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

tnb-logo-21

rum-limited-edition

098_technoblast_green

Recent comments

Time	Subject	Name	Comment
2022-11-21 15:50:41	bisasam_20x20_ascii	admin	Hi, Joe. Maybe there's some misunderstanding in how the writing the text out into canvas is meant to be. The [x,y], as an input parameter for the routine for text output, is supposed to be on the baseline - not the top-left corner. It's the routine that has to add sizeOver to the baseline to get to a "top line" from which it then adds [relX, relY] of each character. Capital letters in this font are 13px "tall", so sizeOver is 13. The sizeUnder parameter says: reserve this many pixels under (or below) the base line for characters like , j g y…. Does it make sense? Feel free to comment here.
2022-11-21 05:12:33	bisasam_20x20_ascii	Joe Strout	I love this font! But it seems like the sizeOver and sizeUnder values are incorrect. Using these, the characters draw roughly centered on the baseline, instead of sitting on the baseline. Is that intentional?
2022-11-20 20:51:52	goth16	admin	@Oliver: Hi. Both of those are legacy issues. I vaguely remember converting this font from a binary file containing only the bitmap with fixed width and no other metadata to the font as a whole or its letters. It takes time to add this information and I didn't give it back then. Although there can be some scarce examples found of a serif or even 'gothic' font being monospace, it looks like this font should be proportional. I'll change it. ---- updated @20:59 - Changed.
2022-11-20 20:44:36	General discussion	Oliver	I have finished a bmf2bdf converter: Features - Convert .bmf to .bdf - Converts DOS codepage to Unicode (-u option) - Convert monospaced proportional font back to none-monospaced font (-p) - Optional glyph spacing with -x - Optional baseline adjustment with -y - Brightness threshold with -l for multicolor fonts - Generated BDF can be modified with gbdfed and FontForge URL: https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/tree/master/tools/font/bmf2bdf The converter is a single .c file without other dependencies. Windows exe is included in the above folder. Let me add some generic notes from my tests with the bmf2bdf converter: 1) Some fonts are marked as monospaced, but are actually proportional fonts. 2) The baseline seems to be shifted for some fonts (ok, it depends on the definition of baseline). But the problem is: The above bdf converter can't fix this: If the uppercase A is not placed on the baseline, then this is also not the case for the generated BDF. Again, thanks for the effort and improvements for the filter.
2022-11-20 19:53:05	General discussion	admin	@Oliver, @Joe: Allright, I hear ya. Did some changes to address this, added inputs to filter the number of colors and characters in the font. Yeah, the number of characters is not exactly the same as filtering whether the font has a lower case letters, I hope it'll be good enough for now, though. Btw. you can still sort the search result by the number of colors in the font, as well as the number of characters in it. Also, you can filter just the fonts with ?tag=incomplete-alphabet.
2022-11-20 15:43:17	General discussion	Joe Strout	I think Oliver makes good points. I also think it'd be great to be able to filter by number of characters in the font. Say I put in 64, it should show only fonts with 64 characters or more. Right now there's no good way to find more complete fonts.
2022-11-20 12:01:15	goth16	Oliver	I am in the middle of trying to understand the bmf format. "goth16" is somehow my test font at the moment. I don't understand two things here: 1. goth16 is marked as monospaced and indeed the shift value is 16 for each char. This doesn't make sense. I mean it doesn't make sense that the font itself is marked as monospaced or did I miss something here? 2. The baseline seems to be shiftet by 2 pixel. I mean the problem here is, that the uppercase A has a descent of 2 pixel (compare with uppercase C). Should the sizeOver value be -14 and the sizeUnder 2 instead?
2022-11-20 09:27:03	General discussion	Oliver	Thanks for all the effort here. Great work. While looking around here and exploring all the nice fonts I also was thinking about some improvements: 1. Seeing the full charset requires two clicks. What about removing the full charset expander and just keep the "load" button? 2. A filter for single and multi color fonts would be great 3. A filter for fonts with and without lower case chars would be also nice. Thanks again.
2022-11-02 22:00:33	quartex	admin	Other characters than in QUARTEX recycled by crs/broncs.
2022-10-31 16:43:49	intryx	admin	The "3" character was flimpsily hand-drawn in the original set; I took a liberty to make it in the original style.