The Oldschool PC Font Pack

109 29 7 years ago

bbmario• 7 years ago

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.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

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?

camgunz• 7 years ago

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.

eggoa• 7 years ago

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.

zevv• 7 years ago

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

crb2• 7 years ago

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".)

deadmetheny• 7 years ago

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

sliptype• 7 years ago

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

teddyh• 7 years ago

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

gwbas1c• 7 years ago

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.)

cronix2• 7 years ago

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.

echeese• 7 years ago

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

sdegutis• 7 years ago

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.

dole• 7 years ago

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/

crb2• 7 years ago

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

dang• 7 years ago

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

0xff00ffee3• 7 years ago

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.

sneakernets• 7 years ago

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.

ramses0• 7 years ago

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

0xff00ffee3• 7 years ago

Now that's good!

ryanmcbride• 7 years ago

I love cathode so much

andrepd• 7 years ago

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

0xff00ffee3• 7 years ago

i just installed this and it is really impressive.

dpfu• 7 years ago

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...

acheron• 7 years ago

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.

montag• 7 years ago

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

naikrovek• 7 years ago

excellent site. sooo many memories.

The Oldschool PC Font Pack

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