
The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack - sep
http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
======
Elv13
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](http://i.imgur.com/LDSOade.png)

(code at [https://github.com/Elv13/](https://github.com/Elv13/) , but that
particular theme isn't pushed yet as it require upstream patches still in the
CI)

~~~
bitwize
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.

~~~
aidenn0
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.

------
david-given
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/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts)

[https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-
other...](https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other-
english-micros)

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...

~~~
sspiff
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 colours?)

[1]
[http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders](http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders)

~~~
JonnieCache
There's [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

~~~
yankcrime
And also:
[http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)

------
SwellJoe
This is super cool. I've been wanting to make retro video games with modern
tools and for modern platforms (like the web and Android) for fun (in the
genre of Oregon Trail, Infocom text games, King's Quest, etc.). Some of these
are just right for that, and they're CC-licensed, so presumably good for use
in Open Source games.

I find the old typefaces from the early 8 bit and 16 bit days really charming.
They were working with such severe limitations. I remember designing my own
font on my Amiga and using it on my desktop...I kinda wish I still had those
files. But, they weren't nearly as legible as the fonts from the vendors.

~~~
tdicola
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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).

~~~
viley
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](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!

~~~
chris_wot
I joked on the Libreoffice IRC developer channel that we would include them in
the 5.2 release :-) nobody trouted me, which is a worry.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
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 elements and box drawings wouldn't hurt either.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
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
and it's free.

I'll give ReactOS a try, thanks. I had given up hope to be honest, I guess
Unicode is just too big to implement fully.

Edit: Ok, Pragmata costs €19 for just the regular weight- I thought it was
costed by unicode range. I could definitely give that a try, so thanks for the
hint mietek.

2nd Edit: Ouch, no- the mono font is €59. That's too high again :)

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

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

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I know, but haven't used, La/Tex. I'll need to use it at some point, but for
note-taking I prefer plain text files, as I use- except for paper notebooks.

~~~
Elv13
Most implementations of markdown allow inline La/Tex and HTML, this is the
best of both world. You have plain text notes and the power to inline some
math.

I would also suggest iPython notebook (if you can live with web apps, I don't)
as it allow you to see what you write in real time and add some code too (and
being able to use mathplotlib). That being said, I used computer to take note
in high school (The KDE3 version of basket notepad, the evernote of 2006, now
defunct), but switched back to pen and paper for college, formatting was much
easier ;)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I'm thinking of giving markdown a try, for the reasons you say, but I'm not
sure how the maths notation looks like when it's not rendered. I think it's
all escaped characters, in which case it won't be as readable as plain text,
even with rare glyphs that need special fonts.

Some text editors even let you enter rare characters with key combinations
(frex, Vim's digraphs). The end result is pretty much WYSIWIG mathematical
notation.

Here's an example from my machine learning class notes:

    
    
            ⎛ ₙ       ⎞

ƒ̂(x) = θ⎜ ∑ wᵢxᵢ ⎟

    
    
            ⎝ ⁱ⁼⁰     ⎠
    

So, that looks a mess on HN, but if you copy/paste it in a decent text editor,
with a font that has all the necessary characters, you'll get a nice formula
that you can keep around for as long as there's text editors supporting ASCII-
and you don't have to rely on any special tools to render it properly.

That's what I'm going on about- but there's not enough super/subscripts in
ASCII itself. :)

~~~
teach
I'm not sure you're using the term "ASCII" correctly. There are virtually no
characters in ASCII that aren't printed on a key on a typical US keyboard.

Especially when you say "with a font that has all the necessary characters".
ASCII is ASCII. All fonts (except Wingdings) have 100% of the ASCII
characters.

Maybe you're pasting in Unicode; maybe you're using the Windows-only ALT-
numeric keypad garbage.

But I suspect your "nice formula" that renders in a text editor maybe isn't as
clean or standard as you think.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Sorry, I meant "unicode", not ASCII, my bad. :)

I can't edit it unfortunately so it has to stay there, in perpetuity reminding
me of my failings in life.

------
sep
Note that he allows you to enter your own text to try out without actually
downloading the fonts: [http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-
fonts/preview/](http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/preview/)

------
tempodox
This 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.

------
kalleboo
This page desperately needs -webkit-font-smoothing: none;

------
ansible
I 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.

~~~
viley
The font "IBM Nouveau" may be close to what you're looking for:
[http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font](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.)

------
alricb
Oh, the nostalgia.

Does anyone know if there's something similar for Amiga (for ascii art)

~~~
SwellJoe
[https://github.com/rewtnull/amigafonts](https://github.com/rewtnull/amigafonts)

------
rbanffy
I always wonder why IBM chose these horrible serif designs over their
previous, much nicer, cleaner, fonts you can find on their 32xx terminals...

~~~
bitwize
The double-width vertical strokes improve visibility.

~~~
ddingus
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 of blue
receptors, compared to red and green. This means screen noise gets lost in a
sea of blue.

On composite displays, that same sea of blue tends to was artifacts away. SGI
IRIX offered it's Xterm with a great font, white on blue and it was very easy
on the eyes.

I've used that combo for terminals ever since.

~~~
rbanffy
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.

~~~
bitwize
Not only did the CGA have composite out, but by playing with the signal
timings it was possible for a CGA to output more colors than the four nasty
"CGA palette" colors it's known for (no matter which palette you use, shit's
nasty) to a composite monitor.

The demoscene prod "8088MPH" demonstrates this to spectacular effect.

~~~
ddingus
It was also very simple to just use the 640x480 graphics mode on a composite
display. US NTSC color cycles 160 times in that display area, which yields 4
pixels per cycle.

That's a 16 color, any color any pixel display 160x200.

Some PC games offered this option. It should have been in the CGA spec. For
memory reasons, 1 and 2 bits per pixel were common. However, the same amount
of RAM offers the full color set at a reasonable, if modest, resolution. (For
the period)

16 colors on a 160x200 display was considered "nice" at that time, and having
it be official would have improved early PC gaming considerably.

~~~
bitwize
The drawback to this mode is it looks like ass on anything but a composite
display -- which not a lot of people actually hooked up their CGAs to.

There was also a hack to set the display to _text_ mode and reprogram the
character height to fit 100 characters vertically on the screen, then use
chopped-off block graphics characters to yield, in effect, a 160x100,
16-color, any color any _monitor_ (composite or RGB) pseudo-graphics mode that
compared favorably to, say, the 128x48 mono pseudo-graphics mode of the
TRS-80. More PC games made use of this mode; one of the more notable recent
ones is Paku Paku, a (remarkably good) Pac-Man clone.

~~~
ddingus
Yes, all tradeoffs. Of course, it was not too difficult to have multiple sets
of art.

I like 160x100 presentations and thought they were a good use of the CGA
personally. A lot of game can be done at that resolution.

Really, the thing for IBM to have done was 16 color graphics of some kind.
160x200 was the obvious choice in that it would have worked with their memory
scan scheme.

------
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.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
By the way, Windows has its own terminal font:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_\(typeface\))

~~~
tdeck
Another similar one is Fixedsys, the oldest font in Windows:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixedsys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixedsys)

------
Elv13
This project also have a good collection [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-
retro-term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

------
chris_wot
The kerning is dreadful.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I can't decide if this is sarcasm or not, so forgive me if it was. These are
monospace fonts because the character modes in which these fonts were used
were strictly grid-based.

~~~
chris_wot
I was being flippant and did it for the yucks :-)

------
zem
my first thought was that it would make an awesome style for the web
conversion of helppc
[[http://stanislavs.org/helppc/](http://stanislavs.org/helppc/)]

------
amelius
What is the font of the original windows blue-screen?

~~~
rspeer
It would drop to 80-column text mode, so it depends what font your VGA chipset
used there. But the most common one was probably IBM VGA9.

