8 ms·
The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
- alricb 11y agoOh, the nostalgia. Does anyone know if there's something similar for Amiga (for ascii art)
- SwellJoe 11y agohttps://github.com/rewtnull/amigafonts https://github.com/rewtnull/amigafonts
- Elv13 11y agoI made an AwesomeWM theme last month using these. I gave up on it, too hard on the eyes ;) http://i.imgur.com/LDSOade.png http://i.imgur.com/LDSOade.png (code at https://github.com/Elv13/ https://github.com/Elv13/ , but that particular theme isn't pushed yet as it require upstream patches still in the CI)
- cpach 11y agoLooks really cool! I can see why you don't use it every day though :)
- FussyZeus 11y agoSo cool but good Lord that's gotta leave the eyes sore for a while afterward.
- bitwize 11y agoTry setting the text color to #7fff7f. It makes things a nice phosphor-glow green; this is how I have my xterms set up. For amber, the X11 color "goldenrod" (#daa520) is near perfect.
- aidenn0 11y agoI agree goldenrod is just about right. My first monitor was amber-on-black HGA, and setting that color with 9x14 makes me feel nostalgic.
- agumonkey 11y agoPretty ! Makes me wanna go to old regional offices in case some of their 80s computer are still in a basement somewhere. Just to run the OS of the day and re-experience fonts, layouts, proportions, dithering-patterns..
- starquake 11y agoVery cool. Looks like it could be used in a movie scene on a hacker's computer.
- Keloo 11y agoThat's why old programmers wear glasses.
- SwellJoe 11y agoThis is super cool. I've been wanting to make retro video games with modern tools and for modern platforms (like the web and Android) for fun (in the genre of Oregon Trail, Infocom text games, King's Quest, etc.). Some of these are just right for that, and they're CC-licensed, so presumably good for use in Open Source games. I find the old typefaces from the early 8 bit and 16 bit days really charming. They were working with such severe limitations. I remember designing my own font on my Amiga and using it on my desktop...I kinda wish I still had those files. But, they weren't nearly as legible as the fonts from the vendors.
- tdicola 11y agoBe careful, the files are CC licensed but the actual fonts are still copyright whoever/whatever created them. They didn't redraw or create new fonts here, they ripped out the old fonts from the systems that used them and converted to TTF, etc.
- EvanAnderson 11y agoCopyright of bitmap fonts is less straightfoward than it might appear. (Vector fonts are more apt to be recognized as "computer programs", but simple renderings of the alphabet are, for example, not considered able to be copyrighted in the United States.)
- SwellJoe 11y agoI'll worry about that when I get a cease and desist (I don't expect to get a cease and desist...the market value of these fonts is approaching zero, and from the history I know of these old fonts, there was a lot of borrowing even back then).
- viley 11y agoYes - while working on this pack I did look into the question of copyright on the original bitmap fonts; what I found seems to indicate that the designs may not be copyrightable as such (e.g.: http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=164817#p164817 http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=164817#p164817), although I'd still rather err on the side of caution, hence the disclaimer at the end of the readme. If they were copyrightable, I imagine that IBM would've sued graphics card manufacturers left and right - from Hercules (which ripped the IBM MDA font bit-for-bit) to the multitudes of VGA clone manufacturers who also used IBM's fonts. BTW, just to correct one of the above comments: a few of my own versions did involve some redrawing/original design (specifically the extended 'PxPlus' unicode variants, and the BIOS-only fonts which originally included only the lower 128 ASCII characters). Although of course this has no bearing on any copyright (or lack thereof) on the originals. At any rate, sure - I encourage you to use these fonts in your projects, and thanks for the comments!
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoBy the way, Windows has its own terminal font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(typeface)
- tdeck 11y agoAnother similar one is Fixedsys, the oldest font in Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixedsys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixedsys
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoWhat I'd really like to see is a font that has lots of sub- and super-scripts and other mathy symbols, like: ⎛⎜⎝⎞⎟⎠⎡⎢⎣⎤⎥⎦⎧⎩⎪⎫⎬⎭⎮ so that I can keep my class notes in text files. So far the only font I found that supports a lot of that sort of thing is DejaVu Sans mono but even that is rather sparse- there's very few Greek letter super/subscripts say, and there's a limited selection of Latin superscripts. Block elements and box drawings wouldn't hurt either.
- david-given 11y agounifont is pretty good. It's a bitmap font, so it's got that pixelly old-school look, but it's got complete Unicode basic plane support and at least some ('growing support', it says) astral plane support. http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
- mietek 11y agoPragmataPro. Here you go: http://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ http://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
- viley 11y agoReactOS has such a version of the VGA font, UniVGA16: https://github.com/mirror/reactos/blob/master/reactos/media/fonts/UniVGA16.ttf https://github.com/mirror/reactos/blob/master/reactos/media/...
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoHi folks, thanks for the suggestions. I know about pragmata pro and unifont. I've tried Unifont, I think it hurt my eyes a bit but it sure has lots of glyphs. Pragmata is very pretty and has great coverage but it's not free and I don't see that it has more glyphs than free fonts, for instance with DejaVu mono I have a subscript for j which I don't see in Pragmata. Or, the APL glyphs for instance; unifont has them too and it's free. I'll give ReactOS a try, thanks. I had given up hope to be honest, I guess Unicode is just too big to implement fully. Edit: Ok, Pragmata costs €19 for just the regular weight- I thought it was costed by unicode range. I could definitely give that a try, so thanks for the hint mietek. 2nd Edit: Ouch, no- the mono font is €59. That's too high again :)
- sep 11y agoNote that he allows you to enter your own text to try out without actually downloading the fonts: http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/preview/ http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/preview/
- Elv13 11y agoThis project also have a good collection https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- zem 11y agomy first thought was that it would make an awesome style for the web conversion of helppc [http://stanislavs.org/helppc/ http://stanislavs.org/helppc/]
- ansible 11y agoI used the VGA8 font for xterms and such for years and years until I switched to Terminus. If someone designed a scalable font based on VGA8, that would be totally awesome.
- viley 11y agoThe font "IBM Nouveau" may be close to what you're looking for: http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font - it's scalable and VGA-based, although still kind of angular. (I'm actually planning my own version to complement the oldschool PC font pack, but for now this might do.)
- david-given 11y agoSee also these articles, for real old-school fonts: https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys... https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other-english-micros https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other... Me, I grew up on Acorn machines, so those are my classic nostalgia font. Although, on a modern LCD with square-edged pixels, they look like arse --- jaggy and overly bold. I wonder if there's a way to emulate fuzzy CRTs with Truetype...
- sspiff 11y agoI don't know about TrueType or hinting, but there are a couple of post-processing shaders that achieve the effect, as commonly used by emulators[1]. If these fonts are used in some kind of retro game, those shaders could be applied as well. Desktop compositor on X11 effects could do the same. Not sure if there is a way to apply shaders to an entire desktop elsewhere (maybe f.lux do something like that to change the colours?) [1] http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders
- JonnieCache 11y agoThere's https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- yankcrime 11y agoAnd also: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
- mattkevan 11y agoThe Acorn system font brings a rush of nostalgia and a shudder of revulsion every time I see it. Good grief was it ugly. One of the first things I learned to do was write a script to load something else on boot - Acorn's Arial knockoff I think. That was ugly too, but better by far.
- rbanffy 11y agoI always wonder why IBM chose these horrible serif designs over their previous, much nicer, cleaner, fonts you can find on their 32xx terminals...
- bitwize 11y agoThe double-width vertical strokes improve visibility.
- ddingus 11y agoThey also help on composite displays, still a significant consideration at the time the PC was created. PAL didn't suffer too much from this, but NTSC did. Single pixel verticals light up in a rainbow of color. This is actually how the monochrome Apple 2 did it's color graphics! White on blue is a secondary helper here. On sharp displays, the human eye sees the white text at full detail. Humans have only a fraction of blue receptors, compared to red and green. This means screen noise gets lost in a sea of blue. On composite displays, that same sea of blue tends to was artifacts away. SGI IRIX offered it's Xterm with a great font, white on blue and it was very easy on the eyes. I've used that combo for terminals ever since.
- rbanffy 11y agoI think the only PC ever to ship with composite video output was the PC Jr. (edit: sadly, no, it wasn't) I became fond of the white on blue scheme with the MSX machines, but kind of abandoned it when I moved to PCs.
- tempodox 11y agoThis is one great presentation. An accomplished fusion of form and contents. And, among all web pages with black background, this is the rare one that _doesn't_ peel your retina off while you're looking at it. My respects to the author.
- kalleboo 11y agoThis page desperately needs -webkit-font-smoothing: none;
- chris_wot 11y agoThe kerning is dreadful.
- EvanAnderson 11y agoI can't decide if this is sarcasm or not, so forgive me if it was. These are monospace fonts because the character modes in which these fonts were used were strictly grid-based.
- chris_wot 11y agoI was being flippant and did it for the yucks :-)
- amelius 11y agoWhat is the font of the original windows blue-screen?
- rspeer 11y agoIt would drop to 80-column text mode, so it depends what font your VGA chipset used there. But the most common one was probably IBM VGA9.
- qubex 11y agoMy family's first computer was an Amstrad 1512. I think it must've been 1987 or thereabouts. I never got very dexterous with it (I have vague recollections of GEM) but some of the visual cues are very impressive.