Typography in 8 bits: System Fonts | Hacker News Reader

Typography in 8 bits: System Fonts

damieng.com

39 pointsyankcrime10 comments

The missing curly-braces in the Atari font made ports of C compilers a little awkward. In '82, trigraphs hadn't made the scene yet, and my roommate used $( .. $), but it was pretty ugly. In my opinion it was still way less ugly than trigraphs, when they arrived ....

A trip down memory-alley with the Atari and ZX-81 fonts. ;-) This is the same person who has made Envy-code-R[1], my favourite font for the terminal and text editors.

[1]http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...

Edited to add a link to the font.

It's interesting how seeing the screenshots (for me specifically, the Atari one and to a lesser extent the c64 one) can instantly trigger a flood of memories and nostalgia. Wish I hung onto my XE, if for no other reason than to mount it on my wall...

Entirely agree; fonts have great power that way. I was transported back to age 11 in my basement with an Atari 400, and to a friend's room who had a C64. All kinds of details you've forgotten can come rushing back into active memory if the right switches get flipped. Ah, the days of laboriously typing in BASIC programs...

  POKE 53280,0
  POKE 53281,0

That would make the background of the screen black on the C64. I really hated the default blue background (coming from the PET and S100 systems), but otherwise I very much liked the C64. I would always issue these POKEs after powering it on. Later I burned my own patched KERNAL ROM which would make the screen background black by default. Later, after my C64 died, I transfered this EPROM into my dad's SX-64, which is still sitting in his attic and sometimes powered up to see if it still works. It does ;-)

Not 8-bits, but for the Lisp-machine nostalgic: http://www.eurogaran.com/downloads/lispmfont/

Reminds me of Monaco.

Now, all want a faithful 327x font.

A 2260 would be cool too. http://www.nfrpartners.com/comphistory/2260a.htm

How about a 2 bit font:

▀▄▀ █▄█ █▀█▀█ █▀█▀█ ▀▄▀

Let's see it with "9 > 8"

;)

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