Makes me wanna go to old regional offices in case some of their 80s computer are still in a basement somewhere. Just to run the OS of the day and re-experience fonts, layouts, proportions, dithering-patterns..
Me, I grew up on Acorn machines, so those are my classic nostalgia font. Although, on a modern LCD with square-edged pixels, they look like arse --- jaggy and overly bold. I wonder if there's a way to emulate fuzzy CRTs with Truetype...
I don't know about TrueType or hinting, but there are a couple of post-processing shaders that achieve the effect, as commonly used by emulators[1].
If these fonts are used in some kind of retro game, those shaders could be applied as well. Desktop compositor on X11 effects could do the same. Not sure if there is a way to apply shaders to an entire desktop elsewhere (maybe f.lux do something like that to change the colours?)
The Acorn system font brings a rush of nostalgia and a shudder of revulsion every time I see it. Good grief was it ugly.
One of the first things I learned to do was write a script to load something else on boot - Acorn's Arial knockoff I think. That was ugly too, but better by far.
This is super cool. I've been wanting to make retro video games with modern tools and for modern platforms (like the web and Android) for fun (in the genre of Oregon Trail, Infocom text games, King's Quest, etc.). Some of these are just right for that, and they're CC-licensed, so presumably good for use in Open Source games.
I find the old typefaces from the early 8 bit and 16 bit days really charming. They were working with such severe limitations. I remember designing my own font on my Amiga and using it on my desktop...I kinda wish I still had those files. But, they weren't nearly as legible as the fonts from the vendors.
Be careful, the files are CC licensed but the actual fonts are still copyright whoever/whatever created them. They didn't redraw or create new fonts here, they ripped out the old fonts from the systems that used them and converted to TTF, etc.
Copyright of bitmap fonts is less straightfoward than it might appear. (Vector fonts are more apt to be recognized as "computer programs", but simple renderings of the alphabet are, for example, not considered able to be copyrighted in the United States.)
I'll worry about that when I get a cease and desist (I don't expect to get a cease and desist...the market value of these fonts is approaching zero, and from the history I know of these old fonts, there was a lot of borrowing even back then).
Yes - while working on this pack I did look into the question of copyright on the original bitmap fonts; what I found seems to indicate that the designs may not be copyrightable as such (e.g.: http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=164817#p164817), although I'd still rather err on the side of caution, hence the disclaimer at the end of the readme. If they were copyrightable, I imagine that IBM would've sued graphics card manufacturers left and right - from Hercules (which ripped the IBM MDA font bit-for-bit) to the multitudes of VGA clone manufacturers who also used IBM's fonts.
BTW, just to correct one of the above comments: a few of my own versions did involve some redrawing/original design (specifically the extended 'PxPlus' unicode variants, and the BIOS-only fonts which originally included only the lower 128 ASCII characters). Although of course this has no bearing on any copyright (or lack thereof) on the originals.
At any rate, sure - I encourage you to use these fonts in your projects, and thanks for the comments!
What I'd really like to see is a font that has lots of sub- and super-scripts and other mathy symbols, like: ⎛⎜⎝⎞⎟⎠⎡⎢⎣⎤⎥⎦⎧⎩⎪⎫⎬⎭⎮ so that I can keep my class notes in text files.
So far the only font I found that supports a lot of that sort of thing is DejaVu Sans mono but even that is rather sparse- there's very few Greek letter super/subscripts say, and there's a limited selection of Latin superscripts. Block elements and box drawings wouldn't hurt either.
I know about pragmata pro and unifont. I've tried Unifont, I think it hurt my eyes a bit but it sure has lots of glyphs. Pragmata is very pretty and has great coverage but it's not free and I don't see that it has more glyphs than free fonts, for instance with DejaVu mono I have a subscript for j which I don't see in Pragmata. Or, the APL glyphs for instance; unifont has them too and it's free.
I'll give ReactOS a try, thanks. I had given up hope to be honest, I guess Unicode is just too big to implement fully.
Edit: Ok, Pragmata costs €19 for just the regular weight- I thought it was costed by unicode range. I could definitely give that a try, so thanks for the hint mietek.
2nd Edit: Ouch, no- the mono font is €59. That's too high again :)
I know, but haven't used, La/Tex. I'll need to use it at some point, but for note-taking I prefer plain text files, as I use- except for paper notebooks.
Most implementations of markdown allow inline La/Tex and HTML, this is the best of both world. You have plain text notes and the power to inline some math.
I would also suggest iPython notebook (if you can live with web apps, I don't) as it allow you to see what you write in real time and add some code too (and being able to use mathplotlib). That being said, I used computer to take note in high school (The KDE3 version of basket notepad, the evernote of 2006, now defunct), but switched back to pen and paper for college, formatting was much easier ;)
I'm thinking of giving markdown a try, for the reasons you say, but I'm not sure how the maths notation looks like when it's not rendered. I think it's all escaped characters, in which case it won't be as readable as plain text, even with rare glyphs that need special fonts.
Some text editors even let you enter rare characters with key combinations (frex, Vim's digraphs). The end result is pretty much WYSIWIG mathematical notation.
Here's an example from my machine learning class notes:
⎛ ₙ ⎞
ƒ̂(x) = θ⎜ ∑ wᵢxᵢ ⎟
⎝ ⁱ⁼⁰ ⎠
So, that looks a mess on HN, but if you copy/paste it in a decent text editor, with a font that has all the necessary characters, you'll get a nice formula that you can keep around for as long as there's text editors supporting ASCII- and you don't have to rely on any special tools to render it properly.
That's what I'm going on about- but there's not enough super/subscripts in ASCII itself. :)
I'm not sure you're using the term "ASCII" correctly. There are virtually no characters in ASCII that aren't printed on a key on a typical US keyboard.
Especially when you say "with a font that has all the necessary characters". ASCII is ASCII. All fonts (except Wingdings) have 100% of the ASCII characters.
Maybe you're pasting in Unicode; maybe you're using the Windows-only ALT-numeric keypad garbage.
But I suspect your "nice formula" that renders in a text editor maybe isn't as clean or standard as you think.
If you use Emacs' Org mode, you can actually convert parts of the buffer to LaTeX and have them inline. This solves the problem of equations being not as readable as you're writing.
unifont is pretty good. It's a bitmap font, so it's got that pixelly old-school look, but it's got complete Unicode basic plane support and at least some ('growing support', it says) astral plane support.
This is one great presentation. An accomplished fusion of form and contents. And, among all web pages with black background, this is the rare one that _doesn't_ peel your retina off while you're looking at it. My respects to the author.
I used the VGA8 font for xterms and such for years and years until I switched to Terminus. If someone designed a scalable font based on VGA8, that would be totally awesome.
The font "IBM Nouveau" may be close to what you're looking for: http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font - it's scalable and VGA-based, although still kind of angular. (I'm actually planning my own version to complement the oldschool PC font pack, but for now this might do.)
They also help on composite displays, still a significant consideration at the time the PC was created.
PAL didn't suffer too much from this, but NTSC did. Single pixel verticals light up in a rainbow of color. This is actually how the monochrome Apple 2 did it's color graphics!
White on blue is a secondary helper here. On sharp displays, the human eye sees the white text at full detail. Humans have only a fraction of blue receptors, compared to red and green. This means screen noise gets lost in a sea of blue.
On composite displays, that same sea of blue tends to was artifacts away. SGI IRIX offered it's Xterm with a great font, white on blue and it was very easy on the eyes.
Not only did the CGA have composite out, but by playing with the signal timings it was possible for a CGA to output more colors than the four nasty "CGA palette" colors it's known for (no matter which palette you use, shit's nasty) to a composite monitor.
The demoscene prod "8088MPH" demonstrates this to spectacular effect.
It was also very simple to just use the 640x480 graphics mode on a composite display. US NTSC color cycles 160 times in that display area, which yields 4 pixels per cycle.
That's a 16 color, any color any pixel display 160x200.
Some PC games offered this option. It should have been in the CGA spec. For memory reasons, 1 and 2 bits per pixel were common. However, the same amount of RAM offers the full color set at a reasonable, if modest, resolution. (For the period)
16 colors on a 160x200 display was considered "nice" at that time, and having it be official would have improved early PC gaming considerably.
The drawback to this mode is it looks like ass on anything but a composite display -- which not a lot of people actually hooked up their CGAs to.
There was also a hack to set the display to text mode and reprogram the character height to fit 100 characters vertically on the screen, then use chopped-off block graphics characters to yield, in effect, a 160x100, 16-color, any color any monitor (composite or RGB) pseudo-graphics mode that compared favorably to, say, the 128x48 mono pseudo-graphics mode of the TRS-80. More PC games made use of this mode; one of the more notable recent ones is Paku Paku, a (remarkably good) Pac-Man clone.
Yes, all tradeoffs. Of course, it was not too difficult to have multiple sets of art.
I like 160x100 presentations and thought they were a good use of the CGA personally. A lot of game can be done at that resolution.
Really, the thing for IBM to have done was 16 color graphics of some kind. 160x200 was the obvious choice in that it would have worked with their memory scan scheme.
Most PC CGA cards offered composite output. One could use a TV or higher resolution composite monitor and skip the expensive CGA one. I did this, as did a number of others I knew at the time.
Yeah... the original PC could be scaled way down in terms of hardware. It had a cassette interface and ROM BASIC, so it didn't need floppy disks, the CGA could connect to a TV via an RF modulator, and it was available with as little as 16K of RAM. In other words - home computer level specs. That said, where it differentiated itself was its upgradability and software selection, so there wasn't much point to the most basic PC configurations.
To show the other end of the original PC spectrum, my family's first PC was a Compaq portable (a clone of an IBM PC), bought in the late 80's. That machine had 2 5.25" 360K floppy disk drives, 20MB Hard Disk, an 8087 FPU, 1200 baud modem, a mouse, and a higher-than-CGA resolution display for text. It was really a nice machine, and when I last checked a few years ago, it still runs.
I guess that having a nice separate character generator ROM for use with their TTL monitore (both for the CGA and the MDA) wound increase the cost. Damn bean counters.
I remember the frustration that my Apple II+ with Videx card (plugged to a monochrome monitor through composite) had nicer looking text than the IBM (mono CGA on RGBi) next to it. Even more infuriating, it was also better than the much better specced Apple IIe that sat to its other side (and used the stock font for 80-column text). And yes, even under PAL-M (PAL with NTSC timings), 80-column text on a color composite screen was awful. My II had a switch installed to turn off color signal generation, making the text much more readable.
Yeah... IBM CGA text wasn't that good even in the best of circumstances. The 640x200 resolution and 8x8 character cells were really inadequate.
Part of the reason for this is that IBM split the market into CGA for graphics and MDA for better text (9x14 character cell). Because the MDA adapter didn't display graphics, IBM made it possible to run both a CGA and a MDA in the same machine. Software like Lotus 1-2-3 could put the spreadsheet on the MDA and the graphics on the CGA. Dual monitors in the mid-80's.
Prior to the development of the EGA and VGA, there were a few interesting competitive responses to IBM's CGA/MDA split. The first was the Hercules card. This would let customers that had bought IBM's MDA (and it's matching monitor) get access to graphics. It wasn't compatible with CGA graphics, but it was higher resolution and wound up being fairly widely supported where it mattered. Compaq also had a solution to the problem... they shipped adapter/monitor pairs that could display MDA-quality text in the text modes and would scale down to 640x200 to display graphics.
What ultimately wound up happening is pretty much what you'd expect. As graphics resolutions got better with EGA and VGA, the quality of text on color displays got to the point where the MDA didn't represent an improvement. That said, there was always the ability to run an MDA (or clone) in parallel with a EGA, VGA, etc... that configuration was useful to programmers because it let you put debug information on one display while the main display ran the software you were developing.
I had that on my II+. Motherboard would drive the modified 16" TV (40 column, graphics) and a Videx Videoterm-like card would drive the monochrome monitor with beautiful (for the time) text.
I remember that in the late 80's I started seeing MDA/CGA hybrids that would drive MDA monitors with CGA-compatible text modes with MDA-like fonts and PWM grays. By then I was getting used and their ugliness no longer offended me.
Yes. I had similar experiences. That Videx card really shined.
At NTSC timings, 80 column text is basically color information. It's just terrible.
Interestingly, sets from about the 80's onward can display 80 column text nicely, given a good DAC driven signal. The signals from back then were square, or coarse, if not square. This makes NTSC light right up. I've been toying with a micro and a DAC and a full interlace, color phase shifting NTSC signal performs well on older analog sets. If the timing is right for the digital ones, they do well too, but it's all about hitting that 13.5Mhz sample window common to most digital sets today.
Back then, just having a full interlaced signal would have helped considerably with text, though at the expense of tearing. Low ambient light and moderate contrast on the display would have largely mitigated this.
As we got Y-C capable displays, one could just use a resistor and send the composite signal into both inputs. This actually did very seriously improve text.
> As we got Y-C capable displays, one could just use a resistor and send the composite signal into both inputs. This actually did very seriously improve text.
This is something I should try with my 8-bit machines.
If you look at the fonts used in Atari and Commodore computers, you'll see double width vertical strokes, few serifs and an overall nicer-looking font, very readable.
It's also worth noting they had no such restriction on their TTL-based monitors.
My family's first computer was an Amstrad 1512. I think it must've been 1987 or thereabouts. I never got very dexterous with it (I have vague recollections of GEM) but some of the visual cues are very impressive.
I can't decide if this is sarcasm or not, so forgive me if it was. These are monospace fonts because the character modes in which these fonts were used were strictly grid-based.
http://i.imgur.com/LDSOade.png
(code at https://github.com/Elv13/ , but that particular theme isn't pushed yet as it require upstream patches still in the CI)