Another interesting historical font I stumbled upon recently is Simplex Roman, designed in 1967 by Dr. A. V. Hershey for vector-based rendering on early CRTs. It still looks remarkably pleasant today: http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/hershey/
Anyone have an idea of the remaining licenses or restrictions on these? I have a small pixel font package and it would be cool to bundle some if possible.
In general, bitmap fonts are not copyrightable in the United States. Scalable fonts like TrueType and so on are protected as computer programs, but typefaces are not copyrightable and bitmap fonts are just direct representations of the typeface.
Other countries have different treatment of typefaces, though.
The ability on the Amstrad CPC to define your own characters was fantastic for me when I was learning to program. It meant you had a dead simple way to draw sprites but just use text commands to draw everything. I do remember liking the default serif font as well, made text seem more apt in the terrible RPGs I wrote.
Yeah, I used that, too. Very handy to code a game in Basic. Firmware even allowed to draw characters at pixel-precise position (enabled with TAGON, disabled with TAGOFF).
Since characters are defined with only "on" and "off" pixels, this trick was limited to two-color graphics, which is a pity considering the CPC had real bitmapped display with up to 16 simultaneous colors, without any of the colour clash that limited most machines of the era.
Despite no sprite features in Basic, the CPC firmware (including Basic) is rather complete in the graphics and sound for the era.
See https://github.com/meesterturner/cpcsprite for a replacement usable from Basic.
Readit News
Here's an overview of some DF tilesets: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/Tileset_repository#8.C3.978
(the images you see on the left ARE the tilesets)
https://damieng.com/blog/2011/03/27/typography-in-16-bits-sy...
https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other...
https://damieng.com/blog/2016/08/09/typography-in-bits-for-a...
OpenType conversions: https://github.com/scruss/AVHershey-OTF/tree/master/otf
MicroPython code to write using Hershey fonts a LCD Display: https://github.com/russhughes/ttgo-hershey-fonts
MicroPython based robot that draws using Hershey fonts: https://github.com/russhughes/turtleplotbot3
I've been toying around with adding text to the EtchArtDuino and turning it into a "typewriter" or serial terminal. https://github.com/russhughes/EtchArtDuino
https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-bitfonts
Preview them here: http://robhagemans.github.io/monobit/
Other countries have different treatment of typefaces, though.
https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?p=87880&sid=bef3cfd8... - A collection of fonts ripped from some NES games
http://pelulamu.net/unscii/ - A font meant to look good in ASCII art
https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html - a tiny 3x5 bitmapped font.
SFont aren't monochrome, and working with them might take some work, but here are 2 nice collections: https://opengameart.org/content/the-collection-of-8-bit-font... and https://opengameart.org/content/a-package-of-8-bit-fonts-for...
http://www.type-invaders.com/sinclair/8bitfonts/ - a set of fonts for ZX Spectrum emulators
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