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POKE 756, 226 Acorn BBC Micro (1981) Specifications Style Bold sans Width 4-7 pixels Caps 7 pixels Charset Screen 320×256 (40×32 text) Designer Unknown The, as it was affectionately known, has its own font which could display in three different modes – one wider and one narrower but many users might not recognize it all as it booted into ‘Mode 7’ utilizing a Videotex chip (used in the UK for text-on-TV and travel agents as well as in France for Minitel) that had a different font of its own. Unusual characteristics. Drops bold in tight spaces e.g ‘$&@’. Outlines the tail on the ‘Q’ to make it much clearer. Unique and beautiful ‘.’.
Does not extend low bar on ‘e’ as much as expected and ‘f’ seems to wide. Vertically squished ‘?’. Style of single-quote ‘ is inconsistent with comma Rationale The machine generally shipped with good quality monitors and the combination of high-contrast colors and this bold font made it very readable indeed. Influences It’s quite likely it was influenced by the Atari 8-bit font but with larger capitals and ascenders and a much more consistent look. Technical The system font is stored at 0xC00-0xC2FF with each character being represented by 8 sequential bytes (left pixel is high bit). You can replace the font used by system text routine OSWRCH (0xFFEE) using the VDU command 23 followed by the ASCII code and then 8 rows of data, e.g.
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VDU 23,65,11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88 Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1982) Specifications Style Regular sans Width 6 upper, 5 lower Caps 6 pixels Charset Screen 256×192 (32×24 text) Designer Nine Tiles Sinclair’s successor to the ZX81 added color and lower-case letters – again preserving the uppercase and numbers from its predecessor but finally mapping them to ASCII. This font was re-used on Jupiter Ace and Timex machines but the was the most popular.
Unusual characteristics. 6 pixels uppercase leaves many unevenly balanced ‘BEFS’ and ‘X’ with ugly 2×2 center. Elf 2003 mkv download for mac free. Full stop is 2×2 pixels (bold) but colon, semi-colon and comma are not. Capital ‘MW’ are very slight with latter hard to distinguish from ‘V’. Uneven styling ‘c’ omits curves, ‘e’ is soft ‘g’ is not, ‘f’ and ‘k’ are thin. Only the copyright symbol uses to the top row of pixels Rationale While the machine has a default high-contrast scheme the video output was poor because of the quality of the RF modulator and home TVs it was connected to. It looks like the designer decided to increase spacing between letters after the ZX80 from one to two pixels which greatly limited what could be done with the letters themselves.
This was likely done for the same reasons it was done on the Atari 8-bit – namely to allow the letters to be centered when using inverse text modes. Influences The font was mostly inherited from the ZX80. I was not involved with that, so I don’t know who did it. Probably it was a combination of John Grant, Jim Westwood and Rick Dickinson.
It’s possible we added lower case for the ZX81 or Spectrum (I can’t remember without checking), and I do remember discussions about how “mostly moistly” would appear. Steve Vickers, email, 2nd February 2001 Technical The system font is stored at 0x3D00-0x3FFF with each character being represented by 8 sequential bytes (left pixel is high bit). You can replace the system text routine (RST 10) by poking the new fonts memory address into the system memory map at 7 minus 256 bytes (the first 32 characters are non-printable, 32×8 = 256). LOAD 'newfont' CODE 49152, 768: POKE 23606, 0: POKE 23607, 191 Commodore 64 (1982) Specifications Style Bold sans Width 6 pixels Caps 7 pixels Charset Screen 320×200 (40×25 text) Designer Unknown Commodore took to take their success with the PET and applied it to the home first with the VIC 20 and then later with the wildly successful.
Unusual characteristics. Inconsistent shapes/style across ‘147,&@Q’.
2×2 pixel of ‘.’ is not carried through to ‘;:!’. Ascenders not as tall as capital letters Rationale The bold font was essential for the low-quality TV’s Commodore were aiming at. The inconsistencies across the font may have been intentional to help make the letters look different (A vs 4, 1 vs I, 7 vs T) given the limitations of the displays or just poorly implemented (see below). Influences Lower-case is identical to the Atari 8-bit font and likely copied wholesale as they do not match the upper-case well.
Symbols, numbers and upper-case are a bolded version of the PET font that looses the serifs and also could explain the odd reproductions of 1, 2, 7 & 4. Technical See for details! Amstrad CPC (1984) Specifications Style Bold serif Width 6-7 pixels Caps 7 pixels Charset Screen 320×200 (40×25 text) Designer Locomotive Software Alan Sugar’s foray into the UK market came a little later than the other 8-bits in 1984 with the series. Unusual characteristics. Full use of 7 pixels for upper and 1 pixel for lower means glyphs can touch. Serif choice is unusual and not consistently applied because of space constraints.
‘0’ is wider than would be expected (copied from CGA font). Very distinctive curves on ‘CGOQ’. ‘X’ looks like a different style because of high mid-point Rationale Sugar wanted the machine to look more professional than other home computers at the time. The choice of a serif based font to look like PCs which also featured serifs (at a higher resolution) reflects that desire. Influences Very similar to the IBM CGA font with some adjustments (fixes) to the horizontal positioning of some symbols. Many characters completely identical and some bearing style similarities too (wider 0, X choosing one side to be longer than the other).
Some other characters bear similarity to the BBC Micro (Q uses the same trick to keep it distinguished) and a number of symbols and lower-case letters being the same where serifs would not fit. The Amstrad CPC manual shows the system font but is different in some areas. It is possible it is a transcription problem (z is shifted up one pixel, missing pixels on ’37PRz’ and extra pixels on ‘#b’ ) although it could have been an earlier version from the designer as ‘rG?’ are subtly different. Technical Redefine using the Amstrad BASIC command SYMBOL that takes an ASCII code and then 8 comma-separated values one-per-row in much the same way as the BBC with the VDU 23 command.
SYMBOL AFTER must be set first e.g. SYMBOL AFTER 32 SYMBOL 65,11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88 MSX (1983) Specifications Style Regular condensed sans Width 5 pixels Caps 7 pixels Charset ASCII Extended Screen 320×200?
(40×25 text) Designer Microsoft? The MSX differs from the other machines here in that it was a standard rather than a specific machine. It was very popular in Japan and did hit UK shores although I only knew a single person that had one apart from our school which had acquired several Yamaha models to control MIDI keyboards.
Given the multiple manufacturers, it’s not surprising that some models had slightly tweaked fonts but the one shown here seems to be the most popular. Unusual characteristics. Full use of 7 pixels for upper and 1 pixel for lower means glyphs can touch. Only 5 pixels wide for the letters. Pixels touching on the curves of ‘db’ etc. Look quite ugly. Very angular curves on ‘5’ Rationale An unusual choice that feels very quirky.
Influences Most likely influenced by the Apple e. Technical Unknown.
I was a font designer for Sinclair Research actually, I was about the lowest of the low in the software engineering pecking order and happened to be doing the screen handling software for a new product, so I got to do the font as well. (The product, Pandora, was a portable 8-bit computer that never got made.) I can’t speak for any of the other companies, but ‘font design’ is perhaps the wrong term for the process. Much faffing with graph paper, lots of over-the-shoulder critiquing from other software engineers, but not a high priority nor something that was seen as needing any particular graphic or typographic skills.
If anything, Pandora got more attention in the font area than normal - it had a very baroque screen technology with a weird aspect ratio and, ah, readability issues. So we had proper proportional spacing, not a fixed width font, which was quite challenging to code for on an 8-bit CPU with no hardware graphics acceleration. I believe the Atari 400/800 fonts were influenced by the coin-op font originally developed by Lyle Rains for Sprint (1976), and adopted fairly faithfully by most arcade games shortly thereafter.
That was a 7x7 in 8x8, and originally upper-case only, so some compromises were made, e.g. To accommodate the 400/800 team’s desire for fully boxed inverse-video characters. Lyle created a number of very nice fonts for later games and for use with X. IIRC, he also helped me out a bit with my 3x5 (in 4x6) font for my 80-column VT-100 terminal emulator (400/800). Disclaimer: I was not in the room when this decision was made, but I was down the hall:-) MikeA –. Damien, I love when someone fills a hole in the world by sharing knowledge like this! Must-read article about early computer fonts mmm, crunchy.
It’s so funny because as I was reading it, I thought the maker of Cathode would like seeing this — only to see your line at the bottom, ahhh! Thank you for sharing, and if Amiga is legit to include, I’d sure like to see it as well.
Big vote up for the C64 PETSCII as goto80 mentioned, I loved seeing those graphics used in games, BBSes, and when I printed party invitations on my old dot matrix. The MSX font characters are stored in the ROM as 8x8 cells. The characters are only 5 pixels wide and are left-aligned in the cells leaving three blank pixels on the right. The graphic characters typically use the full 8 pixels of width.
The MSX video chips have two text modes, screens 0 and 1. In screen 0, only the left 6 pixels of each character is displayed in 40 columns giving a resolution of 240x192. The MSX2 video chip added an 80 column mode giving a resolution of 480x192. In screen 1, all 8 pixels are displayed in 32 columns giving a resolution of 256x192. The left-aligned, 5 pixel wide font displays properly in both screen modes but obviously the apparent spacing between characters changes.
The graphic characters are truncated in screen 0 mode. Some survive this truncation quite well while others do not.
The text modes all have 24 rows (192 pixels) via BASIC although the MSX2 and later video chips were capable of displaying up to 26.5 lines (212 pixels). I believe you have mistakenly stated the height of capital letters as 6 instead of 7 for the MSX, C64 and Amstrad CPC entries. Tim Locke –. The atari 8-bits have an alternate mode for text display using 10 scan lines rather than 8. The last 32 characters which contain all the lowercase letters are displayed shifted down two scan lines allowing better descenders. I saw this used in a few word processors and other productivity software. Yes, this requires using a different font, either an entirely new font or a RAM copy of the default ROM font with the last 32 characters shifted in memory to use the extra scan lines correctly.
Ken Jennings –. I was thinking it would be interesting to maybe superimpose all glyphs from all the different fonts, to see where they differ. The char maps you show only cover the ascii range, do they? The Atari and C64 have a full set of 256 glyphs, the latter half being graphics symbols. On the Atari, there were actually two sets of the latter 128 glyphs, one with graphics symbols similar to the one on the C64, and one with international (accented) chars. Possible additions: Laser Technology machines (VZ200 etc.), and of course the Sinclair ZX80/81. Schoschie –.
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MSX was also quite popular in Brazil. I still own two (with just one being functional). One oddity was the WordStar CP/M port. It was intended to run on MSX 1.x, which had a 40 column width (in Screen 0). This is too unconfortable for text editing, so it shipped with a ‘resident’ assembly program that would switch to Screen 2 (one of the graphical models) and draw the caracters itself, using a 6 pixel wide cell. Not all characters used all 6 pixels, so readability was not great, specially on a television with RF inputs.
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But it did manage to squeeze 64 characters per line, and the drawing was not that slow, for the standards of the time. You could also use it directly on MSX-DOS, without WordStar. I had some fun with that. The BBC Micro font was not specifically a bold font. What was done was to make vertical lines 2 pixels wide, because when displayed on a television, the video timing caused 1 pixel wide vertical lines to almost disappear. So by having 2-pixel verticals, it actually displayed as a normal font.
This is lost on a modern display or LCD which is pixel perfect - a more realistic rendition would be if the font were redesigned as one pixel plus anti-aliasing so simulate the smearing of the video signal. (I worked at Acorn and heard the 2-pixel vertical explanation first-hand from the font designer) Graham Toal –.