Over at int10h.org, VileR has collected classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles. Some lend themselves well to be fed through the N2 vectorizer of vfontas, a font manipulation utility in the consoleet-utils tool suite.
Resources
- Latest release from Consoleet: 2.2.2 (2026-03-20)
The version number follows that of upstream.
DL: consoleet-oldschoolpc-2.2.2.tar.zst - Some Linux distributions may have a readily installable package (e.g. openSUSE's consoleet-oldschoolpc-fonts)
- Release archive
Screenshots
- Comparison between “Mx437 ATI 8x16” and “Consoleet ATI 8x16”.
The glyphs are 16px tall, and to get pixel-perfect rendering, one needs to use
a multiple of 12pt@96dpi (or e.g. 9.6pt@120dpi). Screenshot shows 24pt@96dpi.
- Comparison between “Mx437 ATI 9x16” and “Consoleet ATI 9x16”, at 24pt@96dpi.
- Comparison between “MxPlus AST PremiumExec” and “Consoleet AST”.
The original glyphs are 19px tall, but there is a subtle difference in
how the font metrics for the vector forms have been set. Fonts produced
by vfontas follow exact numbers and so, Consoleet AST needs to be
loaded as [19 * 72/DPI * integral_scaling_factor] to appear
pixel-perfect, i.e. 28.5pt(@96dpi), whereas int10h's AST font metadata
(EM Size) had been configured such that pixel-perfect rendering
requires 30pt(@96dpi).
There is a complex history behind AST. - Comparison between “MxPlus IBM MDA” (24pt) and “Consoleet MDA” (21pt@96dpi)
