Comment by C6C6C6C

Some older computers had weird resolution / aspect ratio combination.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/N...

Basically, if you play video games from the DOS era on a modern computer without correcting their aspect ratio they look stretched, and that was not how they were supposed to look.

So, the same goes for fonts. They look weird if you look at it with your current resolution and aspect ratio. They would look more condensed/thinner on the CRT monitors of the DOS era.

> The thing is, most MS-DOS games were actually rendered in 320x200, which is a 16:10 aspect ratio and thus widescreen – but they weren't displayed that way. I won't pretend I know all the technical details – there are way better sources for that – simply put, the CRT monitors back then stretched images to fit the screen.

> The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something close to 320x240. What today we see as a sharp, square pixel was actually a blurry rectangle back then, about 20% taller than wider (the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST and other home computers all had different resolutions, but the principle is quite similar).

Even if you're lowering your current monitor resolution you're not actually seeing those fonts the way they were meant to be rendered. That's because your monitor will display a native DOS resolution as widescreen. When CRT monitors of the time took that widescreen resolution and turned it square.

There's a lot of understanding about old rendering methods that has been lost in the mainstream. The article I linked also showed how people exploited scanlines to make water look transparent in a very smoothed way. Your LCD pixel grid just doesn't show things the way old low resolution CRTs did.