I'm a bit of a noob with fonts, so jw is there a way to make a font file out of the provided font sprite sheets and install those? 

There isn't right now but Ill look into that for you!

here you go. I made this back when the jam was first announced.. It contains almost all of the characters from the Classic Font Sprites in a ttf file.
It scales nicely as long as AA is turned off.

 https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1702086/3310-classic-1