Forgot to mention last night that the model data was sourced from this website, courtesy of @markmoxon.bsky.social. Mark’s done a sterling job documenting the inner workings of Elite at the source level. Well worth a visit even if you don’t understand assembly language.
Rabbithole warning: Clicking on that link could eat your whole weekend
The Cobra model is quite widely used (can't think why!). I used it in this demo - a 3D engine for Notch's virtual CPU that had a character based display. It was dynamically reassigning the font and placing characters to draw the graphics. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENg9...
Back in the day (circa 1982) a colleague was driving a typesetter that ONLY supported type, not rasters, not filled shapes, no rectangles But you could install new fonts. But the amount of data per character was limited. He created a mechanism to create, install and L.R.use custom fonts...
Wow, that's amazing! I knew they were clever but they were REALLY clever