Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font (2009)

sensi.org

104 pointsgrae_QED33 comments

A lot more information here, including how the phosphor decay is part of the font and you won't get the right appearance if you don't take it into account: https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt-typography

I do wonder if a sufficiently clever person could coerce OpenType's Variable Font extension to simulate phosphor behaviour.

There was a time when blurred fonts were some of a (small) hype. The tricky part is that phosphor response isn't linear, but sinusoidal, and that you had to scale this with font size… (You could make this an axis with variable fonts, though.)

Since the VF extension requires a state machine that can modify the font, it might be able to accomplish that, but my very quick read of the spec didn't let me grasp whether the SM executes once, or whether you can run it repeatedly.

(I am not a sufficiently clever person, obviously, and you probably wouldn't want to burn cycles on simulating that anyway. Nevertheless.)

With CSS (text-shadow to be exact) you can get pretty close, here is my shot at it: https://codepen.io/ivanca/pen/oNPZMLx

Here's the "workbench implementation" mentioned in the blog post (too much blur/bleed), using a character generator of its own:

https://www.masswerk.at/rterm/VT/

And a rather fancy version of the same thing: https://www.masswerk.at/rterm/VT/fancy.html

My formative years at uni were spent on VT320s, the smell of hot dust on CRT, the tick, tick, key click sound, the subtle off-white colouring, the tasteful thickness of it…

MAME will actually emulate a VT240.

We spend a bundle, both on Charon VAX emulation and Bluezone Rocket terminal emulation. We used to run the Reflections terminal emulator, but that is up to $500/seat.

I was actually looking for a functional UTS-20 emulator for our OS2200, but that is another story.

MAME will tie the rs232 to an outgoing socket, and I ran it over stunnel to login to my VAX VMS.

It was a really slow Friday.

how well did it work?

It was a little slow.

No text cut and paste.

The baud rate actually has to be set correctly in the firmware before the connection works.

The command line to invoke for the IP address 1.2.3.4 port 23 is:

  mame -rp . vt240 -window -nothrottle -host null_modem -bitb socket.1.2.3.4:23

These are some useful articles that I read in getting it working.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/terminal-simulator/issues/1

https://www.mail-archive.com/simh@trailing-edge.com/msg09086...

https://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Num...

https://simh.trailing-edge.narkive.com/qgzCvrl8/dec-vt-emula...

very neat. thank you.

Pro tip for people who make fonts:

if you have a webpage for the font, include quality, high resolution pictures of the font.

Fans of this might enjoy https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

And it comes with my 3270 font!

I use this font all the time with my gnome terminal set at 132x43 to remind me of my good times with OpenVMS using a VT220.

I used to love this font but the fake scanline effect was eyehurty after a while. DEC Terminal Modern is the same font with a nice vector look that won't interfere with the scanlines when you use it in cool-retro-term.

https://www.dafont.com/dec-terminal-modern.font

Does this have any particular size it's supposed to be used at?

Nah, it's good for all sizes. The glyphs have been completely vectorized.

Doesn't work in Terminal on macOS. It only displays bordered-questionmarks instead of glyphs. On the webpage, it does look like a nice font, though.

I may have grabbed it from a different place, but I remember this font working well in iTerm under macOS.

The source site at vtxemu.com has been squatted though :( Any other source to download it?

On the site linked above, over on the right-hand side of the page there's a "download" button that still works.

I have a _decterm.ttf that is larger (237400 bytes) and newer (Mar 29 2019) than the one at dafont.com, but do not remember where I got it from.

Thank you! Got it now.

Here's how to do the same thing in Fontforge (with .otf file ready for download) https://gist.github.com/epilys/95869773037d3d2235d324bd5a048...

I built it into a package for arch AUR, then when I loooked at it, I have to agree. The scan lines built into the font are not desirable.

I installed the DEC Terminal Modern package 8-/

Cool notes on the rendering process by the author though...

I installed this font, set my default foreground color to #FDDF7D, and am feeling like I've transported back to 1984.

You need something to emulate flyback whine. Which I can't hear any more having old ears.

Maybe a bit of horizontal hold wobble too

Neat. It does look just like the font I had on that terminal.... back in the day.

There's some interesting design in it.

De Anza College in the early 1990s--we had quite a few VT220s. Super nostalgia...

Thanks! Just installed the font.

Next time I need to email a SQL query, I will use it <3

Nice font but I wish it didn't consist of lines like that.

That’s more or less how it shows on the terminal screen. Scanlines were part of the experience.

You can manually trace over the ROM bitmaps and make the contour - I did that with my 3270 font.

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