Tag Archives: character set

Topaz Unicode by Screwtape, 2024. Adds a rich set of Unicode characters to the default Amiga 500 font, and offers it as a TTF-font. New characters include

  • all the Windows Glyph List 4 characters, including Cyrillic, Greek, and the MS-DOS CP437 symbols
  • everything in the Box Drawing Unicode block
  • everything in the Block Elements Unicode block
  • a lot of things in the Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode block
  • anything else that caught my eye or seemed useful

The font is available as TTF at GitLab.

h/t: Ne7

The first image shows a ROM-dump of the font in the classic terminals VT100 and VT220. The second image is how they appear on screen. The difference is more than just aspect ratio. Look at letters like q and p: pixels are sometimes doubled, sometimes tripled. The fascinating explanation is here.

Southwest Technical’s 6800 computer and the CT-64 terminal, and a photo of its 64×16 textmode. Launched in 1975. First image from Creative Computing and second one from here.

The 1986 retina screen: the WY-700 video card/screen gave the PC a 1280×800 resolution, and a text-mode of 160 columns by 50 lines. It had a built-in 16×16 font (download), and you could even use your own custom fonts. The high-res modes only supported greyscale, but who needs colours anyway?

Sources: John Elliot, thecomputerarchive.com, PC Mag.

The Amstrad PC 1640 character set is similar to Code Page 437, but there are a few differences.

The European font of the Sega SC-3000. Notice how curvy the full triangles and slashes are. Images from SMS Power and Saverio Russo.

By Ray Manta, @datad00r, using his own Circlex charset, now available in Retrospecs.

The 8×16 system font of the Atari ST (1985), available here.

The three TRS-80 models had no less than 22 different fonts in total (top image), available in Rebecca Bettencourt’s font pack Another Mans Treasure. Shown here are the international fonts from TRS-80 Model 4, and Rebecca’s additions in the last image.

Jindai moji, supposedly used in Japan in the 17th century, via @tkasasagi.