A font recreated from photographs of classic Commodore 64 keycaps (github.com)
362 points by sohkamyung 13 hours ago
jankhg 11 hours ago
This reminds me of this beautifully written article about the font Gorton.
abrookewood 10 hours ago
Very cool! Hope you like this one ... about a font carved into a tree!!
jankhg 5 hours ago
Wow, I like the idea and how this was used as a photography arts project. Also, I think this idea could be transferred to other materials, such as iron, or ice.
Forgeties79 8 hours ago
That’s really neat. Interesting watching them grow sideways
mxfh 11 hours ago
in the further reading there is also a list with a number of recreations of related digitzed routed fonts: https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/r...
gxs 6 hours ago
Thank you! Great article, better than the actual submission I came for, super interesting and a pleasure to read
mock-possum 6 hours ago
Thanks for sharing, wonderful article! Makes me wonder what using a bitmap Gorton in terminal would feel like… maybe I’ll try it today.
tniemi 10 hours ago
The old versions of VIC-20 used a font called Microgramma.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1pjw7q6/t...
Sharlin 9 hours ago
Perhaps best known for being the basis for Eurostile, a staple of SF movie typography.
queenkjuul 6 hours ago
Microgramma and Eurostile are all time classics. I have so many old electronics that used them on the control panels.
There's an open source font QTEurotype that does an excellent approximation that I've been using in a recent project
badc0ffee 6 hours ago
The PET models used this as well.
bay_baobab_ii 5 hours ago
8BitDo made a modern mechanical keyboard that looks like a C64. I got one and I am loving it. https://www.8bitdo.com/retro-mechanical-keyboard-c64/
stronglikedan 3 hours ago
Plus one for having all the keys in the correct locations!
How does it feel and sound?
yifanl an hour ago
It's quite hollow and plasticky on the inside. This is not a bad thing nor a mark of cheapness, but it sounds very roomy and echo-y for a keyboard, so if you like the sound of the clacking on a keyboard, it's quite amplified by the board.
I wasn't around to use an actual C64 to compare the sound against that, but I suspect it's an intentional choice as a retro keyboard to mark itself apart from the foamy modern keyboards that tend to dampen the keyboard.
whilenot-dev 2 hours ago
Had one too, it's rather on the loud side of clicking and the build quality is great.
petecooper 9 hours ago
>https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/issues/4
This saddens me, frankly.
BearOso 8 hours ago
The S is misproportioned. M should have the middle go all the way to the baseline. The middle stems on 3 and 4 are too long and too short. The punctuation is all different sizes. This is just me glancing at the normalized comparison image. It's really obvious.
petecooper 7 hours ago
>It's really obvious.
I'm not disputing that -- the approach of the issue OP was what irked me.
ryandrake 4 hours ago
kalleboo 7 hours ago
It's an asshole issue, but at the same time the AI that did the work isn't going to have it's feelings hurt.
ricardobeat 5 hours ago
What a confused comment.
"There is no RETURN, SHIFT...", "Too many F keys". They are confusing a typeface with trying to replicate the keyboard keys.
The arrows are not the cursor keys, but based on the ESC key.
They are right about the @ character though, it looks quite wonky.
dylan604 8 hours ago
Why would keys with full words like shift/return/etc be useful in creating a font. Basic comprehension skills are at a loss for this user. The issue comment should have ended with the first sentence. However, could the keys with full words have been used to provide clues on kerning or other spacing to use when building the font?
Oarch 11 hours ago
Oh gosh, this is really rather nice.
unD 10 hours ago
I haven't read "Press play on tape" in decades!
Sharlin 9 hours ago
There was a band named PRESS PLAY ON TAPE (stylized in all caps, of course) playing SID covers and similar stuff that I saw performing a couple of times back in the 00s/10s. Actually, looks like they’re still active at least to some extent: https://pressplayontape.com/
Loughla 11 hours ago
It really is though. Very clean.
epcoa 8 hours ago
More AI slop.
dar5hak 8 hours ago
If creatively expanded to more characters, this would make a pretty nice coding font.
gwbas1c 9 hours ago
The special characters / punctuation are not aligned. The !#$% characters either float too high or need to be a little bigger.
(Yes, I copied the image from the page into Paint and drew a line)
sombragris 4 hours ago
Looks nice. The C-64 had an excellent keyboard typeface
I think peak keycaps font were the ones used in the Epson QX-10, Epson HX-20, Tandy 100, and the common C-64.
zooweemama 12 hours ago
We need one for the ZX Spectrum too!
stevekemp 7 hours ago
You can find a Speccy font here:
orbital-decay 10 hours ago
But what font did the C64 keyboard originally use?
nathell 8 hours ago
Dunno about the original C64 (which is what this attempts to recreate), but the C64C used ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro Book according to https://github.com/FeralChild64/MechBoard64-keycaps
crustyoldhuman 6 hours ago
thank you so much for this! love how this looks, it's such a clean typeface
EDIT: I kept getting problems downloading it--errors acting like nothing was there. After clicking around on the download links a few times, it eventually made it to my downloads and I got the file. Not sure what's going on there, but just a heads up for anyone else
exitb 11 hours ago
Nice. It never really occurred to me how different these are from 64C keycaps. I guess through our affinity for retro look, the original typeface ended up feeling more modern/current than the newer one.
judetechdevs 11 hours ago
Same, the old one somehow looks newer lol
otikik 8 hours ago
"!" is like half of the size of "?". Even if that's faithful to the keyboard, it is very annoying.
BearOso 8 hours ago
It's not faithful. The AI took the original image and assumed the ! was supposed to be elevated like that. This project is low-effort AI generated.
Edit to add: This GitHub user has a over a hundred repositories full of random slop. It's clearly being used to generate activity for a resume or something.
mark-r 10 hours ago
What, no Euro key?
(Yes, I realize the € symbol didn't exist until 1996)
Sharlin 12 hours ago
It’s a very pleasant looking humanist sans. Now I’m wondering about the story of the original typeface – were the glyphs specifically designed for the keyboard? Seems more likely that some existing font was used.
urbnspacecowboy 5 hours ago
Good question! I've looked into this a bit myself and I think the best overall match is Akzidenz-Grotesk Condensed, albeit not exact: https://www.myfonts.com/products/condensed-regular-akzidenz-...
The G is different (look at the lower right corner), the 0 (zero) has a slash which looks custom, and the Q is very different (it looks like a letter O with a piece of another O added for the tail).
And yes, since it's the standard comment about fonts, this is a commercial font that costs an arm and a leg.
judetechdevs 11 hours ago
It looks too nice to have been drawn just for keycaps :(
mxfh 11 hours ago
Kind of ambivalent state of things, a research thread to solve that provenance issue to some degree of certainty is always only one prompt away too.
exceptione 9 hours ago
A weird thing: the exclamation mark `!` seems to be elevated from the baseline, judging from the specimen.
petesergeant 12 hours ago
The download links seem broken, does anyone have the TTF?
Tomrn 12 hours ago
dekoruotas 9 hours ago
Readme links to: https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/blob/main/fon... Instead, it should be linked to: https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/raw/refs/head...
leptons 4 hours ago
I removed the querystring ?raw=true on the download link, and then clicked "view raw" and that worked.
cringleycringe 9 hours ago
I love AI!
queenkjuul 6 hours ago
This is sweet but i could really live without the Claude commentary in the preview page
amai 10 hours ago
No umlauts?
appstorelottery 10 hours ago
Very nice - thank you!
amelius 10 hours ago
Apple ][ please.
(Actually, I think the Commodore had a better font)