Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack | Hacker News Reader

Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

int10h.org

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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.

I guess you could try booting freedos from a thumbdrive.

Or some kind of console only Linux live boot.

And i do believe that George R R Martin is (in)famous for using a DOS setup for writing.

That said, i think i have seen a few "distraction free" writing devices pop up on kickstarter. Not sure if any of them reached mass market though.

Oh and btw, there is a font selector for the site in the top right corner.

>> That said, i think i have seen a few "distraction free" writing devices pop up on kickstarter. Not sure if any of them reached mass market though.

Aren't those basically rehashed Tandy TRS-80 Model 100's? Those were damned cool devices back in the day.

> For anyone curious the main font used for this website is the "IBMVGA8" one.

I feel like I should point out that it even says so in the upper right corner -- and there you can variate between 6 fonts for the website, too.

Indeed you can, can't believe I missed that.

George R. R. Martin (author of the Game of Thrones novel series that the HBO show is based on, probably one of the most well-known fiction writers in the world right now) actually uses WordStar 4.0 for DOS [1].

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/videos/george-r-r-martin...

And if you've got joe, you can emulate Wordstar with jstar:

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

It works well for distraction-free writing.

You can run a headless Linux distro (although that's not exactly turnkey, I know). If you're already running linux, you can hit something like ctrl+alt+F3 to get a commandline only UI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_(Unix)

Note for anyone who tries this out - to get back to your main session, try ctrl+alt+F1 or ctrl+alt+F2

Last time I was on Ubuntu, ctl+alt+F1 through F6 were virtual terminals; F7 was the gui.

Edit: I've usually been on Macs for the last three years, and I miss that functionality almost daily.

2nd edit: Alt plus the side arrows scrolls between them.

On most modern distros (I think it was systemd that caused this change?) 1 is now the GUI, 2 is a text console, and 3-7 don't exist unless you manually add them.

Graphical splash screens in the RedHat bootstrap process caused the change, about 2 years before systemd even existed.

* https://lwn.net/Articles/305047/

* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterStartup

* https://blogs.gnome.org/halfline/2009/11/28/plymouth-%E2%9F%...

* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=480113

I stand corrected.

It used to be that way, now when I try it F1 is a sign-in screen, F2 is my main GUI, F3-F6 are normal virtual terminals, and F7 is some process that I don't recognize.

I’m currently in the process of building a case for my Raspberry Pi 3 with a 7” LCD (switchable, so one can use the HDMI instead) and a mechanical keyboard, that boots into my own custom “distro” of Linux that is basically a pure TTY, some fonts, a BusyBox shell and Wordgrinder.

While I’m missing the difficult bits (the case, the battery, the switches and so on — I want to be able to use it as a word processsor, a “home computer” plugged into the TV, and a pure keyboard depending on what switches are flipped!) it works wonderfully for distraction free writing.

Ctrl-Shift-F1, ‘$ wordgrinder’ and away we go! Best part is, I can swap the SD card out to get the data off it without needing network abilities. Think of it like a DIY Freewrite (née Hemingwrite)

I've been considering building something very similar myself! I hope it turns out well, and do write a post about it!

I burnt out two cheap touchscreens after failing to follow poorly translated docs.

So, I gave up on doing it myself, and got a PocketCHIP. (Cost effective, but less exciting).

It's not a terrible piece of kit.

>Even just reading that home screen brings back strange sense memories.

Agree. It's like a smell memory. For me, I'm transported back to playing MINERVGA.

For me it's Rogue. Those upside down exclamation points will forever be potions in my head.

I’ve used writeroom in the past to get a similar distraction-free writing experience.

> 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.

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.

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.

You can get a good setup with FocusWriter https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/ (don't be put off by the screenshots, it is very customisable) and one of those fonts.

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

If someone wants to grab it: https://www.ebay.com/itm/vintage-sperry-luggable-computer-20...

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikO0WOAGWI

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

That is a damn fine font. Faintly resembles Iosevka Slab Serif.

Iosevka reminds me of the Dec VT terminals.

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.

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

Talk about time to burn.

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.

OpenBSD VT fonts are almost the same.

Check Luxi Mono for TTF fonts.

Also: https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/jmc/public/tmp/gallant12x22...

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

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.

Cool, I’ll check it out.

The IBM terminals were a totally different story. A sans-serif, simple and elegant design, modern and yet timeless.

I reproduced the 3270's here: https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

Those are pretty slick; a completely different deal than the PC bucket. IBM just didn’t have the insight nor the vision (as opposed to Hi-Toro and Jay Miner) to build a personal computer people would actually love and enjoy to use. It was a machine designed by a committee and it shows in the uglyness of the BIOS’ font. The terminals were a completely different world. I actually used them, Green monochrome monitor, IBM key clicking keyboard and all, although the termcap on Solaris 2.5.1 wasn’t quite right so I’d switch to a DEC VT220 as soon as one would be freed. Good times.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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...

I am really happy with Fixedsys Excelsior[0].

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

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

The IBM fonts are clearly the best. Hardly surprising.

And their PC fonts were their ugliest.

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

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

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).

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.

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?

Likely the graphics card ROM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA-compatible_text_mode

When a PC first starts it's essentially an origina IBM PC from the 80s including the original text mode and built in fonts. You can write text in this mode literally by copying ascii characters to a specific memory address.

The hardware handles the job of actually putting characters on the screen.

> When a PC first starts it's essentially an origina IBM PC from the 80s including the original text mode and built in fonts.

Thanks. Now I feel dirty for touching my modern MacBook and imagining that IBM horror inside it.

I believe macs are UEFI only and so may not contain most of the old peripherals. This is only required for legacy BIOS booting.

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

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

This happens on my desktop/workstation as well (w/ NVIDIA cards) but only when using UEFI. It doesn't occur when using legacy/BIOS mode.

I've got two ThinkPads sitting here as well and it doesn't happen on them. One has Optimus (Intel+NVIDIA), the other just has built-in Intel graphics; both are using legacy/BIOS mode. I haven't tested it using UEFI.

No. It's just loading a new bitmap font. The console is still in legacy text mode on standard PCs. That's why you see the clean transition because the text in memory and video mode remains unchanged (unless you've altered the init) so all the character cells line up.

> That's why you see the clean transition because the text in memory and video mode remains unchanged

It's not so with amdgpu (Polaris at least). Looks like there some glitch that makes color noise appear in between, and screen is reset.

This depends on a lot of things and often linux switches to graphical mode quite early.

Another thing is that some new-ish BIOSes leave the VGA card in non-standard videomode that is 80x25 text mode, but has 8 pixel wide font and same timing as 640x480 graphics mode. The difference is clearly visible on CRT monitor (lower refresh rate but no horizontal black lines between scanlines that are typical for PC text modes). I believe this has to do with fact that some LCD monitors are not capable of reliably maintaining synchronisation in 400-line VGA modes when using VGA input and many TVs and similar HDMI-connected devices simply don't support 400-line modes at all.

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

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

You're mistaking character sets for languages.

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

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...

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