VileR

Linked in this article is VileR's excellent website <https://int10h.org/>. In fact, it is linked 8 times in this article. If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend following those links. VileR's site is probably the best resource we have today that preserves the various PC OEM fonts from a bygone technological era -- an era that lives on in the memories of those of us who first encountered these machines early in life. I'm genuinely in awe of the time and effort VileR has poured into recovering each font, and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction, and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent countless hours there comparing different OEM fonts, and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!

My favorite font of the time was ISO 9x16: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_dos_iso9

my favorite ascii glyphs are the classic IBM Code Page 437: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

There are many aspect ratios of fixed width fonts (see https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/), from square to rectangular, and this one is more than twice as tall as wide Is there any info or research on which width/height ratio of a fixed width font is the best for readability?

> You can find the "NES font" and other 8x8 pixel fonts around the web. This is my favorite pixel font pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/ One of my favorite fonts.

The Corona is my favorite font at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?cordata_ppc-400#- On FreeBSD the SPARC console font is called “gallant” by the way and is easy to use if installed: vidcontrol -f 8x16 gallant

The hercules card had a "80 × 25 text mode with 9 × 14 pixel font (effective resolution of 720 × 350, MDA-compatible)" (wikipedia), but the graphics mode was 720 x 348. It always blew my mind that you'd buy a new videocard, and plug the big CRT monitor in it, and it would switch between different resolutions. Precisely because the holes and pixels don't line up, they supported a huge range of resolutions and it didn't look as smeared as on LCDs. I think the mask in the CRT itself also contributed to a kind of subpixel Anti-Aliasing. And I've never seen this in real life, but it's amazing, using the hardware implementation to force 1024 colors out of CGA?! https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrate…

Some time ago I switched to "PxPlus IBM VGA 8x16" for all my coding and editing. https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_8x16 It's such a great font. Easy to read, attractive, nostalgic, and the thick letters reduce eye strain. I don't see myself switching away any time soon. I made it the font on my webpage too. https://superjamie.github.io/2022/08/06/ncursesw if you'd like to see it in action. If you try it, make sure you set it to 12pt/16px or a multiple of those.

I also have a hard time understanding the question, but reading the text, it asks a different question: “The thing is I'm going to need to display stuff on it so I need character gloves and little graphics and stuff like that. Are there any standard glyphs or libraries for resolutions that small?” Because of that and the use of ‘one color’, I think/guess the OP has a 80×20 display that isn’t black and white (say a LED panel), and looks for fonts that can be used on it (I would go look at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ or https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts, or look at old Mac and Windows bitmap fonts for those (warning: copyright laws may apply)) and, possibly, libraries to show an UI on it.

I use a classic VGA Bios font and never looked back. https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

Oh. One of these again. I get the feeling that "coding fonts" are converging on a certain look. There's a little variation, but not much... which is why I use 1980s microcomputer and terminal fonts to code in. See the Ultimate Old School PC Font Pack for a great collection: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/ Of the more modern coding fonts, I find Iosevka the absolute prettiest (available under a free license anyway). My Visual Studio Code is set to use Iosevka.

In my Visual Studio I'm using Toshiba Sat 8x14 (CP437, square 1:1) from oldschool pc fonts. For me its the best. https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#sec2-toshiba

There was a post just recently on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23129434 If the Fontstruct thing is better or easier, the author might benefit from a pointer to it. Also it was mentioned that the https://int10h.org site has its own article on the method they used, but I can't find the link now.

For years now I've set the font in various IDEs and terminals to Px437 ATI 9x16 at font size 16 from int10h as well: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#ati_gfx I love the pixel perfect goodness.

It's your project, you can make it look however you like, and if you like how it is now, that's great. If however you wanted to go for a more authentic MS-DOS look, consider using these fonts instead – https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ – they are identical (down to the pixel) with the original BIOS fonts used in IBM PC and compatible hardware.

Indeed, for an 8x8 pixel font one can't really go wrong with something more similar to what was used in the early microcomputers: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/ Edit: it actually looks like a 5x7, in which case the best font would probably be something like the 5x7 a lot of character LCDs use: https://www.pjrc.com/mp3/lcdfont2a.jpg

I keep searching for the perfect coding font. And I keep coming back to the classic VGA 8x16. I don't know what it is about it, but it just looks right. (It probably has a lot to do with the date of my birth, but then again... who cares why something feels right, when it does?) https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists. That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font). Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts. If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains…

Hello HN! This project has been featured here in the past, and perhaps the new version would also be of interest. The goal of the collection is still the same: taking classic hardware/system charsets from pre-GUI IBM PCs and compatibles, and providing accurate conversions to current font formats. (The scope has expanded a little bit, so that early "not-quite-compatible" platforms are also fair game.) v2.0 adds: - 133 new fonts (from 52 different sources) - A new TrueType variant with embedded bitmaps (where supported, this bypasses anti-aliasing and ensures sharp rendering) - Another new TrueType variant which provides aspect correction (to reproduce the non-square pixel ratios of the original resolutions) - Web font (.woff) conversions - A full font index on the website, including information on the original hardware and how the charsets were used (for appropriate historical context) - A preview page for each individual font, which lets you play around with sizes, aspect ratios and sample text The linked blog post has more details, but you can also browse the collection directly at http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts. There's also a showcase section, with links to projects that employ these fonts in useful and creative ways. Comments welcome. Enjoy!

It's not that forgotten, for example int10h font collection (which probably is the biggest bitmap font resource) prominently shows aspect-ratio corrections for the fonts https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

One nit about the site: the screen elements forced me to make my browser window more than half the size of my screen, and I use a 3840×2160 monitor. My windows are normally about ⅕ the size of the screen and roughly 4:3 ratio shaped. It was nearly unusable like that (I don't suffer issues from almost any other site.) On the game/bracket: it narrowed me down to Noto Sans Mono and I'm honestly not surprised, it's one of the few fonts that comes with my operating system that I find acceptable. That being said, what I actually have my terminal and Emacs set to is “AcPlus IBM VGA 8x16” from https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/. I've always been fond of the VGA font and it tickles all the right usability marks for me.

The CGA colour palette was horrid on RGB monitors but on Composite it could look quite good for its time. Not Amiga-level good but good enough. Of course composite monitors were not really a thing in the IBM PC world so it was to little avail. Here's an example of a screen in the mentioned horrible hot-pink palette: https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_… ...and here's the same screen viewed on a composite monitor: https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_… These images come from this page: https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/cga-composite-graphics-and-my-a… If this isn't enough it seems to be possible to coax ~1000 colours out of these cards as well: https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrate…

Most of them are emulating the EGA/VGA palette which was a regression from the CGA terminal colors. https://int10h.org/blog/2022/06/ibm-5153-color-true-cga-palette/

https://int10h.org/blog/2016/01/windows-cleartype-truetype-fonts-embed… http://www.electronicdissonance.com/2010/01/raster-fonts-in-visual-stu…

160x100 CGA low resolution could do 16 color (bit of a hack, but semi-official). And then there were tricks to get more colors in higher resolutions as well, especially if you used the TV output instead of a CGA monitor. https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrate…

I would suggest this range of fonts over Perfect DOS VGA 437: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

Can't tell you about the kids, but I started out with an amber monochrome CRT, and I used plenty of Apple II and MS-DOS text mode over the years, so it's not a lately adopted affectation. :) But I'm being around 75% facetious about calling it "original sin" -- I think Atkinson is right that "light mode" is better for graphics work, and his push for it on the Lisa and Mac was probably the right move. But yes, I also think of "light mode" as "starting into a light bulb all day" and when possible prefer light text on a dark background. How much of that is real and how much is just part of the same nostalgic impulse that leads me to install PxPlusVGA9 [0]... [0] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_9x16

The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

If you program a register at a moment and in a way that causes two signals to "collide", the result effectively depends on transistor behavior. That in turn can be temperature dependent. For an example on the PC see https://int10h.org/blog/2023/03/cga-6845-crtc-phantom-vsync-glitch/