EightBit-Atari-Fonts: Fonts generated from bitmaps from Atari 8bit computers

github.com

89 points·lnyan··5 comments

Very nostalgic for someone who grew up with an Atari 800XL! Also shows how much creativity is possible even within severe constraints - there are many fonts there that have real "character" (pun intended).

Indeed - I'm still sad I sold my Atari - I even had the disk drive and official Atari cassette drive :/

My favorite trip down nostalgia font history was replacing my terminal font with a VT220 font. Creating a realistic font isn't as easy as one would assume: https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt-typography

The samples look like the are "aliased". Is there a way to specify in the font description that the font should be rendered only on pixel boundaries?

I suppose that would preclude certain font sizes ... that would be okay if I knew which font sizes gave me pixel-aligned results.

The originals were all 8x8 bitmap fonts with no extra leading. If these are true to the original, then, any multiple of 8px in height should work for you.

Unfortunately, the specimens are rendered with a larger leading than would have appeared on the original systems; if that’s part of the font specification, you’ll have to experiment some.

Some of these (where the lowercase letters have been used for symbols) would make a nice puzzle where you have to "decode" the font name, but unfortunately the name is in the filename of the example PNGs, e.g. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRobotFactory/EightBit-A...

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