VileR

No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists.

That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font).

Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts.

If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains…

Hello HN!

This project has been featured here in the past, and perhaps the new version would also be of interest.

The goal of the collection is still the same: taking classic hardware/system charsets from pre-GUI IBM PCs and compatibles, and providing accurate conversions to current font formats. (The scope has expanded a little bit, so that early "not-quite-compatible" platforms are also fair game.)

v2.0 adds:

- 133 new fonts (from 52 different sources)

- A new TrueType variant with embedded bitmaps (where supported, this bypasses anti-aliasing and ensures sharp rendering)

- Another new TrueType variant which provides aspect correction (to reproduce the non-square pixel ratios of the original resolutions)

- Web font (.woff) conversions

- A full font index on the website, including information on the original hardware and how the charsets were used (for appropriate historical context)

- A preview page for each individual font, which lets you play around with sizes, aspect ratios and sample text

The linked blog post has more details, but you can also browse the collection directly at http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts. There's also a showcase section, with links to projects that employ these fonts in useful and creative ways.

Comments welcome. Enjoy!

Linked in this article is VileR's excellent website <https://int10h.org/>. In fact, it is linked 8 times in this article. If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend following those links. VileR's site is probably the best resource we have today that preserves the various PC OEM fonts from a bygone technological era -- an era that lives on in the memories of those of us who first encountered these machines early in life.

I'm genuinely in awe of the time and effort VileR has poured into recovering each font, and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction, and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent countless hours there comparing different OEM fonts, and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!

The CGA colour palette was horrid on RGB monitors but on Composite it could look quite good for its time. Not Amiga-level good but good enough. Of course composite monitors were not really a thing in the IBM PC world so it was to little avail. Here's an example of a screen in the mentioned horrible hot-pink palette:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_20161009_203405.jpg

...and here's the same screen viewed on a composite monitor:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_20161009_203326.jpg

These images come from this page:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/cga-composite-graphics-and-my-attempts-to-use-them/

If this isn't enough it seems to be possible to coax ~1000 colours out of these cards as well:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/

I also have a hard time understanding the question, but reading the text, it asks a different question:

“The thing is I'm going to need to display stuff on it so I need character gloves and little graphics and stuff like that. Are there any standard glyphs or libraries for resolutions that small?”

Because of that and the use of ‘one color’, I think/guess the OP has a 80×20 display that isn’t black and white (say a LED panel), and looks for fonts that can be used on it (I would go look at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ or https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts, or look at old Mac and Windows bitmap fonts for those (warning: copyright laws may apply)) and, possibly, libraries to show an UI on it.

The hercules card had a "80 × 25 text mode with 9 × 14 pixel font (effective resolution of 720 × 350, MDA-compatible)" (wikipedia), but the graphics mode was 720 x 348.

It always blew my mind that you'd buy a new videocard, and plug the big CRT monitor in it, and it would switch between different resolutions. Precisely because the holes and pixels don't line up, they supported a huge range of resolutions and it didn't look as smeared as on LCDs.

I think the mask in the CRT itself also contributed to a kind of subpixel Anti-Aliasing.

And I've never seen this in real life, but it's amazing, using the hardware implementation to force 1024 colors out of CGA?! https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/