with the new label. I eventually went with glossy photo paper, because I just like the way it looks. Plain resume paper would be better, because it's matte, and be closer to the faded nature of the original Sears carts. But because I keep my Video Arcade in a dark place, the glossy paper looks better.

Since we're going all Sears with it, naturally it had to have a different name than the real name. I chose "Super Multi-Cart." Originally I was going to use "Super Cart IV," but changed my mind at the last minute for no good reason. In this comparison with a Speedway II cart, you can see how I never really found a Bauhaus font I liked. And the file for the bold version of the one I chose was invalid.

Here is the Super Mulit-Cart in action. You can see that the label bumps out a bit where the microSD card hangs out of the face of the Harmony cart. I'm OK with that, because while it's away in its cabinet, you can't see that. I thought about using an X-acto knife to cut a slot for the card to poke through, but my hands aren't that steady today. Maybe on another day when I've had less coffee. Or maybe on a day when I've had more coffee, I'll see if I can shave some of the plastic off the end of a microSD card without affecting its functionality.

I attached the top label with rubber cement, and the end label with rolled-up Scotch tape on the back. This is so I can easily lift the end label off if I want to add games to the cart. But I'm OK with it covering the microSD card long-term since I only put carts on the Harmony that I own, and I already own all of the carts that I want. (Though I might buy my wife that Space Cactus cart for Christmas.)

I've attached the .afphoto files to this message, if anyone wants to make their own, or improve upon what I've done.

Sears Cart Top Label.afphoto Sears Cart End Label.afphoto

Edited September 25, 2022 by waynel