A collection of text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era PCs | Hacker News Reader

A collection of text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era PCs

int10h.org

368 pointsBerislavLopac63 comments

This reminds me of the time I asked about the "rock" font (from the Slackware days) on StackOverflow, and got WAY more information than I could possibly have expected: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/226593/where-can-i-... Sadly, I'm not in a Linux console very often these days.

What an incredible answer. I love posts like that.

Related, and similarly awesome:

SGI screen fonts: https://njr.sabi.net/2015/11/01/sgi-screen-fonts-converted-f...

DEC VT220 font: http://blog.fosketts.net/2015/10/06/the-best-mac-os-x-termin... (related blog post as canonical site appears to be down)

Here's Commodore 64: http://style64.org/c64-truetype Atari 400/800: http://members.bitstream.net/marksim/atarimac/fonts.html and more Tandy fonts: http://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/trs80.shtml

Just looking at these fonts makes me smell the techy plastic of those old consoles.

+1 for KreativeKorp's wonderful archive of fonts: http://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/index.shtml

They also have the Apple II fonts, which I (incorrectly) superimposed on a VT520 using WebGL here: https://langworth.com

Save functionality doesn't work on your site :(

It's not that long. You got farther than anyone else though ;)

The IBM VGA8 sent me into a funk of nostalgia not only for the early 90s, when a trusty 386 was my best and only friend, but also for 99+, when my first forays into Linux forever cemented the default console font in my visual memory.

This is my terminal font now, and I don't care what anyone says.

Oh good, it's not just me. I've set it as my default font for emacs, terminal and window manager, and it's really great watching people get all nostalgic when they visit my desk.

(Though I'm on PxPlus VGA9.)

Ha, yes, I've done this too over the past year. Including on isolated networks where transferring things from the Internet is mildly complicated, but I gotta have my PxPlus VGA9.

It is amazing how comforting it is to use that font. It's not the first one I encountered certainly, but it was there for what seems like a long time, and for many formative experiences, I guess.

"For TrueType fonts, Microsoft has somehow seen fit to require an unsupported registry hack"

this is an interesting comment. iirc it is because most 'fixed width' true type fonts aren't actually fixed width enough to not make a mess out of the console when used there... any pixels that bleed out of the fixed width bounds are left behind when removing the character.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070516-00/?p=...

So how do Linux and Mac graphical terminal emulators manage to use monospaced true-type fonts? Granted, sometimes box drawing characters don't appear fully seamless, and sometimes a character printed on console isn't in the chosen font, so the fallback font mechanism kicks in and the glyph is rendered with some non-monospaced font and looks ugly and out of place, but by and large, it seems that most terminal emulators manage to work just fine with true-type monospaced fonts.

They redraw more than it would be strictly necessary. Remember that the linked post refers to Windows 95, and the corresponding state of the art in the Unix world was bitmapped X11 fonts.

Anyone have something similar for the original mac fonts? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Original...

There's this: http://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/urbanrenewal.shtm...

Edit: And this: http://www.andreagrell.de/eworld/download1.html (Fontforge can read/convert .sit "suitcase" files)

Wow, a StuffIt[1] .sit file. That takes me back. I had no idea those made it into the OS X era as far as they did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuffIt#Overview

Thanks. That ParcPlace font really takes me back. I still have a copy of my beloved August 1981 "Smalltalk Issue" Byte Magazine, which I reread so many times.

I copied Cream to Apple IIs (as a "shape table font") that was used on many educational titles from Senac (a Brazilian organization that was doing research in computers in education)

As a side note, when Apple announced they were going to use the "San Francisco" font for the Apple Watch, iOS, and macOS, this image shows exactly why I got very worried for a second... :)

For old macintosh fonts, look here: https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/ClassicMacintoshFonts

It's a picture :(

http://int10h.org/images/text_mode_lives!.png

Oh the irony.

The irony that 25 year old terminals can render text better than a modern web browser?

At it's core, a browser is a fancy telnet client. How a site decides to present itself is up to the site author...

Pretty sure encoding it into DOM would take way too many elements and be unnecessarily slow to load.

Someone needs to write an ANSI to CSS converter that can work inline.

Discussion from when this came out last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430

It's like having a BBS in my web browser.

This does bring back a lot of memories of sitting in front of a 486 trying to get Commander Keen to load.

Heh, now i want to try that color scheme on HN.

Make that a 286! :) A 486 was far out of my budget back then. Fun days, anyway!

If someone was wondering, the website is made using IBM VGA8 font. Going to try it as my konsole font.

Edit: Can't get konsole to use true-type fonts.

Actually the top right holds a font switcher.

The "PS/2 thin fonts" (http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#ibmps2_isa ) look very similar to the larger sizes of the X "fixed" font ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface) ) which I've taken a liking to using for just about everything, including in my terminal and editor windows.

Also noticed that the owner of the site, VileR, seemed familiar... then realised he's one of the authors of this astounding demo: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...

Nice. Related, if you need some old-school look bitmap fonts, but need more unicode glyphs: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

I always found BIOS fonts ugly, especially the uppercase and lowercase D letters.

What I do like are monospace fonts having one-story lower A letters. My short list of modern fonts with this feature:

- Monaco (Mac-only, 9pt and 12pt bitmap); "()" and "[]" appear circle- and square-like, resp.

- Anonymous 9 (Mac-only, bitmap)

- Anonymous (TTF, like Anonymous 9)

Plus, some monospace fonts have one-story as cursive/italics letter forms.

Anonymous Pro has two-story a and has much more complete Unicode coverage; has more latin-like proportions (x-height) and has (not strictly necessary) serifs on eg. letter C, lower letter F, etc. so probably doesn't go well with a sans font for other text?

Monaco bitmap 9pt should have a warm place in every classic Mac user's heart, along with Helvetica 9pt.

If you want a flashback into Classic Mac development, a while back I tried some development with MetroWerks CodeWarrior, Symantic C++, and more, and I took screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/scNE2

I spent so long looking for a font that rendered on Windows like Monaco 10 did on Mac that I wound up just making it myself, with a few changes. I called it Monocle and I still use it.

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/517659/monoclefix...

Here's one to add to your list: https://github.com/lucy/tewi-font

Missing the Apple II fonts: http://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml

My BBS nostalgia is spiraling out of control right now. This is so rad.

Shameless plug:

Also, not pixel-perfect and with many symbols absent from the original, is https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font.

Sadly, it never made it to the PCs, being confined to mainframe terminals.

That's actually really nice. Reminds me a little of Computer Modern. Very legible.

Thank you!

The Hyundai XT clone my parents bought for me had an ATI Small Wonder Graphics Solution card. Such a tease: It came with a demo diskette that could show off the 640x200 16-color mode it (and my monitor) supported, but of course no games used it as anything but CGA.

I remember those Wonder devices as well. They could emulate Hercules or CGA, but not EGA. The two available modes didn't look very different on a monochrome monitor though

Some time ago I was looking for DOS era fonts (for the grub4dos project) and found quite a few, see here (there are some previews of converted fonts):

http://reboot.pro/topic/19076-grub4dos-menu-font-type/

I just checked the links to the actual fonts on the thread above and they seem still all working.

For anyone wondering how to set their macOS Terminal font to IBM VGA, select the font, set your font size to 16 and turn off the anti-aliasing checkbox.

Love this website, we need more sites like this!

How bad is the legal status of this web site?

Depends on your country I'd say. In mine not all.

I'm curious about this. Can anyone elaborate on this?

I mean, the fonts on this site are >30 years old, so:

- would it really be 'illegal' to share these files

- would the copyright holders (say, IBM) have any reason to take a site like this down?

Copyright terms are much longer than 30 years, so unfortunately, it's probably illegal without permission from the copyright holders. It's unlikely that they will take action, though.

"It depends". In some jurisdictions typefaces aren't copyrightable, and bitmap fonts don't contain code (unlike TrueType & family)...

According to http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fonts-faq/part2/ bitmap fonts are not copyrightable in the US, where the site is hosted.

It would be fairly simple to just publish some scripts that extract the font from your system. The 8x8 font is at F000:FA6Eh, and I think you can call interrupts to find the location of the others (it changes depending on the system). Then just dump that to a file and process those to whatever font format you want.

I remember having a TSR that would let you change the DOS font to a few different options, it always looked cool and impressed my friends. I think it did a few other weird things like cycle the keyboard LEDs (caps, scroll, num lock) in patterns.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.pascal.bor...

This is quite appealing

Too bad most of these can't be installed on a Mac :(

Which ones? Did a straw poll of the .ttf fonts and I could install all of them.

too bad they dont work in the browser

They do if you convert them to webfonts, it's a few seconds with FontSquirrel

they will not be pixel perfect. antialias make them blurry. i would love to be proven wrong though.

But they do work in the browser :) I can live with antialias and other things and other imperfections. Old monitors were blurry too.

Old monitors were not blurry in good condition, and the distortions from applying un-needed AA to these fonts don't resemble what an out of focus monitor will do.

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