' Plus' has a greater selection (some 780 characters in total) to support more scripts and symbols a lot of them are custom additions, so this was only done for a few selected fonts.' 437' includes all 256 characters available in the IBM PC's original encoding (codepage 437).The rest of the prefix specifies the character set: Wherever the above formats don't work (well), you can use the ' Px' ('pixel outline') variants, which are TrueType fonts with a square-pixel aspect, and should be the most compatible.This is available with the ' Ac' variants ('aspect-correct', or maybe 'accurate', take your pick). When perceptual fidelity is important, you'll want the true aspect ratio of the original fonts.This is available with the ' Mx' ('mixed-format') and ' Bm' (bitmap) variants. When crisp appearance is important, you'll want bitmap rendering.The font name starts with two letters which signify the rendering: What's with all those weird prefixed versions of each font? Which one(s) do I want/need?Ī. Software-loadable fonts are also within the scope of this collection (if associated with a particular machine or display system), so some of these have also made it in.įrequently Asked Questions Q.

This collection is here to remedy that, and to bring you pixel-perfect remakes of various type styles from text-mode era PCs - in modern, multi-platform, Unicode-compatible TrueType form (plus straight bitmap versions).Īlthough the goal is to make it a complete resource, the main focus is on hardware/firmware character sets: the kind that's located in a ROM chip on the system board or graphics card, which is what you'd see by default when working in text (or graphics) mode. except for that one VGA text mode font (which has been remade numerous times, to varying degrees of success). On the other hand, the IBM PC and its clones seem to get little love. It was inspired by similar efforts that cover other vintage machines: classic system fonts from the Amiga, C64, Apple II, Mac, ZX Spectrum, Atari 8-bit/ST etc. The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack started out with the idea of paying tribute to ancient PCs and their bitmapped, pre-GUI typography (if you can call it that).

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