Fonts | Bytemap Fonts

Welcome

This site gathers bitmap/bytemap fonts, saved and extracted mostly from games and demoscene, drawn and pixelated by various graphicians and artists, lost and forgotten in time.

You can find hundreds upon hundreds of those fonts here, either as pictures or, better yet, in a file format that allows basic (macro)typography. Feel free to browse the list, filtered either by initial letter of the font name (above right) or more specifically (via form above, left).

In closer look

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A font is a set of characters. Bitmap is a map of bits (picture). A bitmap font is a set of pictures as its proprietary characters.

We can further distinguish pixelated/image fonts with just two colours (black or white, foreground or background) and fonts drawn with more than one colour. Let's call these bytemap fonts.

The fonts published here are of several origins:

pictures gathered by Daniel Guldkrans
font art from the archive of Carsten Cumbrowski
bytemap fonts of the 8-bit scene – mostly Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum
bytemap fonts of the 16-bit scene – mostly Atari ST and Amiga
other fonts from various sources (old demos, intros, etc.) converted by me

Wherever I could get a grip of the name of the author, I mentioned them in the file description. A lot of these fonts are many years old, some even decades. Font that were part of some games are now so called abandonware. I'm going to assume in good faith that all bitmap fonts shown here are freeware.

If you happen to be an author of a certain font presented here that you do not wish to be available, then feel free to contact me and I will make quick amendments to remove it from this website.

Similarly, if you happen to find an error in the description of any font, please, tell me what to fix in the discussion below each font.

Thanks in advance!

What's in it for me?

Let this site be helpful to you if:

you are a graphic designer seeking for some cool bitmap fonts
you are a programmer and would like to implement the BMF file-format
you'd like to have a pic of your text drawn by one of the fonts

Enjoy!

Recently added fonts

Recent comments

Time	Subject	Name	Comment
2010-02-12 02:55:48	army	admin	bohužel, nedělá. To je zcela jiný formát.
2010-02-06 01:34:58	General discussion	admin	Do You remember the game called Syndicate? Oh, those were the times...
2010-02-06 01:29:54	General discussion	van burden	...and happy day to You, armin! :-)
2010-01-20 22:53:28	General discussion	armin	hey fucker it is not work just shit ! where is unicode support u basterd
2009-11-02 16:15:46	General discussion	admin	Steven: Yeah, I gotta think it all through, hmm... The unicode support should be done by denominating each character not by one byte but rather a string, capturing its name, or a unicode code. And yes - alpha channel shouldn't be embedded but rather separate (but not taking the file space neither). So, I guess, it may (optionally) follow after the bitmaps definitions. Updated editor is in progress (but stopped on some trivial bug in saving... Delphi code, btw). So, You may already suggest it - the problem is, nowadays I happen not to have too much time (or zest, as I deny to admit) investing in it. :-( However, I don't mind passing the code to some one else with enthusiasm to keep developing.
2009-10-26 12:46:08	General discussion	Steven	Hmm unicode support would be nice, I'm not sure how good alpha would be (mind you I'm comming from the point of a DS homebrew developer here where pixel plotting is a slow process), but adding some form of compression would be nice - even if it was only for the mono coloured fonts. Thinking a bit more about the alpha bit, it would be useful to an extent, but you would have problems as there is one font that uses a 256 palette entry (402). An updated font editor would also be nice, I'm currently using a small utility to convert bitmap files to bmf files, with a lot of assumptions on the font glyph data. Sorry for all this talk about DS specific uses of the font, but that's where I'm currently using the fonts that are on this site.
2009-08-07 16:17:06	General discussion	admin	oggzee: exactly - i was even planning to implement it just like that, but somehow it didn't happen (perhaps because i was so lazy) ;-) however, nothing prohibits me to design version 2.0 of this format, to include both the transparency and some other things (like unicode characters, for example). you seem to be interested, i'll write you.
2009-07-28 15:44:22	General discussion	oggzee	If max colors used is 32 that means only 5 out of 8 bits for character data pixels are used, right? That leaves 3 bits unused, which could be used for the alpha channel. 3 bits would give a scale of 0-7 which should be good enough for antialiasing...
2009-07-28 13:37:26	General discussion	oggzee	It's a pitty BMF fonts don't carry alpha/transparency info as it would allow for proper antialiasing. A lot of fonts here are antialiased to a black background and so they are not suitable to be used over a colored background. The shades of grey could be extrapolated to the alpha channel, but since some fonts are actually colored, that can't be done automatically and reliably for all the fonts... Of course changing the BMF format is out of the question as well i suppose ;)
2009-07-16 02:11:53	General discussion	admin	i'm thinking about a proper design renovation of this site. all: what do you think about that?