See also these articles, for real old-school fonts: https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys... https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other... Me, I grew up on Acorn machines, so those are my classic nostalgia font. Although, on a modern LCD with square-edged pixels, they look like arse --- jaggy and overly bold. I wonder if there's a way to emulate fuzzy CRTs with Truetype...
I don't know about TrueType or hinting, but there are a couple of post-processing shaders that achieve the effect, as commonly used by emulators[1]. If these fonts are used in some kind of retro game, those shaders could be applied as well. Desktop compositor on X11 effects could do the same. Not sure if there is a way to apply shaders to an entire desktop elsewhere (maybe f.lux do something like that to change the c…
The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful, the files are CC licensed but the actual fonts are still copyright whoever/whatever created them. They didn't redraw or create new fonts here, they ripped out the old fonts from the systems that used them and converted to TTF, etc.
I'll worry about that when I get a cease and desist (I don't expect to get a cease and desist...the market value of these fonts is approaching zero, and from the history I know of these old fonts, there was a lot of borrowing even back then).
Yes - while working on this pack I did look into the question of copyright on the original bitmap fonts; what I found seems to indicate that the designs may not be copyrightable as such (e.g.: http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=164817#p164817), although I'd still rather err on the side of caution, hence the disclaimer at the end of the readme. If they were copyrightable, I imagine that IBM would've sued graphics card manufacturers left and right - from Hercules (which ripped the IBM MDA font bit-for-bit) to the multitudes of VGA clone manufacturers who also used IBM's fonts.
BTW, just to correct one of the above comments: a few of my own versions did involve some redrawing/original design (specifically the extended 'PxPlus' unicode variants, and the BIOS-only fonts which originally included only the lower 128 ASCII characters). Although of course this has no bearing on any copyright (or lack thereof) on the originals.
At any rate, sure - I encourage you to use these fonts in your projects, and thanks for the comments!
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#23What I'd really like to see is a font that has lots of sub- and super-scripts and other mathy symbols, like: ⎛⎜⎝⎞⎟⎠⎡⎢⎣⎤⎥⎦⎧⎩⎪⎫⎬⎭⎮ so that I can keep my class notes in text files. So far the only font I found that supports a lot of that sort of thing is DejaVu Sans mono but even that is rather sparse- there's very few Greek letter super/subscripts say, and there's a limited selection of Latin superscripts. Block elemen…
ReactOS has such a version of the VGA font, UniVGA16: https://github.com/mirror/reactos/blob/master/reactos/media/...
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about TrueType or hinting, but there are a couple of post-processing shaders that achieve the effect, as commonly used by emulators[1]. If these fonts are used in some kind of retro game, those shaders could be applied as well. Desktop compositor on X11 effects could do the same. Not sure if there is a way to apply shaders to an entire desktop elsewhere (maybe f.lux do something like that to change the c…
There's https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#25I used the VGA8 font for xterms and such for years and years until I switched to Terminus. If someone designed a scalable font based on VGA8, that would be totally awesome.
The font "IBM Nouveau" may be close to what you're looking for: http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font - it's scalable and VGA-based, although still kind of angular. (I'm actually planning my own version to complement the oldschool PC font pack, but for now this might do.)
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#26I always wonder why IBM chose these horrible serif designs over their previous, much nicer, cleaner, fonts you can find on their 32xx terminals...
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#27I made an AwesomeWM theme last month using these. I gave up on it, too hard on the eyes ;) http://i.imgur.com/LDSOade.png (code at https://github.com/Elv13/ , but that particular theme isn't pushed yet as it require upstream patches still in the CI)
Try setting the text color to #7fff7f. It makes things a nice phosphor-glow green; this is how I have my xterms set up.
For amber, the X11 color "goldenrod" (#daa520) is near perfect.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#28I always wonder why IBM chose these horrible serif designs over their previous, much nicer, cleaner, fonts you can find on their 32xx terminals...
The double-width vertical strokes improve visibility.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#29This is one great presentation. An accomplished fusion of form and contents. And, among all web pages with black background, this is the rare one that _doesn't_ peel your retina off while you're looking at it. My respects to the author.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#30This page desperately needs -webkit-font-smoothing: none;