
Arcade Game Typography - Impossible
https://readonlymemory.vg/shop/book/arcade-game-typography/
======
colanderman
It's a shame these are all presented with giant blocky pixels. It makes some
of the fonts look _really_ ugly (ex. Lady Bug). Better IMO to present them as
they would appear on the medium for which the designers intended them, a CRT.
[https://www.hottechzone.com/is-an-old-crt-television-
perfect...](https://www.hottechzone.com/is-an-old-crt-television-perfect-for-
retro-gaming/) has some good examples of the difference.

Another post from the same site, with a high-quality image of a Space Invaders
CRT for direct comparison with the first example in the article:
[https://www.hottechzone.com/taito-space-invaders-arcade-
mach...](https://www.hottechzone.com/taito-space-invaders-arcade-machine/)

~~~
Rooster61
I dunno, I think it's good to look at these typefaces from a different
perspective. An analogy would be examining a butterfly that has been pinned so
that its anatomy can be examined up close. It's not as pretty or elegant as
seeing it fluttering around outside, but it does let you experience it in a
way that gives you information you wouldn't normally get.

~~~
colanderman
I don't disagree, but to continue the analogy, pictures of live butterflies in
flight are nonetheless invaluable to a researcher, and difficult to obtain.
Although emulation helps, the "original look" of many of these fonts may be
forever lost to time as the original hardware dies out.

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mnem
In case you’re looking for a cheaper copy (or that sells out) I think that’s
just a hardback version of
[https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0500021740](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0500021740)

~~~
bartread
Damn: I wish I'd seen that before. No comments on this when I ordered. Would
also have dodged their annoying checkout process.

~~~
jiofih
It’s mentioned in the page itself, third paragraph. I think the extra 20 is
definitely worth it for the hard cover.

What annoyed you during checkout? Took 30s on mobile for me.

~~~
bartread
On reflection I'm actually pretty happy with the decision to go with
hardcover.

Nowadays I've got quite used to Paypal checkout for sites I've not bought from
before, which has the advantage that you generally don't need to enter any
details or digout your card.

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ungzd
On ZX Spectrum, games often had fonts based on MICR[1] or OCR-A[2]. Example:
[3]. I still don't understand why. I see these fonts in the wild very, very
rarely. Was they popular in UK in 80s maybe? Was they used even outside bank
cheques?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A)

[3]
[https://archive.org/serve/zx_Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_...](https://archive.org/serve/zx_Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_Game_a/Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_Game_a_screenshot.gif)

~~~
AndrewStephens
That's an easy question to answer - because they looked cool and futuristic.
If you watch old episodes of Doctor Who or 70s films you will often see props
and displays with similar fonts, and video games followed that aesthetic.

I guess those fonts had just started to appear on cheques and machine readable
tickets so people associated those typefaces with computers.

~~~
sedatk
Exactly, the cheque font was synonymous with sci-fi back then.

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wernsey
I'm a sucker for these old bitmap fonts. Here's a collection of links I've
bookmarked over the years:

* [https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys...](https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts) and [https://damieng.com/blog/2011/03/27/typography-in-16-bits-sy...](https://damieng.com/blog/2011/03/27/typography-in-16-bits-system-fonts)

* [http://www.type-invaders.com/sinclair/8bitfonts/](http://www.type-invaders.com/sinclair/8bitfonts/)

* [https://opengameart.org/content/the-collection-of-8-bit-font...](https://opengameart.org/content/the-collection-of-8-bit-fonts-for-grafx2)

* [https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8440](https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8440) (scroll down a bit)

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gavanwoolery
I'm an even bigger fan of the slightly larger and more detailed bitmap fonts
used in the early 90s, popularized on Amiga, arcade machines, and in
particular the demoscene. These fonts were the inspiration for the Voxel Quest
logo [1].

[1] [https://ksr-
ugc.imgix.net/assets/011/631/892/83281ea18b64eab...](https://ksr-
ugc.imgix.net/assets/011/631/892/83281ea18b64eab16462df01b2f10908_original.png?ixlib=rb-2.1.0&crop=faces&w=1552&h=873&fit=crop&v=1463685891&auto=format&frame=1&q=92&s=2b5a3fdab8c787c280dc6a8b25277744)

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ArtWomb
Don't sunset bitmap fonts just yet (or many old school gamedev dark arts).
They can be more portable and faster to render than vectors ;)

~~~
matthewfcarlson
The software I work on at work uses bitmap fonts. We actually have a system
that renders windows fonts without subpixel rendering on a few backgrounds and
then saves the output to header files for us to include in the project. It's
mainly for space saving reasons and the fact that getting a proper text
rendering system was more work than it was worth.

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tenebrisalietum
So what's your favorite, HN?

Personally I'm a big fan of

\- the Apple ][ font,

\- what I call the "Nintendo Font" that was in many 8-bit NES games and arcade
games. It's the font in Pac-man. I believe some Atari games from the 70's used
it,

\- The VT220 font - I use the GlassTTY font in PuTTY, I really like it.

~~~
mmphosis
\- the Apple ][ font, I sometimes use it in Terminal as it is compact and
retro.

[https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml](https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml)

~~~
smallduck
re the apple 2 font, yes i instantly recognized the space invaders page in the
book to be exactly, or nearly so, the upper case 40-column character set used
on the apple 2.

ha, i used the condensed (ie. 80-column) version of this font in my terminal
too, and for coding as well. see the xcode theme i made...
[https://smallduck.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/throwback-
xcode-t...](https://smallduck.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/throwback-xcode-theme/)

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richrichardsson
Used to love making bitmap fonts in DPaint on the Amiga, something quite
meditative about it almost.

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jordn
These are beautiful and very on-trend rn. Anyone have links to good webfont
versions?

~~~
CmdrKrool
Not webfonts as such, but this site will generate you some images:
[https://nfggames.com/games/fontmaker/](https://nfggames.com/games/fontmaker/)

(I feel the book must have been inspired by this site somehow, particularly
when you read the various 'notes' that pop up after selecting a font from the
dropdown.)

~~~
rob74
Great site! Unfortunately they're limiting themselves to arcade machines. For
instance, the font from Lemmings looks great too:
[http://www.lemmingsuniverse.net/shots/images/amigashot03.png](http://www.lemmingsuniverse.net/shots/images/amigashot03.png)

~~~
onion2k
_Unfortunately they 're limiting themselves to arcade machines._

There are _thousands_ of different bitmap fonts from the 8- and 16-bit era of
gaming. Any book about them has to be limited in some way.

~~~
rob74
I wasn't talking about the book, but about the site CmdrKrool mentioned.

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atum47
It would be interesting to pass all those fonts trough a neural network so a
GAN try to generate some new ones

~~~
gwern
In a sense, any GAN which generates fonts, like
[https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1095603397179396098](https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1095603397179396098)
or [http://www.machinelearningfont.com/](http://www.machinelearningfont.com/)
or [https://medium.com/@robert.munro/creating-new-scripts-
with-s...](https://medium.com/@robert.munro/creating-new-scripts-with-
stylegan-c16473a50fd0) , is already generating bitmap fonts, because the
generator is upscaling through multiple resolutions. If you want the 'bitmap'
version, you'd just grab the 32px layer output etc.

But the pixel art I've seen from GANs hasn't been too good. I think it's
ultimately because it's very impoverished a representation and pixel art
relies heavily on us already knowing what we might be looking at, and a GAN
doesn't know that. Imagine trying to learn to generate Pokemon when there's
only a few hundred examples of them and you've never seen any of the millions
of plant or animal species they are based off of?

~~~
atum47
I'm doing some experiments with GAN. I think I'm halfway done. I don't want to
talk much about it now, cause I'm afraid of failure, but... if things goes
well, I'm might post something interesting here this weekend.

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phkahler
Does it have the vector fonts?

~~~
Jolter
Looks like it's about pixel fonts specifically.

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bronlund
So no fonts included?

~~~
slacka
You can make your own. Here is guide to rip fonts from your favorite childhood
arcade machine using MAME:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170107110149/https://nfgworld....](https://web.archive.org/web/20170107110149/https://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/623)

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workthrowaway
this looks so good! thanks.

