Mastodawn

I wish I could use the DOS / IBM PC style smileys in terminal games. They were, in fact, designed for "ansi art" style fixed width character games. However, there isn't the convention in fonts that it should fit into a single character with a monospace font, so you can't use this or a lot of the lovely characters that DOS games would use.

Also look at them! They have such nice, minimalist character!

And yes, they WERE intended for games: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/790/the-ibm-smiley-character-turns-30

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Christine Lemmer-Webber 3d ago

From the article above:

> If you look at the first 32 characters in the IBM PC character set you’ll see lots of whimsical characters — smiley face, musical notes, playing card suits and others. These were intended for character based games — see “Snipes” if you can still find a copy.
>
> [...]
>
> Now, what to do about the first 32 characters (x00-x1F)? ASCII defines them as control codes, carriage return, line feed, tab… These characters originated with teletype transmission. But we could display them on the character based screens. So we added a set of “not serious” characters. They were intended as display only characters, not for transmission or storage. Their most probable use would be in character based games.

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Trammell Hudson 3d ago

@cwebber the ascii control characters have "official" forms, although I've never seen anything use the MIL-STD-188-100 glyphs

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Matthew Dockrey 3d ago

@th @cwebber I have GOT to use these somehow!

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mirabilos

@attoparsec @th @cwebber bookmarked for the same reason. They do seem to have a system behind them, though I’d need to look more for the difference between outer shape is circle vs. square, the rest is clear.