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Retro Game Fonts

The pixel and 8-bit typefaces inside classic games and computers, cataloged from the actual files and shown as real specimens: what each face covers, what it is missing, and where its license lets it live.

Most retro game lettering was never a font you could install. It was tiles in a cartridge, a character ROM in a computer, or an alphabet burned into an arcade board. This wing collects the conversions, restorations and extractions that turned those alphabets into files, 2,397 designs across 1,829 rendered specimen sets, and shows each one honestly: the specimen is rendered from the held file, so a font that lacks digits shows a strip with no digits. font.lol does not hand out the files; where a design is published, the route out is FontSpace.

The shelves

PC Text Mode fonts DOS and BIOS character sets, code page 437 72 designs · 69 with specimens Browse the shelf > Atari 8-Bit fonts ATASCII sets from the Atari 400/800 line and its games 398 designs · 395 with specimens Browse the shelf > ZX Spectrum fonts The 8x8 grid: Sinclair's ROM face and 260-plus originals 287 designs · 284 with specimens Browse the shelf > NES fonts Tile alphabets from inside Nintendo's cartridges 175 designs · 139 with specimens Browse the shelf > Game Boy fonts Four shades of green: tile alphabets from the handheld 111 designs · 110 with specimens Browse the shelf > SNES fonts 16-bit dialogue faces, including an extraction flagship 15 designs · 15 with specimens Browse the shelf > Arcade fonts Alphabets from the boards, organised by game 398 designs · 165 with specimens Browse the shelf >

The flagship: Chrono Trigger

ChronoType specimen, a redraw of the Chrono Trigger dialogue lettering
ChronoType, Caveras's redraw of the dialogue lettering

Chrono Trigger's dialogue font is the wing's restoration story. The game talks in a proportional 8 by 12 pixel font that Square drew for it in 1995, and in thirty years nobody ever distributed it as a file. The answer page tells the whole story: where the font bank sits inside the cartridge, how it was decoded and verified glyph by glyph, and the honest part, that no width table exists, so the rebuilt font's spacing is measured from the letterforms themselves.

Read the Chrono Trigger answer
The console generator Your text in the shelf faces: PC Classics and Atari sets, with the CRT finish and the monitor-framed preview. Open the generator >
The format corner Why game fonts ship as a PNG atlas plus a .fnt descriptor, and what FON, .chr, .fzx and .64c each belong to. The BMFont converter workbench arrives with its own tranche; the editorial starts on the shelf pages.
ASCII Fonts: the text-art wing The collections behind the ASCII generator, kept as a reference archive: 313 FIGlet designs, the 34 TheDraw fonts from the BBS art packs, and the 4,019-pack archive itself. Browse the text-art wing > Every design, one wall The whole wing on a single wall: filter by system, character set, license and state across all 2,397 cataloged designs. Open the wall >

Fresh specimens from the shelves

Px437 IBM VGA 9x16 specimen Px437 IBM VGA 9x16 VileR (Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack) Pac-Man - Arcade specimen Pac-Man - Arcade Pac-Man - Arcade Tetris - Arcade specimen Tetris - Arcade Tetris - Arcade Press Start 2P specimen Press Start 2P Return of Ishtar Eightbit Atari Classic specimen Eightbit Atari Classic GitHub - a8bit/EightBit-Atari-Fonts Amiga Topaz v1 specimen Amiga Topaz v1 DamienG (System Fonts) Kenney Blocks specimen Kenney Blocks Kenney ChronoType specimen ChronoType Chrono Trigger