Then I got my first VGA output with a 386.

The exclamation mark was now curvy and sexy! Thick at the top, curving down to a point, finished with a round dot. I thought everything was right in the world.

I miss that font.

I've tried reusing bitmapped fonts that give me my desired output but I find it just doesn't work in enough places that it's too annoying. Maybe it messes up curses output, or UTF-8 incompatibilities?

VGA (in typically used character modes) had more bits per character, and its fonts didn’t have to be designed to be legible when displayed on a television set (screen not designed for text display, and signal converted to antenna signal and back)

Also, are you sure about that “round dot”? https://github.com/spacerace/romfont/blob/master/font-images... doesn’t show it, and any non-squareness would require a width of at least 3 pixels (more likely 4) to draw.

I don't doubt the C64 designers did the best with what they could; but I was absolutely impressed with how good the "!" looked on that VGA screen.

Then you must have missed the atrocity that was the Commodore's @ symbol.

None of the early computers did a good job with it. I remember the Tandy machines were particularly bad.

Heck—if you spent years reading your terminal upside down, you'd get very good at that too. Eventually you might get nostalgic for it.