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

bass-o-matic-by-crusaders-c

legobio-g

arcade-carrier-air-wing-small-o

arcade-carrier-air-wing-small-g

arcade-carrier-air-wing-small-y

sw-menu-softer

game-clover-u

game-clover-t

arcade-carrier-air-wing-c

arcade-carrier-air-wing-b

Recent comments

Time	Subject	Name	Comment
2024-06-12 22:52:27	oricatmos	admin	"The follow-up v2 model of the TRS 80 Color Computer – also known as the Tandy Color Computer used an enhanced Motorola MC6847T1 variant." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:49:50	amigatopaz2xlow	admin	"Commodore’s update to the Amiga saw all sorts of changes in the ROM and Workbench for the GUI including some revisions to the font and the ability to change what font the workbench used." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:48:43	ataristlow	admin	"The Atari ST was Atari’s answer to the Commodore Amiga after they failed to purchase back the talent and technology. The machine’s GUI was based on GEM from Digital Research." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:47:42	ti-99-4a	admin	"Texas Instruments foray into the home computer market came in 1979 with the TI-99/4 and featured an awkward keyboard and limited expansion. By 1981 the 4A had been released which fixed these and the machine went onto enjoy a few years of success before chasing the technically-inferior VIC 20's price point and eventually discontinuing in 1983 after large losses with much of the failure down to TI's tight control on technical information and discouraging third-party development." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:46:28	commodore128	admin	"While the follow-up to the Commodore 64 used the exact same font at boot – it had the same VIC-II video chip – switching it into 80-column mode reveals a new font with double-height pixels powered by the MOS 8563 VDC." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:45:23	einstein	admin	"The Tatung Einstein TC-01 was a British Z80 based machine launched in the UK that never really took off with the public. It enjoyed some success in game development as a compiler and debugger for other, more popular, Z80 systems. This use was likely due to its CP/M compatible OS and disk system (it came with the same oddball 3″ disks used on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 and Amstrad CPC/PCW range)." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:44:33	msx	admin	"The MSX differs from the other machines here in that it was a standard rather than a specific machine. It was very popular in Japan and did hit UK shores although I only knew a single person that had one apart from our school which had acquired several Yamaha models to control MIDI keyboards. Given the multiple manufacturers, it’s not surprising that some models had slightly tweaked fonts but the one shown here seems to be the most popular." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:43:49	apple2	admin	"Apple’s first professionally built computer was the Apple ][ which from rev 7 onwards added lower-case letters." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:43:20	atari8bit	admin	"Atari’s entry into the home computing market put out some very capable machines with all sorts of hardware tricks (the creative geniuses behind it would go on to form Amiga). The same font was used on all Atari 8-bit models from the original 400/800 to the XL and XE models in the late 80’s." —Damien Guard
2024-06-12 22:35:17	commodore128	admin	This font has the big and small letters switched. ---- edit 2024-06-18: I added ?font=commodore128i that has it by the ASCII norm.