It's a shame these are all presented with giant blocky pixels. It makes some of the fonts look really ugly (ex. Lady Bug). Better IMO to present them as they would appear on the medium for which the designers intended them, a CRT. https://www.hottechzone.com/is-an-old-crt-television-perfect... has some good examples of the difference.
I dunno, I think it's good to look at these typefaces from a different perspective. An analogy would be examining a butterfly that has been pinned so that its anatomy can be examined up close. It's not as pretty or elegant as seeing it fluttering around outside, but it does let you experience it in a way that gives you information you wouldn't normally get.
I don't disagree, but to continue the analogy, pictures of live butterflies in flight are nonetheless invaluable to a researcher, and difficult to obtain. Although emulation helps, the "original look" of many of these fonts may be forever lost to time as the original hardware dies out.
On reflection I'm actually pretty happy with the decision to go with hardcover.
Nowadays I've got quite used to Paypal checkout for sites I've not bought from before, which has the advantage that you generally don't need to enter any details or digout your card.
On ZX Spectrum, games often had fonts based on MICR[1] or OCR-A[2]. Example: [3]. I still don't understand why. I see these fonts in the wild very, very rarely. Was they popular in UK in 80s maybe? Was they used even outside bank cheques?
That's an easy question to answer - because they looked cool and futuristic. If you watch old episodes of Doctor Who or 70s films you will often see props and displays with similar fonts, and video games followed that aesthetic.
I guess those fonts had just started to appear on cheques and machine readable tickets so people associated those typefaces with computers.
Because in the 1970s, those fonts were visual code for "computer", and there was some spillover into the 1980s. Books with a computer theme, such as type-in program books and young adult novels, often had part or all of their title set in such a font. You see it also on electronic products of the era, such as the Waddingtons Game Machine.
I'm an even bigger fan of the slightly larger and more detailed bitmap fonts used in the early 90s, popularized on Amiga, arcade machines, and in particular the demoscene. These fonts were the inspiration for the Voxel Quest logo [1].
The software I work on at work uses bitmap fonts. We actually have a system that renders windows fonts without subpixel rendering on a few backgrounds and then saves the output to header files for us to include in the project. It's mainly for space saving reasons and the fact that getting a proper text rendering system was more work than it was worth.
- what I call the "Nintendo Font" that was in many 8-bit NES games and arcade games. It's the font in Pac-man. I believe some Atari games from the 70's used it,
- The VT220 font - I use the GlassTTY font in PuTTY, I really like it.
re the apple 2 font, yes i instantly recognized the space invaders page in the book to be exactly, or nearly so, the upper case 40-column character set used on the apple 2.
(I feel the book must have been inspired by this site somehow, particularly when you read the various 'notes' that pop up after selecting a font from the dropdown.)
Moru thanks for that! The website is not maintained anymore but it doesn't distribute any malware. Maybe that's why the amount of views is slowly dropping every year.
Added a false positive report https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/254447-fontsforwebcom-...
But the pixel art I've seen from GANs hasn't been too good. I think it's ultimately because it's very impoverished a representation and pixel art relies heavily on us already knowing what we might be looking at, and a GAN doesn't know that. Imagine trying to learn to generate Pokemon when there's only a few hundred examples of them and you've never seen any of the millions of plant or animal species they are based off of?
I'm doing some experiments with GAN. I think I'm halfway done. I don't want to talk much about it now, cause I'm afraid of failure, but... if things goes well, I'm might post something interesting here this weekend.
Another post from the same site, with a high-quality image of a Space Invaders CRT for direct comparison with the first example in the article: https://www.hottechzone.com/taito-space-invaders-arcade-mach...