A font drawn by a language model, then checked against every font table we could find
Atlas carries one little font of its own: 128 characters, 8 by 8 pixels, 1 KB of ROM. The BIOS uses it to draw text in the CGA graphics modes, for video cards that don't bring their own. Claude drew every character as ASCII art in a text file, one # per pixel, with nothing else open: no ROM, no screenshot, no font file.
The catch, which the font's own record admits, is that a language model has seen plenty of PC fonts, so "drawn from scratch" isn't something you can prove by asking it. So we checked the font against every 8x8 font table we could find in a big pile of other BIOS images. The first draft failed, with a handful of simple symbols that came out the same as the originals, the way anyone would draw them. After a couple of rounds of redrawing, no Atlas character matches any of them.
It can't prove nobody ever drew a similar letter, and the pile of BIOS images isn't every font ever made. I liked it anyway and decided to keep it: "Keep the custom Atlas 8x8 font. Don't replace it with Dominus. Don't expand it to CP437 just because you can." It's also the font this whole website is drawn in. Funny thing, though: my PB686 has a VGA card with its own fonts, so this one has never actually appeared on that screen.
