Console Generator
Type into the machines themselves. These are the real hardware charsets from DOS PCs and the Atari 8-bit line, served live and run through the effect engine. Turn on the CRT finish and the picture bends like curved glass.
Real hardware charsets, not imitations
Before fonts were files, they were character generators burned into hardware. The IBM PC's text modes drew from fixed charsets in code page 437: the chunky 8x8 of CGA and the BIOS, MDA's sharp 9x14 business face, EGA's 8x14, and the VGA 9x16 that became the look of DOS itself. The Atari 8-bit line had its own ATASCII set, redrawn by generations of demo sceners and magazine type-ins. The faces in this generator are the authoritative digitizations of those charsets, the same glyphs the machines drew, served as live webfonts under the wing's face allowlist.
Period CRTs did not have square pixels, so the pack ships two digitizations of every machine: Px faces, the square-pixel outlines used for flat renders, and Ac faces, aspect-correct, the proportions the characters actually had on a monitor tube. The generator follows the hardware: flat exports use Px, and turning on the CRT finish switches to the Ac face and dresses the render with the barrel curve, phosphor glow, scanlines and vignette of curved glass.
Credits and licenses
PC Classics faces digitized by VileR, from The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. EightBit Atari faces are font outlines (c) 2018 by Steve Boswell (a8bit), from the EightBit-Atari-Fonts collection, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The files served here are subset WOFF2 conversions of those fonts; the adapted PC faces remain CC BY-SA. Full attribution ships with the faces in CREDITS.txt.