Last time I made a game, I looked at a bunch of fonts, figured out which I preferred reading, and used that. It wasn't a fancy font, it was a font that made the text easy to read, and I think for the type of game I was making, that was the right choice. But in addition to "game feel" and "readability", here we have an additional limitation: 32-bit. How does that influence the choice? Here's what I can think of:

• Fonts on those consoles would usually use textures, and maybe they would avoid anti-aliasing to be able to use lower colour-depth to save VRAM. Triangle-fonts were also possible, but I don't think I should be using that.
• Vector fonts like the ones we use on computers probably didn't get used in those games, although it's possible some fonts were created as vector fonts and converted to bitmap fonts when making the games.
• I think kerning was possible, but ligatures wouldn't be used much. That rules out any font with too obvious "fi" and "fl" glyphs, I guess (unless you treat the ligature itself as a character).
• On the PS1, just turning on the console took enough time that it had a nice animation and sound, so loading a vector font but rendering it with settings that could look like a bitmap font (turning of anti-aliasing shouldn't be too hard, turning off ligatures for English might be a bit trickier)
• Don't put more text on screen than you can fit at the resolution the consoles used
• Avoid TTF "bitmap" fonts: they're slow to load, and they don't really look better than actual bitmap fonts.
• What if the player manually resizes the window? I guess I should just set the stretch mode to 2D pixel or whatever it's called. And if people manage to make the window smaller than 240p and that makes the text unreadable, that's not really for me to solve.
• If I plan on making a game in three languages, I guess I have to make sure the font works for all three.

Now, how are others picking fonts? Am I overthinking this?