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The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

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Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#41

Post by ddingus »

rbanffy wrote: post #39
ddingus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also help on composite displays, still a significant consideration at the time the PC was created. PAL didn't suffer too much from this, but NTSC did. Single pixel verticals light up in a rainbow of color. This is actually how the monochrome Apple 2 did it's color graphics! White on blue is a secondary helper here. On sharp displays, the human eye sees the white text at full detail. Humans have only a fraction o…

I think the only PC ever to ship with composite video output was the PC Jr. (edit: sadly, no, it wasn't) I became fond of the white on blue scheme with the MSX machines, but kind of abandoned it when I moved to PCs.

Most PC CGA cards offered composite output. One could use a TV or higher resolution composite monitor and skip the expensive CGA one. I did this, as did a number of others I knew at the time.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#42

Post by teach »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #36
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #12

What 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…

Hi folks, thanks for the suggestions. I know about pragmata pro and unifont. I've tried Unifont, I think it hurt my eyes a bit but it sure has lots of glyphs. Pragmata is very pretty and has great coverage but it's not free and I don't see that it has more glyphs than free fonts, for instance with DejaVu mono I have a subscript for j which I don't see in Pragmata. Or, the APL glyphs for instance; unifont has them too…

Do you know TeX/LaTeX? If not, sounds like you should learn it.

It's all my mathy friends use for taking notes.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#43

Post by rbanffy »

ddingus wrote: post #41
rbanffy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only PC ever to ship with composite video output was the PC Jr. (edit: sadly, no, it wasn't) I became fond of the white on blue scheme with the MSX machines, but kind of abandoned it when I moved to PCs.

Most PC CGA cards offered composite output. One could use a TV or higher resolution composite monitor and skip the expensive CGA one. I did this, as did a number of others I knew at the time.

I guess that having a nice separate character generator ROM for use with their TTL monitore (both for the CGA and the MDA) wound increase the cost. Damn bean counters.

I remember the frustration that my Apple II+ with Videx card (plugged to a monochrome monitor through composite) had nicer looking text than the IBM (mono CGA on RGBi) next to it. Even more infuriating, it was also better than the much better specced Apple IIe that sat to its other side (and used the stock font for 80-column text). And yes, even under PAL-M (PAL with NTSC timings), 80-column text on a color composite screen was awful. My II had a switch installed to turn off color signal generation, making the text much more readable.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#44

Post by qubex »

My family's first computer was an Amstrad 1512. I think it must've been 1987 or thereabouts. I never got very dexterous with it (I have vague recollections of GEM) but some of the visual cues are very impressive.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#45

Post by agumonkey »

Elv13 wrote: post #4

I 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)

Pretty !

Makes me wanna go to old regional offices in case some of their 80s computer are still in a basement somewhere. Just to run the OS of the day and re-experience fonts, layouts, proportions, dithering-patterns..

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#46

Post by starquake »

Elv13 wrote: post #4

I 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)

Very cool. Looks like it could be used in a movie scene on a hacker's computer.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#48

Post by ddingus »

rbanffy wrote: post #43
ddingus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most PC CGA cards offered composite output. One could use a TV or higher resolution composite monitor and skip the expensive CGA one. I did this, as did a number of others I knew at the time.

I guess that having a nice separate character generator ROM for use with their TTL monitore (both for the CGA and the MDA) wound increase the cost. Damn bean counters. I remember the frustration that my Apple II+ with Videx card (plugged to a monochrome monitor through composite) had nicer looking text than the IBM (mono CGA on RGBi) next to it. Even more infuriating, it was also better than the much better specced A…

Yes. I had similar experiences. That Videx card really shined.

At NTSC timings, 80 column text is basically color information. It's just terrible.

Interestingly, sets from about the 80's onward can display 80 column text nicely, given a good DAC driven signal. The signals from back then were square, or coarse, if not square. This makes NTSC light right up. I've been toying with a micro and a DAC and a full interlace, color phase shifting NTSC signal performs well on older analog sets. If the timing is right for the digital ones, they do well too, but it's all about hitting that 13.5Mhz sample window common to most digital sets today.

Back then, just having a full interlaced signal would have helped considerably with text, though at the expense of tearing. Low ambient light and moderate contrast on the display would have largely mitigated this.

As we got Y-C capable displays, one could just use a resistor and send the composite signal into both inputs. This actually did very seriously improve text.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#49

Post by aidenn0 »

bitwize wrote: post #27
Elv13 wrote: post #4

I 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.

I agree goldenrod is just about right. My first monitor was amber-on-black HGA, and setting that color with 9x14 makes me feel nostalgic.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#50

Post by rbanffy »

ddingus wrote: post #48
rbanffy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that having a nice separate character generator ROM for use with their TTL monitore (both for the CGA and the MDA) wound increase the cost. Damn bean counters. I remember the frustration that my Apple II+ with Videx card (plugged to a monochrome monitor through composite) had nicer looking text than the IBM (mono CGA on RGBi) next to it. Even more infuriating, it was also better than the much better specced A…

Yes. I had similar experiences. That Videx card really shined. At NTSC timings, 80 column text is basically color information. It's just terrible. Interestingly, sets from about the 80's onward can display 80 column text nicely, given a good DAC driven signal. The signals from back then were square, or coarse, if not square. This makes NTSC light right up. I've been toying with a micro and a DAC and a full interlace,…

> As we got Y-C capable displays, one could just use a resistor and send the composite signal into both inputs. This actually did very seriously improve text.

This is something I should try with my 8-bit machines.

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