Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hoard-of-bitfonts: bitmap fonts from disused operating systems

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Hoard-of-bitfonts: bitmap fonts from disused operating systems

#11

Post by LocalH »

unnah wrote: post #6

Huh. Apparently the default Amiga Topaz font was redesigned for Kickstart ROM 2.0 without changing the name of the font. Compared to the old version, the new Topaz font does look rather generic.

Topaz 1.x is basically a slightly modified IBM BIOS font. Topaz 2.x may look more generic but it’s not so blatantly a copy of any other such font that I’m aware of. Sort of like how the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 have identical lowercase characters.

Re: Hoard-of-bitfonts: bitmap fonts from disused operating systems

#16

Post by AnthonBerg »

Propolice wrote: post #2

Nice catalog. I also prefer bitmap fonts for terminals on low DPI and even 32" 4K monitors. The OLDSCHOOL PC FONT RESOURCE is a treasure trove.

Ditto!! I’m hooked on the 8x8 high-fantasy font EagleSpCGA Alt3 from the Ultimate PC Font Pack. I use it everywhere.

Well, almost everywhere. The square font tends to break certain application layouts. So those get an 8x14 IBM VGA font.

Re: Hoard-of-bitfonts: bitmap fonts from disused operating systems

#17

Post by joombaga »

ourcat wrote: post #14

I'm tempted to write something to help convert these for using in various U8g2/GFX libraries for micro-controllers. (I like building LED matrix/screens.) It seems monobit only supports reading C/C++ fonts.

You may find this useful/inspirational.

https://github.com/ropg/truetype2gfx

I've been using it for my Watchy (an esp32 that uses Adafruit GFX).

Re: Hoard-of-bitfonts: bitmap fonts from disused operating systems

#18

Post by megameter »

Someone wrote: post #7
phkahler wrote: post #3

I still have my original Interact computer which is not listed. The text on that is 5x5 pixel characters with 1 pixel in between, so 6x6 but the gap is not encoded in the font. Only upper case characters were supported. The font is not in a separate prom, it's in the main 2K eprom along with the tape read/write functions and some very simple keyboard scanning and pixel, box, and text rendering functions. I think a RO…

Looking at the screen shots in https://www.old-computers.com/museum/software_detail.asp?st=... , it doesn’t look bad. Of course, those are lying. https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=100... says “The Interact shipped with 2 joysticks, a built-in tape recorder, a TV RF modulator and 2 KB of ROM”. So, in real life, those characters were filtered through a NTSC tv signal. Also, the last comment on ht…

The term "character generator" in video specifically refers to hardware that overlays text onto the video signal. That is, in this case it's not a "text mode", it's a bitmap graphics mode used for text, which appears likely just going by the screenshots. There weren't many computer systems taking this approach in 1978, since any bitmap mode would be RAM-hungry, so they were usually either text centric(Commodore PET) or had both text and graphics modes and hybrids(Apple II, Atari).

Re: Hoard-of-bitfonts: bitmap fonts from disused operating systems

#19

Post by anthk »

rbanffy wrote: post #15

How do you dare to call these operating systems and computers “disused”?!

Except Mac OS 7-9 (media production because a patched Mac OS 9 under a G4 is beast) and DOS (expensive ad-hoc industrial hardware), most computer/OSes aren't used to anything but retrogaming/retroemulation except with some niches with the Atari STE/FreeMint communities.
Post reply on HN