About

Inspired by The Oldschool PC Font Resource, the idea is to collect a definitive collection of assets in tribute to the Atari ST and its successors. The aim is for both accuracy and utility.

The collection includes all four system font sizes, accurate rendering of bold and italic versions, greyed-out versions with the correct bit-masks, and includes the original "disk" TOS fonts. "2y" versions are available for everything traditionally used on a medium resolution screen, to give that authentic stretched look.

To make the collection widely useful, fonts are presented in TrueType. Sets of fonts with bold and italic attributes can be installed together and have been set up to work correctly with the majority of software.

FAQ

What's with the weird file names?

The file naming scheme follows along with and extends the conventions used for The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack.

• The 'Px' prefix indicates pixel-based outlines. When rendered at the source size of the font (e.g. rendering the 8*16 font at 16px height) the outlines should match the screen pixels 1:1.
• The next part of the name indicates the encoding. 'U8MAtariST' is the name I've used for the standard mapping from the Atari ST's native repertoire into Unicode code points. It's derived entirely from the U8/M encoding system.
• Next is the font name itself. This contains 'Atari System', the original pixel height of the font, and then 'DT' for "Disk" TOS and 'RT' for "ROM" TOS.
• If the font is greyed-out, the word 'Gray' appears next in the filename. Although GEM considers greying out as a rendering property, modern software doesn't have an equivalent, so the word 'Gray' is also added to the font name.
• Next are the conventional style markers 'Bold' and 'Italic'.
• Finally, a suffix of '-2y' is added for vertical stretched versions. These convey the way the fonts look on the medium resolution screen (640*200). You'll need to double the render size for the pixels to line up accurately, as it's a vertical stretch, not a horizontal squash.

Wait, explain that "Disk" TOS again?

The original release of the Atari ST's OS was a 16kB ROM that loaded the main OS image from disk. Soon after, an official full ROM OS was produced. As well as booting the whole OS from ROM, the font was also adjusted to be more consistent. I've included it in the collection for historical accuracy and completeness. If you just want to make something look Atari ST, the "ROM" TOS fonts are the ones to use.

Why are there four sizes for "ROM" and three for "Disk"?

The fourth size, 16*32, is for the TT's 1280*960 screen resolution. Since this did not exist at the time the "Disk" TOS was created, there was no 16*32 font in that version of TOS. It was added in TOS version 3.

Can we have a full Unicode version?

Full Unicode is a tall order. But it should be possible to add characters for alphabets that are similar to what's already there. It would just need some time and some inspiration.

Can we have a smooth version?

Sort of maybe. There are algorithms to calculate a "smoothed" version of a bitmap image. I don't think they do a great job on making a nice looking font based on small bitmaps though. Certainly something to play with when time allows.

Can we have a version without the Unicode mapping, just 1:1 indexed with the original encoding?

That's easy to do and I've poked around at it a little, but I'd need help testing it out properly.

Can we have a proper bitmap or mixed mode version of the font?

Internally the data goes into BDF and then into other tools to create the outputs, so in theory the bitmap version is right there. Again, it's a matter of testing it out and documenting it.

If you're doing 'Px' versions, what about 'Ac' versions?

I'd just need a reliable measurement of the expected ratio. Something like 1.2:1 seems about right for a properly calibrated SM124; if you're in a position to test out an aspect-corrected font, do get in touch.

What about (some other related font)?

The font on the case and the keyboard is Helvetica, with some custom glyphs like the double-quote and the asterisk. The logo and badge font is VGC Harry. The manuals use Helvetica except for code listings, which vary depending on language. For ST Basic, the code font in the manual is a mangled version of the Atari 8-bit font. For the fonts for box stamps, PCBs, and case labels, I haven't yet tried to pin down details. I'd love to know more about the history of the keycaps and the code font though.

Encodings

The U8/M AtariST encoding seems to be the current best standard way to map between the Atari ST character set and the Unicode codepoints. Here's a cheat-sheet so that you can find all the characters:

Tooling

• OS bitmap data reverse engineering assisted by Robert Mazur's RAW Pixels Viewer.
• BDF creation and manipulation with the Python bdflib library.
• GEM rendering reverse engineered through Atari ST Internals, tos.hyp, and a home-grown font displayer in GFA Basic, cross-checked with screenshots grabbed via STeem.
• ttf file output via Rebecca G. Bettencourt's Bits'n'Picas.

Legal Stuff

I do not claim any rights to the original Atari font designs, nor the original ROM binary data encoding of those designs. As far as I can determine, no copyright currently applies to the original font, either in its original jurisdiction (where nothing about it could be copyrighted), nor in the UK where this site is based (where any such copyright expires after 25 years, and the last font presented here was originally released with the Atari TT in 1990).

The font files that I provide here are, however, my own work, especially in figuring out the various versions and renderings, and aspects may be subject to copyright depending on jurisdiction. To keep it simple, they are copyright 2024 daeghnao / Zoë Stephenson where applicable, and are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.