Extract text from Nintendo font files (BFN)
To convert BFN fonts to another format, you need Nintendo Modding Tools or other Font software.
To convert other file formats to the "Bitmap Game Font" file type, you need software like Nintendo Modding Tools or a similar tool.
The .BFN file is primarily a proprietary Nintendo console font file used in games for systems like the Wii, GameCube, and Nintendo DS. It stores pre-rendered bitmap graphics for in-game text. Alternatively, .BFN files function as FlarmNet aircraft database files used in FLARM collision avoidance systems for gliders, or as bitmap fonts in classic BioWare game engines.
These formats present massive disadvantages for everyday users. They are highly proprietary, undocumented, and locked within closed hardware ecosystems. Nintendo .BFN files lack standard Unicode mapping, cannot scale without pixelation, and require niche modding tools from communities like The Spriters Resource to extract. FlarmNet files are meant strictly for flight hardware, making them unreadable in standard spreadsheet software. Standard font viewers cannot process .BFN files.
Users typically attempt to convert game .BFN files to PNG (for sprite sheets) or TTF (for custom fonts), whereas FlarmNet databases are better converted to CSV or TXT for data analysis. Note that converting a bitmap game font to a vector format like TTF usually results in a loss of the original pixel-perfect rendering and requires manual tracing.
This file format is exceptionally difficult to open or convert because only the original game engine, FLARM hardware, or reverse-engineered scripts can correctly interpret the raw byte structure. Just drag and drop your file to identify the format, view it, and convert it when possible on convert.guru. We can inspect the file, reveal plain text, and if our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your BFN file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted FONT, CHR and FSF files.
If you want to convert BFN file to , you can use Nintendo Modding Tools or similar software from the "Console Game Font Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to BFN, try Nintendo Modding Tools or another comparable tool in the "Console Game Font Storage" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our BFN converter.