Smallest Bitmap/Pixel Cyrillic font

Question

I'm looking for the smallest Cyrillic font I can find, something similar in size to the SMALL FONTS font found in windows (around 7px)

It's for a retro looking russian videogame so must be clean pixels and no aliasing or anything

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

There are a few ways to go about this. They'll produce a monospace bitmap font with 8x8 pixel cells, which isn't the "smallest" but is a common size for games on second- through fourth-generation consoles.

• Start with Fixedsys Excelsior and render all Cyrillic capital letters to a bitmap. The glyphs will be 9 pixels tall. Then remove one row from the top half and the bottom half of each glyph to form a 7-line-tall glyph that cleanly fits in an 8x8 box.
• Start with a Latin 8x8 font. There are many to choose from, and bitmap fonts lack ordinary copyright. Then flip the R and N to form the Cyrillic Ya and I, and create the other glyphs by tweaking the Latin ones.
• Take a screenshot of a classic console game that was localized into Russian, such as one made for the Dendy or Subor famiclone system, and pull the glyphs out of that. There might be some in the "Fami Dumping Project" CaH4e3's web site. Or you could just use the font from the Russian version of the MSX computer, from REXPaint Legacy System Resources.