I am going back and forth on things and I have concluded one of two things:

IBM MDA font was used in MS-DOS 2.11 Grid OS to render the program and the offness was due to production affects part of the creation process

A custom screen rendering was made for the movie in DOS as a simple batch or C program.

Has anyone determined which TTF font was used beyond that IBM MDA font?

Has anyone recreated the font from scratch in TTF form?

Based on the flash program already created I have enough letters to piece together enough of the alphabet to get a darned close facsimile.

Now one's parents often times have much wisdom and I can hear it being repeated do not reinvent the wheel if one does not need to, so that said, has anyone created a custom ttf font for this need?

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

I have done more digging on things. We are probably better off designing our own font. Now if we want to go insane we can trademark or patent the font and add usage restrictions on others that use it to include terms such as our website must be displayed on the work to give attribution. I am not familiar enough with font IP law to know how we can protect ourselves if someone steals our creation and then tries to make us pay for it other than the fact we will have dated materials showing our designs predate theirs.

I would prefer to just use a creative commons license on it and ensure it stays free but , things can get insane if certain entities decide to get greedy.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

You’re doing a brilliant job with your attention to detail

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A02/TQ2.0.52141E1

"Errr... Roger that's a 2-1-6..."

Thanks. In the second and third tier IT support stuff I do, that detail is what fixes things.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

Honestly I would pay money to talk to whomever designed the original sentry gun setup in the movie.

Fidelity will disappear as things are resized. This is a given but helps when you are trying to guestimate things.

The font itself is a hybrid font of several to achieve the look. It was most likely a true type font or TTF as they are called. No single font set matches what we saw in the film. Based on what we saw it is a BOLD True Type Font. Not an Italicized or underlined TTF. That we are only dealing with a bold version of the font we are lucky. We only have to deal with one set of a font grouping. We do not have to build the 10 different types and already have the specs on the font size and pitch to use.

Screen pitch is a measurement of the distance between the pixels. This was a big thing in CRT monitors back in the day and even in primitive LCD displays. The smaller the pitch the more of a high resolution image you could produce in a smaller screen.

To put it in perspective your smartphone device has a resolution that exceeds that of the highest resolution a 486 computer could produce in the x286 family series of processors.

Now let us delve into printing. You have two main print driver formats:
Printer Control Language (PCL) up to version 6 enhanced or 6e now I believe
Adobe Post Script (PS)

A guy working for Xerox saw the potential for a universal print driver language that could work with any printer or computer. Up until the 70s all printers and drivers were proprietary setups. Think the copier scene in the movie 9 to 5. That is all that was available. Xerox nixed the guys idea.

A year later adobe was born and it became a staple of the printer industry in the 70s. THen comes along Hewlett Packard and they see the potential and create the PCL language for its dot matrix and inkjet based printers. Many copy them and use their printer driver standard over the years. PCL version 1 was introduced in the 70s. For decades PCL and PS drivers and hardware based support of them was exclusive. Now most all printers can emulate either or one or the other. Some printer manufacturers prefer one driver type over others. But with virtualization and clustering thanks to VMware and IBM blades drivers have moved more to a universal standard by manufacturer. CUPS(Common Unix Printing System) for Linux/UNIX setups came to be around 1997. This gave birth to the multi platform support we see for all the prtiners now. Why do I know this? I supported printers at a previous job for a decade. Explaining why this or that driver worked better with a given os and software helps make the user understand and get the, "aha" moment much more quickly to lessen the amount of support calls and issues.

TTF is more of a windows type of font and is a very generic business font form. Usually used for business typesetting and logo brand/trade mark type deals. And that is why there are so darned many of them. The key in all of this is to ensure you are not stepping on the toes of an existing copyright. As there is no profit involved we have a lot more leeway but still have to be careful.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

I will try using this utility:
http://www.pentacom.jp/pentacom/bitfont ... tfont.php#

I will post results once done.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

See how this one works. With that site you can do pixel by pixel adjustments. I had to eyeball the relevant letters used. I will need more time to do the other letters.



I will only add that this stuff will make you go cross eyed.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

Latest file. I just need to edit in the ranks on the special language marks and it should be a complete font reference set. Bitmap files provided on python thread helped. I had to guess on some things.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...