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Reply 60 of 76, by VileR

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Seems like none of the Memotek encodings are 100% identical to the Acer one. The closest one is the block at offset 800h, but nine high-ASCII characters are still different:

0xEB: Acer= Φ , Memotek= Έ
0xEC: Acer= ∞ , Memotek= Ή
0xED: Acer= ∅ , Memotek= Ί
0xEE: Acer= ∈ , Memotek= Ό
0xEF: Acer= ∩ , Memotek= Ύ
0xF0: Acer= ≡ , Memotek= Ώ
0xF9: Acer= ∙ , Memotek= £
0xFA: Acer= · , Memotek= ΄
0xFC: Acer= ⁿ , Memotek= ¨

acer_vs_memotek.png
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Of course the glyph shapes for the Greek alphabet block also differ, but the characters themselves seems to be the same there (correct me if I'm wrong). So unless those magazine programs actually depend on these *non*-greek characters in the Acer ROM, then the Memotek one should be close enough 😉

Creating the data for a custom CGA ROM shouldn't be a problem... it's the same structure that the Acer ROM already has:

- 0h: 4 KB of 8x14 font data (unused on CGA, but Acer has a Greek encoding there too, probably for using the same ROM on mono cards)
- 1000h: 2 KB of 'thin' 8x8 font data (which Acer replaced with its Greek encoding)
- 1800h: 2 KB of 'thick' 8x8 font data (Acer keeps the US CGA charset at this location)

...with the last two 2 KB banks being jumper-selectable. So you could simply make a copy of the Acer ROM data - it should work just fine with an IBM CGA, and jumpering it to use the 'thin' font will give you the Acer-style encoding you want.

Of course, you could also replace those 2 KB with the 0800h Memotek data, or merge the two charsets any odd way... for instance, taking the Memotek charset (if you prefer that font style) and replacing just those 9 'problem' chars with the Acer ones.
Perhaps there are ready-made tools to do that, but I'd just use a hex-editor and CrystalTile 2... anyway, if you do want to "mix-and-match", let me know and I'd be happy to help!

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Reply 61 of 76, by keropi

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hmmmm

Here is what I am seeing
- the greek encoding seems to the the same in both images - as expected
- the ACER plyphs are better looking for the most part, there are some that the Memotek one does better
- the different glyphs on the memotek are actually capital letters with an accent , they are used but are not mamdatory. I'd say the Memotek set is more complete because of this...

I have a couple of dumps from generic CGAs but at the office - I believe they will shed some more light on what the "correct" map is ... Using CrystalTile 2 is a nice tip, I can view the glyphs too now (well the Acer one is kinda strange because the first half of the characters appear to be 50% displayed or something, the Memotek one displays fine).

When it comes to the English characters both are identical in pixel level, right?

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Reply 62 of 76, by SquallStrife

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VileR, Would you be interested in a dump from a DEC VT320?

It has two fonts that I know of, one each for 80-col and 132-col mode.

I have one of those TL866 reader/writers, so shouldn't be too hard.

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Reply 63 of 76, by VileR

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keropi wrote:

- the different glyphs on the memotek are actually capital letters with an accent , they are used but are not mamdatory. I'd say the Memotek set is more complete because of this...

I have a couple of dumps from generic CGAs but at the office - I believe they will shed some more light on what the "correct" map is ... Using CrystalTile 2 is a nice tip, I can view the glyphs too now (well the Acer one is kinda strange because the first half of the characters appear to be 50% displayed or something, the Memotek one displays fine).

Memotek looked more complete to me as well... nice to have that confirmed by a native speaker then. 😀
As for the first half of the Acer ROM, it's just using the same format as IBM: this is the MDA 8x14 font, stored as 8x16 with the bottom two scanlines unused. That in turn is split into two 8x8 banks, so 0h-7FFh contain the top half of each character, and 800h-FFFh the bottom halves.

When it comes to the English characters both are identical in pixel level, right?

Yep - characters 0 to 127 are 100% identical between Acer, Memotek, and IBM CGA.

BTW, gratuitous tip regarding Crystal Tile 2... I don't think the keyboard shortcuts are listed anywhere (at least not in English), so here they are:
- F5-F10: switch modes
- Alt+cursor keys: resize character cell
- Shift+cursor keys: resize viewport
- Cursor keys: change offset (in character cell increments)
- Ctrl+cursor left/right: change offset (in byte increments)
- Ctrl+cursor up/down: change tile format (of course only 1bpp is useful for character ROMs)

I found the UI intolerable until I figured them out, so I hope that helps.

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Reply 64 of 76, by VileR

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SquallStrife wrote:

VileR, Would you be interested in a dump from a DEC VT320?

It has two fonts that I know of, one each for 80-col and 132-col mode.

I have one of those TL866 reader/writers, so shouldn't be too hard.

I'm always interested in those old bitmap charsets, although probably not for this font pack since the focus is IBM PC/compatibles. 😀 I did find this page, but that's only for the 80-column font. (According to the preamble, the character data is compressed, too?)

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Reply 65 of 76, by leileilol

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Someone is working on some more rounded vectory font based on the IBM VGA fonts. Sorry for the hijacking but I didn't want to start a topic and it's a very very similar interest anyway and I'd thought to poke this your way. 😀

The project just went public and it's an hour old at the time of this post. Whether it's intended to compete with your efforts I do not know. Just raising awareness

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Reply 66 of 76, by VileR

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leileilol wrote:

Someone is working on some more rounded vectory font based on the IBM VGA fonts. Sorry for the hijacking but I didn't want to start a topic and it's a very very similar interest anyway and I'd thought to poke this your way. 😀

The project just went public and it's an hour old at the time of this post. Whether it's intended to compete with your efforts I do not know. Just raising awareness

Heh, that's not bad but way too rounded for my taste. Reminds me of what I already wanted to do a few years ago 😁
I think something halfway between that xbrz-style (kinda rounded) and Nouveau IBM (very angular) would be best - with correct VGA aspect ratio of course, which is ~0.75x as wide as the naïve 1:1 version. I still wanna give it a go, if I ever find a nice and flexible way to automate the tracing instead of doing it all by hand.

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Reply 67 of 76, by VileR

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VileRancour wrote:

...if I ever find a nice and flexible way to automate the tracing instead of doing it all by hand.

OK, that turned out to be not too bad. Here's an actual .SVG sample using a faithful aspect ratio:

temp_font2.svg

Making a .ttf out of that would be the annoying part, but that's just a matter of throwing time at the problem...

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Reply 68 of 76, by VileR

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Ok, if anyone wants to play around with a test version of the scalable VGA font, here you go:

Filename
Flexi VGA9 fonts.zip
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It's more faithful than either 'Nouveau IBM' or this 'Codepage' font (IMHO, YMMV, OFC). 😀 Has the same extended multilingual character sets as my pixelfont 'PxPlus' version.

Flexi_IBM_VGA9_True = aspect-corrected, so the characters have the same ratio as on a 4:3 VGA CRT (720x400 text mode):

preview_flexivga9_true.png

Flexi_IBM_VGA9_False = no aspect correction:

preview_flexivga9_false.png

Unfortunately, on Windows this may look a little "off" when GDI is used for font rendering, i.e. pretty much everywhere... other than (new-ish) browsers, which use DirectWrite. Therefore it's best at multiples of 16px. No such problem on Linux or Mac.

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Reply 69 of 76, by MikeRS

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Hey guys. I didn't find a good way to edit the font sources, but I wanted to make a couple small extensions. Just the characters ẞ (LATIN CAPITAL SHARP S) and ₿ (BITCOIN SIGN). I've tried to add these symbols in the best way I could to the style of the original fonts while being recognizable. My edit process was:

1. Draw pixel forms in GIMP
2. Edit the *.fon versions in FontForge
3. Save as *.sfd and add bitmap outlines to the characters
4. Run bitsnpicas on the files
5. Copy+paste to the right locations in the PxPlus versions with FontForge

I've only tested my changes on Linux, hopefully I didn't screw the pooch 😀 This is a small contribution but it was fun to figure out how to do it. (Maybe if I'm nuts enough, I'll try a more significant script...)

https://chungy.keybase.pub/PxPlus_extended.zip

Reply 70 of 76, by dr.zeissler

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How can these fonts be use in plain Dos and or Win9x/Win2k...
I copied some fonts in the hidden "fonts" folder of win9x but I can't choose them for the Desktop.
Is there a Trick to do so? or are they not compatible with win9x?

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Reply 71 of 76, by xjas

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Is Computerphile using your font pack? See here: https://youtu.be/_qvOlL8nhN4?t=6m40s

Nice going if so. 😀

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Reply 72 of 76, by VileR

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Been a long time, but I'm finally(!) working on an update for this font collection.

Quite a few additions and improvements are in the works, but if anyone has an interesting PC compatible / laptop / video card which isn't already included, and has a non-generic font, I'd be happy to add more 😀

If you do and you'd like to contribute, lemme know!

Oh, missed this post:

xjas wrote on 2018-01-19, 22:57:

Is Computerphile using your font pack? See here: https://youtu.be/_qvOlL8nhN4?t=6m40s
Nice going if so. 😀

...Nope, that just looks like FixedSys. 😁

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Reply 73 of 76, by fly_indiz

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VileR, I love the font PxPlus_IBM_VGA_9x16.ttf
Use this:
- on windows: cmd, powershell, windows terminal, putty
- on linux: terminal emulator
- on android: in termux
it is excelent!!
But I have a request, if possible.

Some cyrillic characters style are not excelent..
Proposal:
can you get ONLY cyrillic chars from latest ega3.cpi (windows 98 - XP) CP866?
these cyrillic characters can be called canonical, and look some better.
I don't have experience with font editors 🙁

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Reply 74 of 76, by VileR

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fly_indiz wrote on 2023-05-19, 06:03:
Some cyrillic characters style are not excelent.. Proposal: can you get ONLY cyrillic chars from latest ega3.cpi (windows 98 - X […]
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Some cyrillic characters style are not excelent..
Proposal:
can you get ONLY cyrillic chars from latest ega3.cpi (windows 98 - XP) CP866?
these cyrillic characters can be called canonical, and look some better.

Appreciate the suggestion... honestly I don't recall exactly where I sourced the Cyrillic chars from - it may have been some flavor of PC-DOS (7/2K), or mixed-and-matched. I think I ran into this set as well, but it looked kind of uneven: some characters seem optimized for the 9-dot width (Ж / Т) and others are not (Ш / М), е and ё are shaped differently, З looks the same as the number 3, etc.

Changing these could be a bit complicated, since the 'plus' fonts include other Cyrillic chars not found in CP866; I also tried to keep a consistent style for all the 'IBM' fonts, so modifying VGA_9x16 would mean modifying the others the same way.
Perhaps other Cyrillic users could weigh in on this? Is the above set preferable to the current one?

By the way: if you're only interested in the IBM VGA font, you could also try UniVGA16 from ReactOS, which covers even more characters.

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Reply 75 of 76, by fly_indiz

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VileR wrote on 2023-05-21, 06:59:

since the 'plus' fonts include other Cyrillic chars not found in CP866

It is possible fix only submitted cyrillic chars from ega3.cpi...

VileR wrote on 2023-05-21, 06:59:

if you're only interested in the IBM VGA font, you could also try UniVGA16 from ReactOS, which covers even more characters.

interesting font, but full chars set in UniVGA16 is less important then what's UniVGA16 is 8x16 font - and this not correct for me, because not exist artificial 9 pixel additional column to preserve the authenticity of 8х16 font visibility at 9x16 display char cells.
In this sense, the IBM VGA 9x16 font - is perfect, and therefore he is only interested.

I also note that not all cyrillic chars need to be fixed, some symbols are correct.
If it is possible to correct at least one these font, it would be great.