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I completely forgot to mention this, but I'm putting together something that actually puts those pixel fonts to use. This is a browser-based app (written in Javascript) - for now it's just doing a display demo, but eventually I'll be using it to actually provide content. This is part of a larger "rebranding" effort that xeno.chat is another part of.
The City of Elseways lives.
@dodec I'm impressed by the legibility of some of the more intricate characters in there.
8x12 turns out to be a very comfortable pixel size for characters. It has just enough vertical room for diacritics without getting too smushed. Also, XenoTerm has 50 columns and 25 rows, which multiplies out to a nice 400 by 300 resolution, exactly proportional to classic television size. The right way to picture XenoTerm is as if you're watching it on a CRT with a rounded beige box hooked up to it.
@dodec Perhaps making such a box would be an interesting project at some point.
It would, but I'm hardly a hardware expert. I do software. Once this project is further along, though, I'd love to see it running "live" (it's still going to be Javascript-based and running in a browser, but the intent is to make an emulator for a computer that never existed).
@Felthry @Rosemary
The nice thing about writing software for a fictional computer is that it doesn't strictly need to be an "emulator". It just has to behave right on the surface, even if it doesn't work like a real computer would underneath.