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
2020-09-25 19:12:59	023_32	admin	Numerals quickly added (recycled from letters like I,H,S,Z,P,T) by crs/broncs.
2020-09-25 19:00:56	arakis16	admin	@Zbeng: Thanks, link added.
2020-09-25 18:41:20	myth2	admin	Chars like !"'()+,-./1:;I[]_{} and space have the width of 16px, every other character is 32px wide. "\" is an eye :]
2020-09-25 18:31:58	myth2	admin	@Zbeng: The letter 'Z' had half the shift that it should have. Thanks for the acuity! P. S. While at it, I also mapped the beginning and end of the background to "[" and "]" & "{" and "}".
2020-09-25 16:42:01	knight1	admin	I will try to use some common sense for spacing when converting the fonts. If characters like I, J, 1, and maybe some others, have serifs and try to extend to sides to cover some width around, I will tend to make the font non-proportional; and vice versa. On the other hand, not every font has to be proportional; some fonts from games of the 8-bit and 16-bit era have letters like W and M 'minimized' to fit the width of every other letter - that, conversely, would be the indicator for me to keep the font non-proportional. Simply put, I'll try to be more careful in deciding proportionality further on. P.S. Don't hesitate to say or comment if you think some font should be proportional/non-proportional - I will listen.
2020-09-25 11:28:12	myth2	Zbeng	'Z' is being half-covered by the following letter in text. Also space ' ', is not behaving as expected.
2020-09-25 11:26:52	knight1	Zbeng	I agree with you. For demo purposes it is easier to scroll text when every letter has the same size. moving byte multiples in memory is the way to minimize processing time. For BMFs, the requirements are different. Calculation time in no issue, and you don't have real-time concerns. So doing the "proportion treatment" is certainly improving readability. It requires more work for you, though...
2020-09-25 01:36:41	knight1	admin	@Zbeng: Yeah, I made it non-proportional. You think all characters should have a fixed width (or "shift")? Yes, the image of the font would suggest that - all characters are arrayed in constant distances - but I think that doesn't have to be the case necessarily. For example, the letter "I" doesn't have serifs up and down (like Courier, e.g.) trying to gain some additional width; to me that indicates the typography counts with proportional layout. And yes, the usage of the font in appropriate intro or demo in which it was used might have treated it as non-proportional (for simpler computation of each letter's position), but again, the origin of it (the Ming font, or the "Terminator 2" font of which it was inspired) are both proporitonal. In addition, text like, e.g. "HIM" would create weird gaps around "I" if it were non-proportional. It just doesn't look and feel right to me. What do you think?
2020-09-25 01:23:02	le-sergent32x32	Zbeng	Looks like a version with a light purple palette in this scroller font: https://demozoo.org/productions/124428/
2020-09-25 01:20:12	arakis16	Zbeng	Used for the logo here: https://demozoo.org/productions/124428/