8 ms·

The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

288 points by sep 6y ago

jbverschoor 6y ago
Surprisingly legible
rbanffy 6y ago
It never ceases to amaze me that the IBM PC got these fonts when IBM big iron terminals had a much nicer, modern geometric sans serif font. They just needed to use the 5100 font or terminal fonts they were already using.
- viler 6y ago
  That's part of the reason I've added more fonts from more compatibles: some of them had much nicer ones - the Cordata and Wyse machines in particular more than doubled the resolution of the original IBM fonts, and indeed achieved something quite close to that 'classic terminal' look. The IBM PC was meant to support both color and monochrome displays though ("color" meaning "cheap TV-resolution CGA" :-)), and there are hints that both functions were originally supposed to go on the same adapter board. That plus cost cutting are probably why the same ROM chip contained both the color and monochrome fonts, so neither of them could have been very high-res...
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I love that the Cordata PPC-400 was included. It's one of the most beautiful screen fonts I've ever seen.
    - viler 6y ago
      Yep! They seemed to be quite proud of it in the PPC-400 User's Guide. It goes on to describe the availability of various character attributes (reverse video, underlining, blinking, intensity) as "part of Corona's continuing effort to provide you with the finest and most advanced products". Definitely a well-done design. If it wasn't for the ToshibaSat 8x14 font (also included), that'd be my code editor font of choice now.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        If I hadn't made my own 3270 font, I'd seriously consider it.
- mietek 6y ago
  > a much nicer, modern geometric sans serif font Which font was that?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    The 5100, 5110, and 5120 computers had a simple sans serif font, with a distinctive narrow zero. The 3270, 3150, and 5250 terminals also shared a very nice design (which was copied into x3270's), with distinctive 6's, 9's and the dotted rounded 0 (that made it easier to distinguish from the squarer O). The 3270 also had the peculiarity of having the digits being slighly taller than the letters. I'm not sure which was the first machine that had the distinctive MDA look that flowed into CGA, EGA, and VGA. Could be something created for the PC. If all else failed, it'd be nicer if they just did like Commodore and copied the Atari 8-bit one with wide stems. The NTSC output for the CGA board more or less mandated the wide stems to prevent color artifacts.
- jeppesen-io 6y ago
  Likely because the IBM PC project was a very rushed job, by IBM standards. It was built rather quickly using as much as possible off the shelf hardware and software. Due to the buacr bureaucratic nature of the company of the time, the project was largely kept from the rest of the company. That's why they outsourced DOS When the project started, they were way way behind in the home PC market
- rob74 6y ago
  Yeah, I really hated the standard IBM font too... trying to look like a serif font and having to "fall back" to sans serif most of the time anyway because there just wasn't enough space for the serifs... why?! And the patterns drawn with the standard background "pattern characters" looked horrible in the 80x25 mode which was used most of the time, because the hardware inserted an extra column repeating the 8th column, so the font matrix was actually 9x16, but the font didn't account for that. Actually back in the bad old DOS days I went as far as realizing that it was really easy to replace the "default" font (at least on German/non-US machines, which installed a different font from a file which contained the correct characters for the German code page). So I wrote a small program to hack this code page file and insert my own sans-serif font. An additional realization was that 8 = 3+1+3+1 - so if you designed your "pattern characters" to have 2 "patterned" columns 3 pixels wide and 2 empty columns 1 pixel wide (so the repeated column would be empty too), the pattern would look nicer when shown in the 9x16 matrix. I wonder if I still have that laying around somewhere...
sep 6y ago
Link to the detailed font index: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/ https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
urb 6y ago
Amir rulezz!
dilandau 6y ago
For linux users, you can open the .FON files with fontforge, then go to file menu -> generate to create a .bdf file (I prefer to use bitmap over ttf to avoid any artifacts).
- viler 6y ago
  At the right sizes the included 'Mx' fonts should avoid those artifacts - they're ttf but contain embedded bitmaps, which seem to be better supported in Linux than in Windows (supported, but silly hacks required) or macOS (seemingly not supported at all). :) I do want to include .bdf fonts in future versions, especially if the conversion is as simple as that. But if I do it I want to be sure I do it correctly, and I'm still not 100% familiar with the format.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Any chance you can publish some details on what your workflow looks like to generate these fonts? I'd be interested in generating some bitmap conversions of some classic non-VGA fonts, like Apple's bitmap fonts (some of which were never converted to TrueType!) and some X11 standards like fixed13.
    - viler 6y ago
      To sum it up (links to the various tools can be found at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#tools_used https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#tools_used): usually the starting point is some sort of raw bitmap data, which I convert to .png with something like Binxelview, although ImageMagick can also do the trick. The .png then goes into Bits'N'Picas to trace the glyphs and produces an outlined .ttf. This .ttf is far from final however, as it still needs an encoding with proper Unicode mapping, some height/metric adjustments, and so on. The specific changes depend on the font, but they can be done in Fontforge, which is very scriptable thankfully. The same goes for things like aspect correction (mark all glyphs, scale down on the X-axis) and producing embedded bitmaps (add "bitmap strikes" at the target pixel/point sizes, export w/"bitmap in TTF/OTF" option). Fontforge's bitmap export options should also let you create bitmap-only fonts in formats like .bdf or .otb. As I still use only .fon for bitmap fonts (though this should change in the future), I do those in a different program named Fony, which like Bits'N'Picas can import the glyphs from a .png and export to .fon after some adjustments and metadata massaging. More details than that would probably belong in a blog post or so, but that's it in a nutshell.
bloopernova 6y ago
This led me on a short Google trip to find the Sun Openboot font: Finding this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-identification-of-the-font-being-used-for-the-solaris-console-in-tex https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-... And this is the TTF of that font: https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/OSX/gallant12x22.ttf https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/OSX/gallant...
- cerberusss 6y ago
  Around 2000, I worked at Lucent, which was a Sun shop. But I can't remember this font. Was it only used on the console, i.e. in text mode?
  - bloopernova 6y ago
    When you hit stop-a to emergency-halt the system, you'd see this console.
  - mceachen 6y ago
    If you booted single-user or didn't have a graphical login manager, you'd see this on the console on SunOS 4 and earlier (80s and 90s, pre-Solaris). I think by the time Solaris (or even open look) rolled around, it had a graphical user login.
    - brirec 6y ago
      Solaris 2.6 and 7 didn’t have a graphical boot splash, so you’d see this while watching a SPARC box boot up.
      - cellularmitosis 6y ago
        Just recently found an adafruit guide to building a solaris 2.6 setup using QEMU. The nostalgia! https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-an... edit: just remembered that you sadly don't get to see Sun Gallant Demi in all its glory, because it boots using the QEMU openfirmware.
Exmoor 6y ago
Unrelated to the fonts, but I really love that CSS they're using to emulate the ANSI interfaces of my youth. Perhaps it's just a product of my age, but I find it a lot more usable then a lot of similar website interfaces.
- airstrike 6y ago
  It's so incredibly easy to parse visually. I'm in heaven. The lime-green background for selected text adds a special touch! I wish there was a CSS framework for this type of UI language
  - signal11 6y ago
    Something like TuiCss[1]? [1] https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
  - tass 6y ago
    There is bootstra.386 which put a smile on my face: https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/ https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sjs382 6y ago
  https://artpacks.org https://artpacks.org uses a similar interface, which was super fun to work on.
flobosg 6y ago
I am using an old laptop as a console-only typewriter. This might come in handy for inspiration, thank you!
bitwize 6y ago
Oh my God, they have the Tandy 2000 font.
magoon 6y ago
A trip down memory lane, bringing back so much just looking at the fonts. It’s amazing how much I associate each company’s historical fonts with their brand.
plg 6y ago
WOW there is a strange visual illusion for me, the red fonts seem to be sitting 3D <behind> the rest of the page
- zerocrates 6y ago
  Do you wear glasses? You could be seeing the effects of chromatic abberation. I have fairly thick and high-refractive-index glasses and can regularly experience this phenomenon where different-colored text shifts in different directions, creating a "3D" effect. The Microsoft logo is a great example of this: if I tilt my head up the red/orange and blue squares seem to move toward each other, and the yellow and green ones away from each other, and vice versa if I tilt my head down.
- kmill 6y ago
  Two possibilities come to mind. The red channel in each pixel might be at the left, causing all the pure red text to be slightly shifted relative to the other text. Another might be chromatic aberration if you wear glasses. (This causes the Windows logo to look comically maligned for me.) Whether it's behind or in front of the text would depend on the tilt of your head.
  - zerocrates 6y ago
    Wow I posted at basically the same time, and also mentioned the Microsoft logo. It's just a perfect test case to see this kind of thing happening, I guess.
- viler 6y ago
  My hunch is that this could be the result of subpixel antialiasing. It often creates a sort of fringing around the text, which ideally isn't very apparent... but it takes advantage of separate RGB components. Red text has only one component, so the fringing may have the effect of darkening on one side, and brightening on the other, which can look a little like 3d relief.
ggerules 6y ago
Thank you for posting this! It brings back a lot of memories.
dang 6y ago
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001964 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098262 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695319 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430 It's a fine thing to submit but the cutoff for dupes is about a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Edit: scratch that, we'll make an exception since it's the first new release in several years. See discussion in subthread below.
- sep 6y ago
  v2.0 of this was released just a few days ago, after several years without a major version. Hence the submission. Btw, thanks for doing the hard and important work of moderating hn! [Edit: I realize now that the last part may come off as sarcastic, so I want to emphasize it is sincere. While here I disagree with the action, I'm generally very thankful for the moderators' work.]
  - dang 6y ago
    Ah, ok, I missed that. And now I understand why you submitted https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#history https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#history originally. But are the differences with v2 enough to support a substantively different discussion? I would say probably not? This comes up whenever new versions of projects are released - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 for a longer explanation. I'd be happy to make an exception if there's a case for the diff with v2.
    - sep 6y ago
      The original submission-title was more descriptive (something like: "The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0 Released: 133 fonts added, new online index"), but I assume a moderator edited it to the current, more concise, one. Feature-wise, the new version offers about 3 times as many "oldschool" fonts as the previous version, and also introduces the use of several techniques not typically used elsewhere to make the fonts more palettable for modern use (aspect correction, embedded bitmaps to bypass anti-aliasing). Also the online font index has more details regarding each font. I would say that a very detailed online font index and fonts that are now much more palettable for modern use, may well be grounds for new discussions.
kristopolous 6y ago
I'm using it for my latest bootsta/386¹. It's really the best version of these fonts out there. It's exceptionally accurate. I've gotten accuracy that just simply wasn't possible for the last 2 versions of bootstra. The fonts are really quite something [1] you've probably already seen it, it's this one https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
Did anybody else get a strong emotional reaction to these? I connect them to my BBS years. Reminded me of chat sessions on Terminate, ZMODEM downloads that take just too long to finish (only to discover at least one corrupt zip file part after all that wait!). Mild PTSD memories of my mom chasing me with a telephone bill... :-)
int_19h 6y ago
I wish somebody made a bitmap font based on VGA 8x16, but scaled up to look nice on 4K screens. I'd seriously pay for that.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  You could make your own, using pixel art scaling algorithms. (It's also very easy to scale binary images programmatically in something like GIMP by converting to true color, using low-artifacts Lanczos scaling and then going back to b/w binary. That gives you a very similar rendition to pixel art scaling, with no pixelation or blur but a smooth, painting-like effect.)
- viler 6y ago
  https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truetype-font/ https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truet... ? :) (Edit: not a bitmap font, but to make it scalable to arbitrary sizes it pretty much has to be an outlined .ttf).
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Nope, that's not it. An algorithmic approach won't do here - it needs an actual human filling pixels in on the basis of aesthetics rather than math. It doesn't have to be scalable to arbitrary sizes - 2x of the original would do just fine on a wide variety of high-DPI screens, just as the original itself worked on a very broad historical range of non-high-DPI ones.
    - viler 6y ago
      OK, then I think I get what you mean - scaling up the glyphs 2x and adding more bitmap detail, but perceptually sticking to the original shapes as closely as possible. That's something I thought of in the past but it proved trickier than I expected to actually get nice enough results, so I never actually got very far with it but it's not impossible.
      - int_19h 6y ago

288 points by sep 6y ago

Surprisingly legible

It never ceases to amaze me that the IBM PC got these fonts when IBM big iron terminals had a much nicer, modern geometric sans serif font. They just needed to use the 5100 font or terminal fonts they were already using.

viler 6y ago
That's part of the reason I've added more fonts from more compatibles: some of them had much nicer ones - the Cordata and Wyse machines in particular more than doubled the resolution of the original IBM fonts, and indeed achieved something quite close to that 'classic terminal' look. The IBM PC was meant to support both color and monochrome displays though ("color" meaning "cheap TV-resolution CGA" :-)), and there are hints that both functions were originally supposed to go on the same adapter board. That plus cost cutting are probably why the same ROM chip contained both the color and monochrome fonts, so neither of them could have been very high-res...
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I love that the Cordata PPC-400 was included. It's one of the most beautiful screen fonts I've ever seen.
  - viler 6y ago
    Yep! They seemed to be quite proud of it in the PPC-400 User's Guide. It goes on to describe the availability of various character attributes (reverse video, underlining, blinking, intensity) as "part of Corona's continuing effort to provide you with the finest and most advanced products". Definitely a well-done design. If it wasn't for the ToshibaSat 8x14 font (also included), that'd be my code editor font of choice now.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      If I hadn't made my own 3270 font, I'd seriously consider it.
mietek 6y ago
> a much nicer, modern geometric sans serif font Which font was that?
- rbanffy 6y ago
  The 5100, 5110, and 5120 computers had a simple sans serif font, with a distinctive narrow zero. The 3270, 3150, and 5250 terminals also shared a very nice design (which was copied into x3270's), with distinctive 6's, 9's and the dotted rounded 0 (that made it easier to distinguish from the squarer O). The 3270 also had the peculiarity of having the digits being slighly taller than the letters. I'm not sure which was the first machine that had the distinctive MDA look that flowed into CGA, EGA, and VGA. Could be something created for the PC. If all else failed, it'd be nicer if they just did like Commodore and copied the Atari 8-bit one with wide stems. The NTSC output for the CGA board more or less mandated the wide stems to prevent color artifacts.
jeppesen-io 6y ago
Likely because the IBM PC project was a very rushed job, by IBM standards. It was built rather quickly using as much as possible off the shelf hardware and software. Due to the buacr bureaucratic nature of the company of the time, the project was largely kept from the rest of the company. That's why they outsourced DOS When the project started, they were way way behind in the home PC market
rob74 6y ago
Yeah, I really hated the standard IBM font too... trying to look like a serif font and having to "fall back" to sans serif most of the time anyway because there just wasn't enough space for the serifs... why?! And the patterns drawn with the standard background "pattern characters" looked horrible in the 80x25 mode which was used most of the time, because the hardware inserted an extra column repeating the 8th column, so the font matrix was actually 9x16, but the font didn't account for that. Actually back in the bad old DOS days I went as far as realizing that it was really easy to replace the "default" font (at least on German/non-US machines, which installed a different font from a file which contained the correct characters for the German code page). So I wrote a small program to hack this code page file and insert my own sans-serif font. An additional realization was that 8 = 3+1+3+1 - so if you designed your "pattern characters" to have 2 "patterned" columns 3 pixels wide and 2 empty columns 1 pixel wide (so the repeated column would be empty too), the pattern would look nicer when shown in the 9x16 matrix. I wonder if I still have that laying around somewhere...

sep 6y ago

Link to the detailed font index: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/ https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

urb 6y ago

Amir rulezz!

dilandau 6y ago

For linux users, you can open the .FON files with fontforge, then go to file menu -> generate to create a .bdf file (I prefer to use bitmap over ttf to avoid any artifacts).

viler 6y ago
At the right sizes the included 'Mx' fonts should avoid those artifacts - they're ttf but contain embedded bitmaps, which seem to be better supported in Linux than in Windows (supported, but silly hacks required) or macOS (seemingly not supported at all). :) I do want to include .bdf fonts in future versions, especially if the conversion is as simple as that. But if I do it I want to be sure I do it correctly, and I'm still not 100% familiar with the format.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Any chance you can publish some details on what your workflow looks like to generate these fonts? I'd be interested in generating some bitmap conversions of some classic non-VGA fonts, like Apple's bitmap fonts (some of which were never converted to TrueType!) and some X11 standards like fixed13.
  - viler 6y ago
    To sum it up (links to the various tools can be found at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#tools_used https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#tools_used): usually the starting point is some sort of raw bitmap data, which I convert to .png with something like Binxelview, although ImageMagick can also do the trick. The .png then goes into Bits'N'Picas to trace the glyphs and produces an outlined .ttf. This .ttf is far from final however, as it still needs an encoding with proper Unicode mapping, some height/metric adjustments, and so on. The specific changes depend on the font, but they can be done in Fontforge, which is very scriptable thankfully. The same goes for things like aspect correction (mark all glyphs, scale down on the X-axis) and producing embedded bitmaps (add "bitmap strikes" at the target pixel/point sizes, export w/"bitmap in TTF/OTF" option). Fontforge's bitmap export options should also let you create bitmap-only fonts in formats like .bdf or .otb. As I still use only .fon for bitmap fonts (though this should change in the future), I do those in a different program named Fony, which like Bits'N'Picas can import the glyphs from a .png and export to .fon after some adjustments and metadata massaging. More details than that would probably belong in a blog post or so, but that's it in a nutshell.

bloopernova 6y ago

This led me on a short Google trip to find the Sun Openboot font: Finding this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-identification-of-the-font-being-used-for-the-solaris-console-in-tex https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-... And this is the TTF of that font: https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/OSX/gallant12x22.ttf https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/OSX/gallant...

cerberusss 6y ago
Around 2000, I worked at Lucent, which was a Sun shop. But I can't remember this font. Was it only used on the console, i.e. in text mode?
- bloopernova 6y ago
  When you hit stop-a to emergency-halt the system, you'd see this console.
- mceachen 6y ago
  If you booted single-user or didn't have a graphical login manager, you'd see this on the console on SunOS 4 and earlier (80s and 90s, pre-Solaris). I think by the time Solaris (or even open look) rolled around, it had a graphical user login.
  - brirec 6y ago
    Solaris 2.6 and 7 didn’t have a graphical boot splash, so you’d see this while watching a SPARC box boot up.
    - cellularmitosis 6y ago
      Just recently found an adafruit guide to building a solaris 2.6 setup using QEMU. The nostalgia! https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-an... edit: just remembered that you sadly don't get to see Sun Gallant Demi in all its glory, because it boots using the QEMU openfirmware.

Exmoor 6y ago

Unrelated to the fonts, but I really love that CSS they're using to emulate the ANSI interfaces of my youth. Perhaps it's just a product of my age, but I find it a lot more usable then a lot of similar website interfaces.

airstrike 6y ago
It's so incredibly easy to parse visually. I'm in heaven. The lime-green background for selected text adds a special touch! I wish there was a CSS framework for this type of UI language
- signal11 6y ago
  Something like TuiCss[1]? [1] https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
- tass 6y ago
  There is bootstra.386 which put a smile on my face: https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/ https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sjs382 6y ago
https://artpacks.org https://artpacks.org uses a similar interface, which was super fun to work on.

flobosg 6y ago

I am using an old laptop as a console-only typewriter. This might come in handy for inspiration, thank you!

bitwize 6y ago

Oh my God, they have the Tandy 2000 font.

magoon 6y ago

A trip down memory lane, bringing back so much just looking at the fonts. It’s amazing how much I associate each company’s historical fonts with their brand.

plg 6y ago

WOW there is a strange visual illusion for me, the red fonts seem to be sitting 3D <behind> the rest of the page

zerocrates 6y ago
Do you wear glasses? You could be seeing the effects of chromatic abberation. I have fairly thick and high-refractive-index glasses and can regularly experience this phenomenon where different-colored text shifts in different directions, creating a "3D" effect. The Microsoft logo is a great example of this: if I tilt my head up the red/orange and blue squares seem to move toward each other, and the yellow and green ones away from each other, and vice versa if I tilt my head down.
kmill 6y ago
Two possibilities come to mind. The red channel in each pixel might be at the left, causing all the pure red text to be slightly shifted relative to the other text. Another might be chromatic aberration if you wear glasses. (This causes the Windows logo to look comically maligned for me.) Whether it's behind or in front of the text would depend on the tilt of your head.
- zerocrates 6y ago
  Wow I posted at basically the same time, and also mentioned the Microsoft logo. It's just a perfect test case to see this kind of thing happening, I guess.
viler 6y ago
My hunch is that this could be the result of subpixel antialiasing. It often creates a sort of fringing around the text, which ideally isn't very apparent... but it takes advantage of separate RGB components. Red text has only one component, so the fringing may have the effect of darkening on one side, and brightening on the other, which can look a little like 3d relief.

ggerules 6y ago

Thank you for posting this! It brings back a lot of memories.

dang 6y ago

2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001964 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098262 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695319 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430 It's a fine thing to submit but the cutoff for dupes is about a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Edit: scratch that, we'll make an exception since it's the first new release in several years. See discussion in subthread below.

sep 6y ago
v2.0 of this was released just a few days ago, after several years without a major version. Hence the submission. Btw, thanks for doing the hard and important work of moderating hn! [Edit: I realize now that the last part may come off as sarcastic, so I want to emphasize it is sincere. While here I disagree with the action, I'm generally very thankful for the moderators' work.]
- dang 6y ago
  Ah, ok, I missed that. And now I understand why you submitted https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#history https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#history originally. But are the differences with v2 enough to support a substantively different discussion? I would say probably not? This comes up whenever new versions of projects are released - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 for a longer explanation. I'd be happy to make an exception if there's a case for the diff with v2.
  - sep 6y ago
    The original submission-title was more descriptive (something like: "The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0 Released: 133 fonts added, new online index"), but I assume a moderator edited it to the current, more concise, one. Feature-wise, the new version offers about 3 times as many "oldschool" fonts as the previous version, and also introduces the use of several techniques not typically used elsewhere to make the fonts more palettable for modern use (aspect correction, embedded bitmaps to bypass anti-aliasing). Also the online font index has more details regarding each font. I would say that a very detailed online font index and fonts that are now much more palettable for modern use, may well be grounds for new discussions.

kristopolous 6y ago

I'm using it for my latest bootsta/386¹. It's really the best version of these fonts out there. It's exceptionally accurate. I've gotten accuracy that just simply wasn't possible for the last 2 versions of bootstra. The fonts are really quite something [1] you've probably already seen it, it's this one https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386

emmanueloga_ 6y ago

Did anybody else get a strong emotional reaction to these? I connect them to my BBS years. Reminded me of chat sessions on Terminate, ZMODEM downloads that take just too long to finish (only to discover at least one corrupt zip file part after all that wait!). Mild PTSD memories of my mom chasing me with a telephone bill... :-)

int_19h 6y ago

I wish somebody made a bitmap font based on VGA 8x16, but scaled up to look nice on 4K screens. I'd seriously pay for that.

zozbot234 6y ago
You could make your own, using pixel art scaling algorithms. (It's also very easy to scale binary images programmatically in something like GIMP by converting to true color, using low-artifacts Lanczos scaling and then going back to b/w binary. That gives you a very similar rendition to pixel art scaling, with no pixelation or blur but a smooth, painting-like effect.)
viler 6y ago
https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truetype-font/ https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truet... ? :) (Edit: not a bitmap font, but to make it scalable to arbitrary sizes it pretty much has to be an outlined .ttf).
- int_19h 6y ago
  Nope, that's not it. An algorithmic approach won't do here - it needs an actual human filling pixels in on the basis of aesthetics rather than math. It doesn't have to be scalable to arbitrary sizes - 2x of the original would do just fine on a wide variety of high-DPI screens, just as the original itself worked on a very broad historical range of non-high-DPI ones.
  - viler 6y ago
    OK, then I think I get what you mean - scaling up the glyphs 2x and adding more bitmap detail, but perceptually sticking to the original shapes as closely as possible. That's something I thought of in the past but it proved trickier than I expected to actually get nice enough results, so I never actually got very far with it but it's not impossible.
    - int_19h 6y ago