Segment8

A quick trip back to the 70s for a dip in the LCD & LED segment display technology that adorned watches, HiFi, and car audio equipment for a couple of decades.

The basic 7-segment display (invented in 1908!) could easily manage numbers (and hex!) but upper-case letters would be missing a W and M (lack of extra vertical line) while X is forced into a H, V into a U, and Z into a 2. A later 9 segment display adding a top-right to bottom-left diagonal solved V and and Z but 14 segments was needed to solve M, W and X and 16 if you want to disambiguate D and O and 8 and B.

As fun as this historical jaunt is there isn’t enough space to do 14 actual segments in an 8x8 so once again we take a few liberties especially around punctuation. Not as many liberties as Pitstop but the result is quite different and this works quite well for short displays, titles, menus, and high-score tables.