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textfontsconsolevgabitmap-fonts

Classic VGA text console font used by Matrox graphics adapters


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.


Solution

  • 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.