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Infinite Mac

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Re: Infinite Mac

#221

Post by necovek »

dkarl wrote: post #119
dkonofalski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.

Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pr…

To mitigate the issues you mention, I've long wanted higher res screens since forever (I had one of those early Vaio VGN-Z that was the only 13-14" laptop with 1600x900 displays when 1366x768 dominated; they were also the first to move to 1920x1080 with their next model).

And I had that Dell's first 24" 4K screen that required DP MST to go past 30Hz. I've tried disabling subpixel rendering to see if that resolution was really sufficient (185dpi) but you could then see text regain jagged edges. Thus I reasoned that, with my glasses correcting my myopia to better than 20/20, I needed to wait a while until I can fully enjoy nice, laser-printout-like text.

As a reminder, even laser printers printing at 600dpi use techniques similar to subpixel rendering to render that smooth text.

I am hoping for some 8K screens at 32" for productivity work (though that's still probably too low at 275 dpi), and I never get it why people keep talking about there not being any 8K content. My desktop is my 8K content, though I also lack the GPU to drive it at more than 30Hz :)

Re: Infinite Mac

#222

Post by necovek »

tomc1985 wrote: post #220
necovek wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can still happen when different display panel pixel colour arrangements don't match subpixel rendering settings in software, though that'll usually happen with non-monitor displays like TVs.

True, though in practice I haven't noticed it to be nearly as obnoxious as Apple stuff trying to upscale at non-integer intervals

Yeah, I was completely surprised when I moved from Ubuntu 20.04 to MacBook Pro 14 on the very same Dell U3219Q: MacOS made text editing completely unpleasant.

Then I upgraded my son's laptop to Ubuntu 22.04 RC, and I was greeted with the same fuzziness. I hope that's only due to Wayland, I haven't tried out the X desktop when docked.

Re: Infinite Mac

#223

Post by spike021 »

Whoa!! This is amazing.

My brother and I used to play the FA-18 "sim" all the time. Thanks for the blast from the past.

Now if only I still had the joystick controller...

Re: Infinite Mac

#224

Post by drewzero1 »

doubled112 wrote: post #185
drewzero1 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the grinding/croaking of those old hard drives!

The wurr chhkchkchk of floppies is what does it for me

Chk chk.... chk chk.... chk chk..... chk chk.... dkdkdk.

    Not ready reading drive A. Abort/Retry/Fail?_

Re: Infinite Mac

#225

Post by opan »

moth-fuzz wrote: post #69

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

I use Terminus 9pt whenever/wherever I can easily get it going for this reason. It's funny seeing all the replies from people who don't get it. Other fonts really do all look blurry next to bitmaps. I've switched terminal emulators at least once due to Pango dropping bitmap support. Still works in foot and alacritty. Probably others as well, but I also need Wayland support.

Re: Infinite Mac

#226

Post by dkonofalski »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #20

Civilization and Battle Chess is in the games folder!

I couldn't get Battle Chess to work. It kept giving me a memory error. I even read the readme file that says how to fix it but the option it mentions isn't available in the Controls pane for Memory. :(

Re: Infinite Mac

#227

Post by perardi »

PortiaBerries wrote: post #208

Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.

I can’t tell if it’s just simple nostalgia, but I feel it too.

I got my first Mac when I was in 4th grade in 1994. (A Performa 630CD, which is so slow that I assume my AirPods have an order of magnitude more computational power.) By god I loved that thing.

And I think in part it’s because I could poke at it. You could fiddle around inside the System Folder. You could modify application resources with ResEdit. You could really dig in and see all the files, and then probably accidentally ruin something, but still, you could do it. And you simply cannot do that on an iOS device outside of jailbreaking, and increasingly you cannot do that with SIP and other security measures on macOS.

Which is probably for the best, for obvious security reasons. But I feel like I miss that joy of exploration…

Re: Infinite Mac

#229

Post by murermader »

dkarl wrote: post #119
dkonofalski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.

Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pr…

This has nothing to do with the display, this is a MacOS scaling issue. Plug in a Windows device, put it at 100% scaling and it will be as sharp as it can get.

macOS is really limited when in comes to displays, because the display must have a PPI of around 110, or a multiple of that. It sucks how bad macOS is at scaling, especially with the terrible font rendering.

Re: Infinite Mac

#230

Post by anthk »

kornork wrote: post #215
kencausey wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://archive.org/details/EnchantedSceptersMacintosh

What!?!? No way - thank you so much!

You can try downloading mounting the IMG file from that page, getting Scummvm https://scummvm.org and select the path for the mounted image to play the game under the Wage Engine.
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