Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
as it so often is, it's time to do crimes against typography with pixel fonts
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

I need to copy a font off my windows 98 machine to my Raspberry Pi's framebuffer application.

obviously the way to do this is to just render out every character the font supports to bitmaps and then import those as spritesheet

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
based on file metadata, I've been trying to do this since April, and I think every time I've opened a text editor to write the simple python script I need, someone has messaged me on discord
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

fine I'll close discord and just be offline for an hour

and someone walks into my bedroom asking about help finding a cable

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

okay I generated it

and the part from April is wrong, and I need to fix it on Windows 98. DAMN IT

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I'm glad Pillow now has .get_flattened_data to match .getdata, especially since neither of them do what I want, and have never done what I want
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

future foone:

it's Image.tobytes() that you want

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
okay I have the font imported and a very simple (no wrapping or newline handling) text engine:
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
THIS IS THE WRONG FONT (SIZE)
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️
I've extracted MS Sans Serif 10 point. I need MS Sans Serif 8 point.
Feb 18 at 1:28amWeb
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
every day is a good day to pull out Visual C++ 6.0!
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
just kidding, I've already crashed the OS in that screenshot. The cursor switched to the text cursor and is stuck that way, you can't click anything
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

oh no, I need unicode support
in windows 98

I need unicows

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
oh good there's an open source replacement, OpenCow:
https://opencow.sourceforge.net/
Opencow

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I do not recall how you do ASCII/Unicode dual-use source code. There's some macro you gotta wrap around your string literals, I seem to remember
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

oh here's some info on how to use it:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2001/october/mslu-develop-unicode-applications-for-windows-9x-platforms-with-the-microsoft-layer-for-unicode

and look, it was written by the late Michael Kaplan.

MSLU: Develop Unicode Applications for Windows 9x Platforms with the Microsoft Layer for Unicode

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
the secret macro is _T("foobar") which'll do nothing in ASCII mode, but if _UNICODE is defined, it turns "foobar" into "unicode", by which they mean UCS-2
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I copy-pasted UNICOWS.DLL into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM which of course crashed Explorer, because Windows 98
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I still don't have UNICOWS.LIB and it may be a pain to get it
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I think I can maybe get it from the Windows XP Platform SDK? Lets see if I can still get to it on a Windows 98 system.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
oh goody you have to install everything and win98 can't run the MSIs
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I do not currently have a local XP VM
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
okay it won't work. I think the API I'm using is not supported on win9x. I could check the docs but they pretend XP was the first windows
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
ok I went and remoted into another computer and used the XP compiler over there and got it done. I could have done this at the beginning but I was stubborn
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

ugh except this is ALMOST right.
The problem is: this is XP's MS Sans Serif, not Windows 98's.

Yeah they changed it a lot, mainly adding a bunch more characters for better language support.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I wonder if anyone has done a page showing
1. which fonts are included on windows
2. how they've changed over time
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

okay so the function call that I need that's missing from Windows 98 is called GetFontUnicodeRanges.

And the MSDN docs on my visual studio 6.0 discs does talk about it, but this is neat: it's a preliminary doc!

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
And here's the compatibility matrix!
NT needs 5.0, Windows 9x/me is unsupported, and CE is unsupported. You can't do this on your HP Jornada 720.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
This is Visual Studio 6.0, which came out in 1998, so Windows 2000 and Windows XP don't exist yet. The latest available NT is NT4.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
I love the 90s-ness of "here's system call: you can't use this for two more years"
Show threadgloriouscowFeb 18
@foone I still have my Visual Studio 6 CD case around here somewhere....
Show threadwaldiFeb 18
@foone Depends on how you count. Windows 2000 is actually NT, Version 5.0. And Windows XP is 5.1. So the internal version is not the same as the consumer one.
Show threadwyattFeb 18
@foone i *know* i've seen one of these but i think it was in 2011 or 2012
Show threadPeter HoseyFeb 18

@foone I ran into this when making an SVG of California's “this product contains cannabis” symbol. The state's website had it as PNG, JPEG, and PDF, and the PDF used a particular font for the exclamation point. And only the Vista version has the *right* exclamation point.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:California_cannabis_universal_symbol.svg#filehistory

File:California cannabis universal symbol.svg - Wikimedia Commons

Show threadL. David BaronFeb 18
@foone I bet someone whose business is based on identifying users by fingerprinting has the data, at least at the newer end, but they probably wouldn't make it public...
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone Rendering each letter might be insufficient. Because of kerning and hinting. Might need every glyph pair instead. For non-monospace fonts at least.
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone I downloaded some old Win32 docs in *.HLP format from https://www.carabez.com/downloads.html
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone I also have a Dependency Walker like application that works on modern Windows. You can use it to check if an old DLL exports some API or not. Or you can use the original Dependency Walker if you are on old enough system. https://github.com/MarekKnapek/DependencyViewer
Show threadJbrown, EsqFeb 18
@foone moo.dll
Show threadMarek KnápekFeb 18
@foone Kaplan, not Kaplin. What we did back then was to write the code once, then compile twice. One for ANSI Windows, second for Unicode Windows. We used the _T and _TEXT macros. One was meant to be internal for CRT/MFC/whatever, the second macro was meant for us, the users.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18

@MarekKnapek whoops, fixed. Thanks!

Interesting. I only need this code to run on Win9x, so I don't need two copies: I just need better unicode support if I'm gonna have it run on win98, since I need some unicode APIs

Show threadThomasFeb 18
@foone *opens cow, looks inside* milk.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
@HorayNarea a couple years ago I was working on a dairy farm simulator with another dev, but we never came up with a game name. Maybe we should have used OpenCows
Show threadThomasFeb 18
@foone ØpenCöws, just so you need unicows for the Win9x release
Show threadThomasFeb 18
@foone college dating sim with anthropomorphized dairy animals: "UniCows" 🤔
Show threadJennyFluff  💾Feb 18
@foone C++ stands for Crash Plus Plus
Show threadvalerie 2: desperate struggleFeb 18
@foone the windows 9x special
Show threadLemonheep (Medicine user) Feb 18
@shinyjirachi @foone Huh, now I wonder how bad Windows 9x really is - I haven't had experience with anything older than XP as a kid and 2000 in a VM, but I've heard about how much less stable 9x was before XP with its NT protocol released ​​
Show threadthe vessel of morgannaFeb 18
@radmin @foone @shinyjirachi the NT kernel isn't even comparable to the monstrosity that is the 3.1/9x/ME series - those boot into DOS and then the windows kernel kinda scoops DOS's brain out and parasitises it
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialFeb 18
@foone wow, this takes me back to tinkering with the Uplink Developer CD on a big chunky Pentium 3 laptop
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 18
@foone I am soooo not gonna miss 800x600 displays. or 1024x600...
Show threadjasegFeb 18
@whitequark @foone These days I find even 1920x1080 too little. You either don’t get enough context of a file on them, or text becomes hard to read because of the low DPI. My current employer when I started (in 2026!) had a default setup of 2x 24” 1080p monitors. The first thing I did was upgrading mine and a colleague’s setups to 32” 4k.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Feb 18
@whitequark god yeah. I like being able to see more than a couple lines of my code
Show threadBrian SwetlandFeb 18

@foone @whitequark When doing some Apple II retrocomputing a year or two ago, I was reminded how essential a *printer* was back in the day, to be able to get a look at code in larger chunks than a 40x25 or 80x25 screen at a time.

I printed a lot of the Hack source on an Epson pinfeed dot matrix printer... what a way to learn C and (simple) data structures...

Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 18
@swetland @foone i didn't have a printer so i just kinda suffered?
Show threadBrian SwetlandFeb 18
@whitequark @foone If it makes you feel better, cheap dot matrix printers were a mixed blessing at best. Noisy, slow, prone to mis-feeding and jamming...
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 18
@swetland @foone oh, the sounds are absolutely burned into my memory (tbh I kind of miss them)
Show threadRealGene ☣️Feb 18
@swetland @whitequark @foone
Okidata Microline 590.
Never jammed.
Show threadManawyrm | SarahFeb 18
@whitequark @foone that upgrade to the first 1600x1200px TFTs was soooooo nice <3
Show threadJernej Simončič �Feb 18
@manawyrm @whitequark @foone Never had a 1600x1200 TFT, went from 1280x1024 to 1920x1200.
Show threadGorgeous na Shock!Feb 18
@manawyrm @whitequark @foone Everything was so tiny I thought there's no way you're supposed to use it at the native resolution and set it back down to 1280x960. 😓
Show threadManawyrm | SarahFeb 18
@indigoparadox @whitequark @foone my ears were always crap, but my eyes were always good, so i was running at full res :D
(altough i'm starting to get close to my 30s now, I can't handle a 24" 4k display at native res/96dpi anymore xD)
Show threadPatashu (Dragon Style!)Feb 18

@foone

I love that you can kinda sorta see the pathway from this to modern Visual Studio

Show threadFesiugFeb 18
@foone aint there some older Sans Serif and then there's the newer one used in 2000 and such lol