Arcade Game Typography | Hacker News Reader

Arcade Game Typography

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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... 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...

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.

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.

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

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

Or in the US: Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type https://www.amazon.com/dp/0500021740/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_hN...

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.

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.

What did you find annoying about their checkout process? Seemed smooth to me.

Believe it or not I've come to love checkout with Paypal because when integrated well you don't need to enter any details, or dig out your card.

Props for posting a smile link!! :)

Already sold out; thanks for the link!

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...

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

[3] https://archive.org/serve/zx_Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_...

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.

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

Because in the 1970s, those fonts were visual code for "computer", and there was some spillover into the 1980s. Books with a computer theme, such as type-in program books and young adult novels, often had part or all of their title set in such a font. You see it also on electronic products of the era, such as the Waddingtons Game Machine.

I love the MICR'ish fonts and still try to imitate them.

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... and https://damieng.com/blog/2011/03/27/typography-in-16-bits-sy...

* http://www.type-invaders.com/sinclair/8bitfonts/

* https://opengameart.org/content/the-collection-of-8-bit-font...

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

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...

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 ;)

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.

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.

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

https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2.shtml

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...

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

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

Not webfonts as such, but this site will generate you some images: 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.)

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

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.

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

Many years ago I made this website with free webfonts, I processed dafont.com database dump, extracted the free ones and processed them into webfonts. http://fontsforweb.com/fontcategories/show/catid/35/Free-Squ... http://fontsforweb.com/fontcategories/show/catid/39/Free-Pix...

Seems you have gotten your domain blacklisted here: https://hosts-file.net/emd.txt

EMD: Sites engaged in malware distribution

They should really just put that in the comment at the top.

https://hosts-file.net/?s=Classifications

Moru thanks for that! The website is not maintained anymore but it doesn't distribute any malware. Maybe that's why the amount of views is slowly dropping every year. Added a false positive report https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/254447-fontsforwebcom-...

The website has been removed from this website but it's still on the emd.txt list, hopefully it's just a cached leftover. Thanks again :)

My pi-hole has updated now and I can access your site :-)

http://deathgenerator.com/

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

In a sense, any GAN which generates fonts, like https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1095603397179396098 or http://www.machinelearningfont.com/ or https://medium.com/@robert.munro/creating-new-scripts-with-s... , 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?

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.

Does it have the vector fonts?

Looks like it's about pixel fonts specifically.

I also came here wondering about the Battlezone font.

Yeah was looking for the zip to check out some syntax in this font and then I realized it was an actual book.

So no fonts included?

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....

this looks so good! thanks.

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