Re:Fonts extracted from BIOSes and VGA ROMs
by reaperducer on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @12:23PM
(#23168526)
FWIW, the reason all of the vertical elements in the C-64 font are two pixels wide is to compensate for raster blur on televisions that were common at the time.
If you made a vertical line only one pixel wide, on many televisions like the Panasonic I used it would be nearly impossible to see.
And while color monitors of the day were an improvement, they still weren't what we would consider acceptable today. I eventually upgraded to a Commodore CM-141, and single pixel vertical lines still weren't great.
Also if you look at all the ways letters and numbers have been drawn in C-64, NES, Genesis, and SNES games; there's lots of room for creativity and design even in an 8x8 space.