Me, I grew up on Acorn machines, so those are my classic nostalgia font. Although, on a modern LCD with square-edged pixels, they look like arse --- jaggy and overly bold. I wonder if there's a way to emulate fuzzy CRTs with Truetype...
I don't know about TrueType or hinting, but there are a couple of post-processing shaders that achieve the effect, as commonly used by emulators[1].
If these fonts are used in some kind of retro game, those shaders could be applied as well. Desktop compositor on X11 effects could do the same. Not sure if there is a way to apply shaders to an entire desktop elsewhere (maybe f.lux do something like that to change the colours?)
The Acorn system font brings a rush of nostalgia and a shudder of revulsion every time I see it. Good grief was it ugly.
One of the first things I learned to do was write a script to load something else on boot - Acorn's Arial knockoff I think. That was ugly too, but better by far.
If these fonts are used in some kind of retro game, those shaders could be applied as well. Desktop compositor on X11 effects could do the same. Not sure if there is a way to apply shaders to an entire desktop elsewhere (maybe f.lux do something like that to change the colours?)
[1] http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders