4 ms·

It looks like the MSX font is very closely based on the original IBM PC font (these days known as CP437), so for the characters that are ambiguous in 8x8 I reco

It looks like the MSX font is very closely based on the original IBM PC font (these days known as CP437), so for the characters that are ambiguous in 8x8 I recommend checking out the 8x14 versions from the PC. > I wasn't sure whether some letters are upper or lower case, like pi (π), or theta (θ) Wikipedia says "227 (E3hex) is the Greek lowercase pi (U+03C0, π), but early fonts such as Terminal use a variant of pi that is ambiguous in case, and therefore can be used for the Greek capital pi (U+03A0, Π) or the n-ary product sign (U+220F, ∏)." > I'm not sure either what's the character between INFINITY (∞) and ELEMENT OF (∈). I checked an old MSX Technical Data Book and it seems to be lowercase phi (φ), but it certainly doesn't look like it. Wikipedia says: "237 (EDhex) is supposed to be used as Greek lowercase phi, but is mainly used as the empty set sign (U+2205, ∅) and was also used as the Greek phi symbol in italics (U+03D5, ϕ) to name angles, diameter sign (U+2300, ⌀), and as a surrogate for the Latin lowercase O with stroke (U+00F8, ø)." The joys of low-res, approximate typefaces - glyphs so weird and obscure you can use them for just about anything.

damieng 10y ago
They're really not - the IBM PC set is double-pixel wide and with quite different choices for many of the letters because the MSX is 5x7 while IBM PC used 8x14 (EGA) or 8x16 (VGA). It is far more likely they took inspiration from the Apple ][ font and tried to add serifs in the limited space. CP437 is the codepage - chars outside the ASCII range of 0-127. The font you are thinking of is probably the BIOS font from either the IBM EGA or VGA adapter.
- thristian 10y ago
  By "based on" I meant the character set, not the actual glyph designs, I absolutely agree the MSX characters don't look much like the PC ones. ...but the character sets match surprisingly well; outside the basic ASCII range they have mostly the same accented and Greek characters in the same places, many of the same glyphs for control codes, and some of the symbols right at the end. The box-drawing characters are very different, and the MSX has more accented characters in total, but nothing that would raise eyebrows in a European MS-DOS code-page. (off-topic: thank you very much for Envy Code R, it's one of my favourite monospaced typefaces ever!)
  - damieng 10y ago
    Oops, now your comment makes total sense including the CP437 remark, sorry! Glad you enjoy Envy Code R :)

damieng 10y ago

They're really not - the IBM PC set is double-pixel wide and with quite different choices for many of the letters because the MSX is 5x7 while IBM PC used 8x14 (EGA) or 8x16 (VGA). It is far more likely they took inspiration from the Apple ][ font and tried to add serifs in the limited space. CP437 is the codepage - chars outside the ASCII range of 0-127. The font you are thinking of is probably the BIOS font from either the IBM EGA or VGA adapter.

thristian 10y ago
By "based on" I meant the character set, not the actual glyph designs, I absolutely agree the MSX characters don't look much like the PC ones. ...but the character sets match surprisingly well; outside the basic ASCII range they have mostly the same accented and Greek characters in the same places, many of the same glyphs for control codes, and some of the symbols right at the end. The box-drawing characters are very different, and the MSX has more accented characters in total, but nothing that would raise eyebrows in a European MS-DOS code-page. (off-topic: thank you very much for Envy Code R, it's one of my favourite monospaced typefaces ever!)
- damieng 10y ago
  Oops, now your comment makes total sense including the CP437 remark, sorry! Glad you enjoy Envy Code R :)