The Oldschool PC Font Pack | Hacker News Reader

The Oldschool PC Font Pack

int10h.org

My problem with these fontpacks is that they fail to emulate the blur of the electron gun that created visible gaps between the round pixels (which smeared into ovals). Only the most expensive IBM 8514/A (or later NEC 6FG) monitors looked that sharp, but most of us were using inexpensive monochrome (amber or green) displays in the 80's.

When do we get fonts with such features in all OSes? It took ages to get Emoji right in OSes that weren't mobile, now it's time for fonts themselves to step it up.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cathode/id499233976?mt=12

Now that's good!

I love cathode so much

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

i just installed this and it is really impressive.

Given that our monitors have outrageous resolutions today, I miss pixel-perfect fonts with good size. I'm getting older and the eyes are not getting any better.

But normal fonts are easier to read.

Introducing pixel "jaggies" on angled and curved lines makes letterforms harder to distinguish, not easier.

Why do you think pixellated fonts would be better on your eyes?

Perhaps you just need bolder fonts, if it's an eyesight issue?

It's pretty well known that anti-aliasing (and macOS' font rendering) add blur to fonts. A lot of bitmap fonts are "pixel perfect", i.e. there's no blur.

I have great eyesight, because I wear contacts, and I prefer to disable anti-aliasing when I can.

I miss them too. On a 1920x1080 laptop display I can see the grayscale font smoothing as a blur which my eyes try to correct for. In order to make it tolerable I've turned off font smoothing globally. Ugly and jagged text gives me less eyestrain than the built in blurriness of Windows font smoothing.

I have loved this since it came out and use the PxPlus VGA9 font for day to day programming and console use. I have a very strong association between that font and what the computer is "really" doing.

Also check out Fontraption (a VGA Text Mode Font Editor for DOS) and Flexi IBM VGA Font (a Scalable Take on Text Mode).

https://int10h.org/blog/2019/05/fontraption-vga-text-mode-fo...

https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truet...

Previous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430

And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098262

I am kind of disturbed by the fact that the samples use "A quick brown fox..." instead of "The quick brown fox...".

The famous pangram is actually "A quick brown fox" in its earliest recorded appearance (1885): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over...

(Shorter pangrams exist, including some "perfect" ones which require punctuation to make sense. "Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx".)

I'm partial to "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow"

I'm really impressed with that pixel art. Anybody know the process for making something like that?

Regarding software, people use (or at least used to use) an “ANSI Editor”. There are a few to choose from:

http://wiki.synchro.net/resource:ansi_editors

Back in the day I used TheDraw for fine editing. It was a DOS program.

(It's been over 20 years since I last used it, so I don't know where to start other than saying you'll probably need to use DOSBOX to run it.

I also used a graphical program for starting with long ANSIs that basically used the half-character blocks to start with basic pixels, but I don't remember the name. (Basically, the characters that turn 80x25 text into 80x50 pixels.)

There were some cool gif2ansi progs as well at the time. I had forgotten about TheDraw. Back in the days when modem communications were so slow that you could actually read the characters coming across the screen as they were received. It was like watching a really fast typist. Now entire hi resolution videos stream. Watching my dad download his first gif was revolutionary. An actual picture transmitted! I sound like my grandpa now. Ugg.

Right? At 300 baud you could almost read the text as it appeared. Buying a 9600 baud modem after a year or two at 2400 felt amazing, like, "wow, whole lines of text appear before I even start reading!"

Then, with the jump to 14.4k it was like, "wow, a whole PAGE of text practically just pops up!" One whole... screenful of bytes. Wow.

Then you'd start an XMODEM transfer of a single image file and go make dinner.

...and then zmodem came out and saved us all with resumable downloads, because 50% of the time you lost connection due to crappy phone lines/noise and would have to start over.

I found it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_festival_TDRAW500

The one I've been keeping an eye on for a few years is https://www.aseprite.org which unfortunately I have not yet needed for anything, but hopefully it helps you.

Check PabloDraw [1] or REXpaint [2].

[1] http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/

[2] https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

Decent online one here as well: https://asc-paint.glitch.me/

I’m using the IBM PxPlus font at https://mmontag.github.io/chip-player-js/browse. It works great :)

excellent site. sooo many memories.

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