
Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack - vog
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/
======
CPLX
Even just reading that home screen brings back strange sense memories. For
anyone curious the main font used for this website is the "IBMVGA8" one.

As a writer, I still think drafting things from scratch was best done on a
90's era black background PC running WordPerfect.

I guess theoretically it's still possible to do that -- I wonder if anyone
makes turnkey systems for that the way some people still specialize in old
typewriters.

~~~
shakna
> I guess theoretically it's still possible to do that -- I wonder if anyone
> makes turnkey systems for that the way some people still specialize in old
> typewriters.

I still run WordPerfect. No other writing software has come close to making
that same experience.

Til Win8.1, I was able to get it running natively with a little bit of effort,
but it became too much of a hassle at that point.

Now, I run Win3.1 inside DOSBox, with WordPerfect installed. It's more stable
than the my old IBM PC was, so I'm fairly happy, though crashes do still
occur. The keymap differences do take some getting used to when swapping
between everyday things and WP though: F1->Escape, F3->F1, etc.

Getting files from WP to the rest of the world isn't entirely straight
forward, and I've found a lot of the WP->DOCX converters fail with typesetting
and other issues, so I just print to PDF now.

~~~
vog
Very interesting approach! I often hear people complain about how all programs
in the old days were more efficient, but I never met anybody who actually
lived up to the logical conclusion. [1]

 _> I run Win3.1 inside DOSBox_

Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use
case?

 _> The keymap differences do take some getting used to when swapping between
everyday things and WP though: F1->Escape, F3->F1, etc._

Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox)

[1] Except for large institutes like banks, air traffic control, etc. working
with huge legacy systems, which is perhaps the other extreme.

~~~
shakna
I've actually done a lot of work with legacy systems, maybe I'm a bit
sentimental.

> Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your
> use case?

None, for the most part. DOSBox is a little better documented around things
that might break.

I chose DOSBox a few years back, because I still had my Windows 3.1 disks, but
I didn't have any DOS disks anymore. Which gave me the option of Virtual
Machine + FreeDOS, or Dosbox. And FreeDOS was very unstable at the time.

I know lots of publishers for DOS-era software are gone, and so people do tend
to choose to pirate if they want to get hold of that sort of thing, but I have
and continue to contract to the government for very sensitive areas, so I
always have to walk a legal tightrope. So, I can only use my old software.

Thankfully, I've never thrown out my floppy disks. I imaged them all in about
'02, being in a country that allows you to transfer your owned data into half
a dozen different mediums as you see fit.

I have actually been having some mounting issues with Dosbox recently, so I
might think about tearing it down and building a VM with FreeDOS instead
sometime soon. (Though thanks to DOS' super simple structure, that doesn't
mean reinstalling everything from scratch).

\---

> Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool?
> (DOSBox)

You could. But it's just WordPerfect. They decided to ignore the standard, and
go with a keymapping that made a little more sense, because of keyboard
designs back then. However, I've got a couple dozen programs I use, and I'd
rather not have WordPerfect with it's own keymapping and a restart to switch
between it and the default. It isn't particularly onerous, just requires a bit
of mental task switching.

I've written two novels in WP, so the keymappings are ingrained, I just have
to get into the "flow" of things before my mind stops hitting the wrong key.

------
rbanffy
BTW, does anyone here have a Sperry Luggable and is willing to dump the screen
font to a file (or take enough high-res pictures that it can be recreated)?

Sample:
[https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/MGIAAOSwFqJWk6Wq/s-l1600.jpg](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/MGIAAOSwFqJWk6Wq/s-l1600.jpg)

If someone wants to grab it: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/vintage-sperry-
luggable-computer-20...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/vintage-sperry-luggable-
computer-20-meg-hd-boots-works-ships-
worldwide/152778302528?hash=item23924be440)

~~~
sixothree
If that interests you, then you may like this video I stumbled across this
weekend.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikO0WOAGWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikO0WOAGWI)

~~~
rbanffy
I thought only Apple II's were able to move stuff by half a pixel to the
side... :-(

------
ggambetta
Heh. Back in the 90s when I was making my first attempts at videogames, I
remember "reverse engineering" the two fonts used in Monkey Island using graph
paper and a magnifying glass :) Good times.

~~~
jenscow
Yes, and I ripped a walking Lemming animation like that.

Talk about time to burn.

------
Annatar
The reason these fonts didn’t get much love is because growing up on ATARI
ST’s, Commodore 64’s, Amigas and ZX Spectrums, the PC tin-bucket and his ugly
fonts were synonymous with an overpriced, slow, loud, power hungry computer
with extremely bad, inelegant hardware with vastly inferior capabilities. The
PC bucket is and remains the butt of jokes to anyone who grew up on the
non—IBM computers from the era or used real UNIX hardware.

When will we see those beatiful _Sun_ OpenBoot PROM and sgi workstation
firmware fonts remade as TTF’s? Much nicer to look at those.

~~~
anthk_
OpenBSD VT fonts are almost the same.

Check Luxi Mono for TTF fonts.

Also: [https://us-
east.manta.joyent.com/jmc/public/tmp/gallant12x22...](https://us-
east.manta.joyent.com/jmc/public/tmp/gallant12x22.ttf)

~~~
rbanffy
I recently noted Solaris 11 boots the console to the same they used with the
SPARCStations.

~~~
Annatar
It’s been that way since around 2012, not that it helped them after Snoracle’s
abundant blunders.

It’d be really cool if they brought the Black-on-Gray console OBP font back to
illumos though. That would be a treat.

------
arnarbi
Been using this (VGA16) on both linux and Mac in all editors, terminals, IDEs
for about a year. It's by far the best typeface for me, and I've tried many.

~~~
steeef
Can you detail your Mac setup a bit? I've tried out these fonts, but end up
struggling to get the right size, and disabling antialiasing makes things look
pretty ugly.

~~~
arnarbi
Sure! I miswrote VGA16, it's actually VGA8. I'm on a retina display, and set
the size to 16pt. I do have anti-alias disabled in e.g. iTerm2, but visually
it makes no difference.

In iTerm2 I disable "Draw bold text in bold font". For vim I use MacVim
sometimes, which hash gfn=PxPlus IBM VGA8:h16.

Screenshot: [https://imgur.com/a/TBuS4](https://imgur.com/a/TBuS4)

~~~
steeef
Ah, that's the kicker. Looks great on my MBP's built-in retina display, but
crap on my older external monitors. So far the only font I've been able to use
on those without anti-aliasing is Monaco.

------
outsidetheparty
Holy cow, the look of that IBMVGA8 font hit me right in the gut: instantly I'm
ten years old and puzzling my way through the great underground empire.

Somehow I expected my petite madeleine moment would be more... literary

------
mrspeaker
These are so fantastic! Out of interest, does anyone know how copyright for
these fonts work? I see a disclaimer, but what would be required to use one of
the fonts in a commercial application?

~~~
naikrovek
In the US, Bitmap fonts aren't copyrightable, IIRC. Only vector fonts are,
because vector fonts are considered software, while bitmap fonts are not.

The vector font files themselves ARE copyrightable, however the shapes that
these software programs (that's what the court considers vector font files)
draw to your screen or printed media are not copyrightable.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces)

------
fraesgrel
I am really happy with Fixedsys Excelsior[0].

[0]: [http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/](http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/)

~~~
kika
And for these who need programming ligatures (like <=, >=, >>=, etc) I made my
own version of it
[https://github.com/kika/fixedsys](https://github.com/kika/fixedsys)

------
ahakki
The IBM fonts are clearly the best. Hardly surprising.

~~~
rbanffy
And their PC fonts were their ugliest.

No other font of theirs compares to their flagship mainframe terminal product
[https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font)

(the original, pixel-by-pixel, is the one used in x3270, from which this was
based)

------
shmerl
Linux still starts booting using such font, until it changes to slightly
different one (make sure to set loglevel=4 or something of the sort, and
remove quiet parameter to actually see text during boot).

~~~
digi_owl
I think what is going on these days is that the font change coincide with the
GPU driver kicking in, as much of what was done with GPUs are now done in the
kernel, rather than X, via the DRI sub-system.

~~~
shmerl
So kernel GPU driver uses some special bitmap font to render in framebuffer?
And how is it working before the GPU driver kicks in and where is that older
font coming from?

~~~
dfox
Modern kernel GPU driver knows enough about the GPU to switch video modes (and
usually also enough to detect connected monitors) and setup some kind of
linear framebuffer mode. The first font used for FB-emulated console is
statically linked into relevant module and usually gets replaced with more
complete font by initramfs code.

IIRC on my desktop the switch to graphical mode happens about 300ms after
loading the kernel. Funnily enough grub2 before that also runs in 4k graphics
mode, which given the 8x16px font is somewhat absurd (and the screen redraw is
slow enough that you can see that it for some reason happens from bottom to
top)

Edit: this is with amdgpu, but both intel, nouveau and ATI rage XL on server
motherboards (which is somehow suboptimal :)) behave similarly on debian.
Maybe with nvidia driver you still get native text mode on consoles (for a
long time nvidia driver was known to interfere with operation of linux
framebuffer infrastructure, but I don't known how this works today).

~~~
shmerl
_> IIRC on my desktop the switch to graphical mode happens about 300ms after
loading the kernel. Funnily enough grub2 before that also runs in 4k graphics
mode, which given the 8x16px font is somewhat absurd (and the screen redraw is
slow enough that you can see that it for some reason happens from bottom to
top)_

Yeah, I noticed that. GRUB font looks similar to the one that's rendered after
the kernel GPU driver takes over.

I also noticed during boot (when systemd messages are showing up) a transition
with amdgpu (RX 480, Polaris) where it displays a color mess for a split
moment, and redraws the screen in new font after that. Never saw that with
Intel.

I haven't used Nvidia in a while, but their blob doesn't support proper
framebuffer if I remember correctly, so it causes an ugly resolution during
boot.

~~~
dfox
On Bonaire (no idea what the card is as I bought it on the basis of being
supported by amdgpu and having right combination of outputs and nothing else)
I don't get mess for split second, but after the switch to graphical mode
first two lines are partialy replaced by randomly colored special characters.

~~~
shmerl
That mess started appearing at some point with kernel 4.14.x.

It's also isolated to upper area and doesn't take the whole screen, but it's
more than two lines.

~~~
jlgaddis
I've seen this as well and noticed that it was only after moving to 4.14.

------
avip
> ...these support extended Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew

I'd love to read about who and why chose this wonderfully useless list of
languages.

~~~
strictnein
You're mistaking character sets for languages.

~~~
avip
I guess I didn't phrase it very clearly - why for example Greek is there
rather than Arabic or Japanese? For the math symbols?

~~~
ljcn
Good luck representing Japanese (kanji especially) in 8x16 pixel dimensions.

Edit: Apparently I'm wrong - 8x8 is acceptable as long as context is given
[https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-
pix...](https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pixel-
resolution-needed-to-support-chinese)

