It's going to be legit old school.IA-32, x86-64, ARM (and historically DEC Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, and Itanium)Ĭommand Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, is the default command-line interpreter for the OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows ( Windows NT family and Windows CE family), and ReactOS operating systems. (The program will eventually run full screen - no menus or even mouse cursor. I'm writing a serial/Telnet terminal program, and I use the Classic Console font above to get back to that 80s DOS look. This is because the font is stored as lines and curves, rather than pixel data.įor a TrueType font that looks like the old VGA font, check out the Old School Font Pack at or Vector fonts (including PostScript, TrueType, and OpenType fonts) can scale to any size without losing quality. Extremely large text is not viable, and 'in between' sizes must be approximated and usually look blocky and ugly.

Instead, the font actually has different size versions in the font file, and the closest version is picked by the operating system when a specific size is requested. Raster fonts are actually stored as individual pixels and cannot scale to different sizes effectively. The difference is that Terminal is a raster font, and Courier New is a TrueType font. In older versions of Windows, I believe that defaulted to a bitmap font named 'Terminal', but that seems to have changed, and in the current version of Windows 10, it defaults to Courier New. You can see the default font by opening a terminal (Command Prompt) and looking at the properties in the system menu (the icon in the upper-left corner of the window.) The Windows terminal uses whatever font you pick. Your graphics cardĬan display that text, but only when Windows is not running. Those fonts are actually a set of bitmap images, and graphics cards would actually use different bitmaps for different display modes. MS-DOS uses the ROM font built into your hardware: the font is actually built into a ROM chip on the video card, and it's not part of the operating system at all. MS-DOS and the Windows terminal are two different things.

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