Ode to Code page 437

There are modern typefaces with smooth vectorized curves on all their characters.  With dynamically scaling fonts, and clean kerning. There are 144,697 characters in the v.14 Unicode standard, which is more than twice as many as they have bits to represent.

The modern digital typesetter is truly spoiled for choice in breadth and depth of style, content, and quality.

But I long for the grid.

I long for the characters of uniform width and predictable spacing.  Your eyes wont flow across them as you read a page of prose, not as they would do with a modern typeface.  But they create art in an antique style.  In a style kept alive by a few passionate and inspired.

Yes, a programming font will be monospaced and more, flaunting beautiful ligatures and easily aligning characters between lines.  But the glyphs don't compose imagery in the same way.

With an old 8-pixel wide typeface, line drawing and block elements align perfectly.  Pixel for pixel, they slide up against each other and construct a single image.  Gradients blend from one to the next, each crafted with the unified intent of making a whole.

CP437 defines 256 characters, exactly as many as you can represent with a single byte.  Three don't print.  It includes a Bullet, Bullet-Point, and an Interpunct and no one knows why.

It offers a limited set of crude triangles and a smattering of a few diacritics and barely enough Greek to describe a little algebra.  But it can all come together to make an entire UX, a tapestry, or even a bit of cinema.

It is at once elegant and limited.  Crafting with these constraints compels a certain sort of graceful beauty.  A chisel in the hands of the artist; they might carve a Moai or they might carve the Veiled Madonna.  Both inspire awe from stone, but as different as mountains and sea.

If you are looking for your own chisel, Grid Sage games makes the amazing Rexpaint .  Viler has lovely recreated an amazing selection of classic typefaces from original IBM and compatible hardware, and provides them at int10h.org

There are thriving communities of Roguelike game developers at http://roguebasin.com/index.php/Main_Page and r/roguelikedev where you can connect with others whom may be working in this medium.

UPDATED: I should add that amazing character based art also exists that takes advantage of the Unicode space.  This may be most familiar in the form of clever one-like emoji-art, but also exists in larger formats: