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Wait a second, is this the same font used by QBASIC.EXE and EDIT.EXE?
by sigil 3y ago
Wait a second, is this the same font used by QBASIC.EXE and EDIT.EXE?
- kstrauser 3y agoNope. Microsoft had their own font that was different from Topaz.
- sigil 3y agoYou’re right. Topaz is eerily familiar though, and I never used an Amiga. Wondering if a well-known MSDOS program used it. Turbo Pascal?
- arexxbifs 3y agoThose are text mode DOS programs and used whatever font was in the graphics card’s character ROM. Perhaps you’re thinking of IBM’s CGA or EGA fonts, which were somewhat similar. https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/ https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
- sigil 3y agoI had a CGA graphics card, and it’s quite possible I’m remembering the CGA-2y font!
- Tourniquet 3y agoIf you're British, then you might recall 'The Chart Show' in the 80s/90s that used an Amiga interface as the overlay. Otherwise, it's pretty iconic..
- kstrauser 3y agoThey were all similar in a lot of ways. There are only so many ways you can draw the Latin alphabet in an 8x8 grid. There were plenty of variants to be sure, with different baselines, serif vs sans, kinda of descenders, and all that. Still, it’s inevitable that several are going to look similar. But Topaz was a Commodore font, and I’m sure no other OS distributed it.
- TonyTrapp 3y agoNot quite. QBASIC.EXE/EDIT.EXE use the text mode ROM font. If you didn't load a specific font in DOS (e.g. to switch code pages), you'd get whatever your graphic card's ROM shipped with.
- kstrauser 3y agoFair, so I guess it was most often IBM’s font with those programs. It definitely wasn’t Topaz, though.
- chaxor 3y agoThe font names are edit.exe? I always found it strange that fonts are executables and yet we hear so few uses of fonts as malware. The Linux repo for Ms fonts seems like such a perfect way to get RCE on Linux computer due to the number of people that need some crappy Times New Roman for a paper submission requirement. They're even called TimesNewRoman.exe or Arial.exe.
- TonyTrapp 3y agoFonts are not executable files, those are the official redistributables by Microsoft to install those fonts on systems where they are missing. TrueType fonts are a highly complex file format though, so there have been plenty of RCEs due to broken font parsing in the past.
- colejohnson66 3y agoFonts are not executables in the way you think they are. They do have code for hinting, but it is not executable in the sense of x86 or ARM code. It’s a custom bytecode designed for an interpreter. If a font is being distributed as an executable, that’s because someone’s wrapped it in an installer.
- wolverine876 3y agoMaybe I misunderstand you: I believe they are saying that EDIT.EXE, an executable that edited text, used the Topaz font. Microsoft Word uses fonts, but those fonts aren't named "Word".
- LocalH 3y agoYes and they're also extracted without execution if you install them on Linux. I believe they're self-extracting CABs
- LocalH 3y agoThis is Topaz, specifically the version used in the 1.x series of AmigaOS releases. It is very similar to the original IBM CGA/BIOS font but not identical.