Category: Fonts

Those four 'bonus' screen fonts in the ROM BIOS of the IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 (and friends) have some more history behind them than was uncovered in my earlier post. How did they get there, where from, and who the heck is Howard?

You might have picked up on two recurring topics around these parts: ancient PC games, and ancient bitmap fonts.  This installment combines the two for fact-finding purposes, and possibly sets some new records in going down silly rabbit holes, but it's all about what you learn along the way!

Another old riddle bites the dust: why did some 16-bit ISA PS/2 machines have an extra set of four alternate fonts tucked away in their firmware?  What on earth were those fonts good for?  And what's one thing you should never do when you're a PC developer 35 years ago?

Yet another load of pixellated character sets, converted from classic PC-related hardware for your enjoyment.  And for the sake of balance, a decidedly non-pixellated update of an old mainstay.

To make up for the 4-year holdup, it's quite a big update: 133 new font families (from 52 different sources), 3 new variants for each font (.ttf w/embedded bitmaps, aspect-corrected .ttf, and .woff for the web), and a revamped website to hold all of these (somewhat) together.

A new font editor for DOS: dual tab interface, clipboard, block operations, 40/80 columns, 8/9-dot mode.  Handles ROM + BMP + XBIN formats, and can create configurable .COM TSRs.  All in a 12KB executable (source is included, plus a huge pack of fonts).

Does VGA 40-column text mode hurt your eyeballs and disfigure the games you play?  A couple of small, mode-specific font replacement TSRs to the rescue.

Yet another go at converting the pre-GUI PC's most iconic typeface into a TrueType font.  This time, a version with scalable outlines and a faithful aspect ratio.

Historical exhibit: a set of 25 floppy disks documenting IBM's creation of an in-house bitmap typeface for the RT PC project (code-named Olympiad).  Contains the original material as received, plus TTF and PNG conversions of the fonts and images.

Presenting the world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from the DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles.  Contains TrueType (TTF) and bitmap (FON) versions of the original character sets, and some unicode expansions as well.

Is it possible to get Windows to display TrueType pixelfonts in a crisp bitmap-like fashion?  Technically, yes.  Practically... not really.

Compact just like Windows' Terminal font, but based on the EGA/VGA text mode character sets.  Comes in TrueType and bitmap versions.  Besides good ol' codepage 437, it also supports an expanded unicode charset.