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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

This would explain why that 8-bit arcade font (it's in numerous Namco and Atari games) that's everywhere in 70's and 80's arcade games was everywhere.

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I thought the same, but this book [0] absolutely staggered me by the creative ways people made 8 by 8 fonts

[0]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Arcade-Game-Typography-Pixel-Type/d...

I used to sketch 8x8 bitmap fonts on graph paper using circles four to a square when I was in junior high. I spent a lot of time trying different combinations.

Well also there aren't that many ways to make a legible font using 8x8 (actually less, for spacing) pixels :-P

That font has some unique characteristics (such as the lopsided S and 8). It's not like the Signetics based font from Apple I/II which is very basic, for example.

Also if you look at all the ways letters and numbers have been drawn in C-64, NES, Genesis, and SNES games; there's lots of room for creativity and design even in an 8x8 space.

FWIW, the reason all of the vertical elements in the C-64 font are two pixels wide is to compensate for raster blur on televisions that were common at the time.

If you made a vertical line only one pixel wide, on many televisions like the Panasonic I used it would be nearly impossible to see.

And while color monitors of the day were an improvement, they still weren't what we would consider acceptable today. I eventually upgraded to a Commodore CM-141, and single pixel vertical lines still weren't great.

I made an 8x8 font that was inspired by Broadway [1] and it ended up in most of the company's video gaming machines back in the 80's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_(typeface)

Don't leave us hanging! Tell us more, which games, which company?

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