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Back in 199[456] I was using Linux and a Matrox graphics adapter. For programming I often used the text mode and didn't bother to boot into X11. These graphics cards allowed for really high text resolutions and still had a very readable font. Occasionally I'd like to test if this font would work well for programming on X11 -- but I cannot find this font to give it a try!

I have searched intensively, for example here, but no font seems to look like the Matrox one. So, the questions:

  • which font was used? Was it the regular console font that just looked better on those graphic cards?
  • is this font available for X11? Which one is it?
  • Any examples / screenshots?

I'd be very glad if anyone could explain if I'm just hallucinating or if my memories are accurate.

UPDATE: I've since found a good resource. Selecting the font Px437_IBM_VGA_8x16.ttf and setting the terminal to 12px comes pretty close to my memories. Since monitor resolutions are much higher now, the font becomes pretty tiny, and scaling it up looks somewhat wrong. I will have to experiment.

hochl
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2 Answers2

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I just found this font online -> http://webdraft.hu/fonts/classic-console/ maybe it will help.

CyberK
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This site dumps the ROMs of several old VGA BIOS chips and locates the bitmaps used by the character generator. There's a Matrox card from 1993 in there, but the fonts look quite ordinary to me.

What software or environment were you using, out of curiosity?

Also, have you made any progress on this subject on any other sites? I'm very curious as I'm going to be embarking on a highly relevant project at some point in the future.

i336_
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  • I have never found the font -- unfortunately! I now use the second best font that I know of, unifont. Very crisp at 12pt and fits a lot of characters on a 24" screen with very good readability. Plus it contains a huge set of unicode characters. Back then I was using a Matrox Mystique and later a Matrox GA400 with a resolution of something like 135 x 90 on a 19" screen. It's entirely possible that the resolution was a key aspect to make the font look better. From my current perspective, the dumped fonts look all very similar to me. Matrox was just the card with all the strange resolutions :) – hochl Jul 16 '16 at 19:32
  • Ah, a Mystique. I have a G450 here that I'll definitely be firing up in future when I get all my old systems going again, but IIRC it looked pretty ordinary. 135x90 sounds very interesting (I assume this is text cols/rows); I'm very interested in old font systems, I'll definitely keep in mind that you used this. I also remember discovering a DOS utility a while back that somehow figured out how to make an old(ish) laptop go into 800x600, and came with a bunch of cool fonts as well - this was why I was curious what your environment was, I was wondering if you were using something like this. – i336_ Jul 17 '16 at 03:01
  • I will use the font from your link and compare it to the font from the other link and see how it looks in different resulotions. I will come back with results as soon as I'm finished. Can take some weeks tho as not much time currently for such projects. – hochl Jul 17 '16 at 19:18
  • Oh, cool! I forgot to mention, there's also http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/ - maybe the font you're looking for is on there. – i336_ Jul 18 '16 at 01:40
  • I think what comes closest is the PxPlus_IBM_VGA8.ttf font at 12pt. It still feels a little different, but it gets there. The 135x90 in text mode felt more symmetrical, I don't know how to better describe it. But it's maybe as good as it gets. I will accept your answer for the time being :) Thanks for your efforts! – hochl Jul 20 '16 at 20:03
  • Oh another side note: I compared the MGA font from the ROM site, the VGA8 one and the classic console font from the other answer and their glyphs all match. Nonetheless, the VGA8 one looks better and I'm not entirely sure how that is possible. Any ideas? – hochl Jul 20 '16 at 20:22
  • Regarding the TTF you found, very interesting. It's possible the symmetricality you remember/describe might be due to your CRT's vsize settings squashing/stretching the font display; the effect may be reproducible with a 4K/8K screen. I definitely hope you find the font, or a close approximation of it! It's possible the VGA8 font is simply being presented more cleanly than the ROM site (bitmapped garbage) or the classic console font (widely spaced presentation). – i336_ Jul 21 '16 at 08:48
  • Finally, I would highly recommend asking on the VOGONS or OSDev forums or contacting int10h about the 135x90 thing - I'm 99.9% certain that they'll be able to provide more info about this, and possibly provide followup font links that might be what you're looking for. 135 cols vaguely rings a bell as a nonstandard mode some VGA cards can do, so I'm very curious what you learn! Perhaps you could post the link or info here when you find out :) – i336_ Jul 21 '16 at 08:49
  • "to your CRT's vsize settings squashing/stretching the font display" that's exactly what I suspect! Unfortunately I currently have no 4K/8K hardware at hand, but I'm sure that will change sooner or later, so patience is needed :/ – hochl Jul 21 '16 at 10:36
  • Yep, 4K/8K has a long way to go before it's ubiquitous yet. I mentioned those sorts of resolutions because trying to simulate an old CRT using the DPI resolutions of most existing displays simply doesn't work - you need more pixel density. On that note, though, I completely forgot to mention [cool-retro-term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term) (I did *not* realize it abbreviates to "CRT" for forever...), a fun (if GPU-heavy) terminal emulator with a bunch of options to try to simulate an old CRT display. Not at all perfect, but fun to tinker with. – i336_ Jul 21 '16 at 11:20