Show HN: Original 8x16 ASCII Fixed Width Font: Classic Console Neue

[hakfoo]

Another option in this space is Modern DOS - https://notabug.org/HarvettFox96/ttf-moderndos

I like it for its even-more-permissive license and the slashed instead of dotted zero.

[untech]

Wow, thanks for Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian, not many fonts have support for all three. Will definitely give it a shot. Iosevka doesn’t have Armenian and Georgian, for instance.

[ptspts]

VGA text mode displayed 8x16 fonts as 9x16, either repeating the rightmost column or displaying an empty rightmost column.

Is there a 9x16 version of this font?

[theandrewbailey]

> either repeating the rightmost column or displaying an empty rightmost column

I always look for the lowercase m. All the strokes should be equally thick, but on 8x16 it has a thin middle stroke.

[ink_13]

From a different source, yes, at int10h.org

[pimlottc]

This seems like a bit of a hodgepodge; I'm not sure all these character sets were supported back in the DOS days and some of the character, like the runic ones, seem too big. It would be nice to know where these are all sourced from.

EDIT: without the extra letter spacing added in the character samples, you can see how some of the wider characters run into their neighbors:

   javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule('.character-list { letter-spacing: normal !important }')

[deejayy]

There were multiple sources I used, first started with dosbox, checked all codepages' ascii chart, made a screenshot, went thru all characters. Then I found int10h, crosschecked a few to not miss anything. Some glyphs are result of just the combination of letters and mods (accented characters mostly).

Then I found a pixel font which has about 40k glyphs as I remember, so I checked which can be derived from it in the style of the original VGA font.

[Leynos]

I wondered if the runes were taken from an Ultima game, but they don't match those in screenshots of Ultima V nor VI.

[matvore]

This is the default font of my browser-based terminal emulator, http://github.com/google/werm, along with a handful of other retro fonts (uses the int10h.org ttf's--converted to bitmaps--which I suspect has all the same characters as Neue)

[stonogo]

Would be nice if this person collaborated with this project: https://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.htm...

Each seems to have glyphs the other is missing.

[atulvi]

I'll pay for one of these that look good in vscode and supports ligatures. One can dream.

[b3lm0nt]

Fixedsys Excelsior might get you close (TTF, with ligatures).

https://github.com/kika/fixedsys

[anyfoo]

They never look right.

It's not just the fact that it should be 9x16 instead of 8x16, or that sometimes (often?) the aspect ratio is off, it's something fundamental about how that 9x16 VGA font was rendered on CRTs.

A really good CRT emulation on a really good flatscreen monitor can maybe simulate the VGA text mode experience of the day, but so far I haven't really seen it.

[ink_13]

int10h.org has the 9x16 version, also with corrected aspect ratio as it would have appeared on systems with non-square pixels

[rob74]

Actually, I think "that" font (I don't know how it's called or if it even had a name) was originally designed to be shown 8 pixels wide and then simply reused when the 9x16 matrix was introduced (the 9th column being always blank or repeating the 8th column for block-drawing characters that required it). Which explains why the "background pattern" characters (0xB0, 0xB1 and 0xB2) look so ugly when shown 9 pixels wide. IMHO the whole font looked really ugly - back in the day I built a utility that stored a custom font in a codepage file to replace the standard font, and added (amongst others) new patterns with the pattern restricted to three 2-pixel-wide columns and two blank columns in between (2+1+2+1+2 = 8, which together with the default blank 9th column produced a nice regular pattern). Unfortunately there was no GitHub back then, otherwise I would have probably published it (or found out that someone had already done the same thing, as it often goes)...

[matvore]

IMO it still looks rather nostalgic. I do remember using cmd.exe or command.exe in Windows 95 and later and this being the default (but it would different if you had a different legacy code page set, IIRC). Of course cmd.exe just rendered the pixels as-is, no emulation or retro effects.

[sim7c00]

most VGA txt mode machines have a BIOS function to dump the font out of the device to mem. easy to grab it if u want a specific one and have the hardware. (this also works in qemu if someone needs a font in early boot and dont wanna grab their own font). nice for if u wanna go to gfx mode but dont want to load ur own font / keep same style text between the stages.

[fouc]

Did you adjust your resolution to compare? the 15" CRT was usually 800x600 or 1024x768 in those days.

[cowsaymoo]

Here is a more extensive font resource (and awesome website): https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

[qwertox]

Thank you, great site!

An apparently less extensive resource is

https://www.programmingfonts.org/

and

https://www.nerdfonts.com/