Great for nostalgia. I wanted to play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it crashes during the intro scene with "An error of type 3 occurred."
Infinite Mac
251–260 of 340 posts
Re: Infinite Mac
#252When I look at this I think how these old UIs like MacOS, windows 95 or 2000 were designed for clarity and usability. And how things have gone downhill since then. I really miss easily distinguishable UI elements.
I'm of two minds. The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it. But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then not), etc... The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed with the design a…
I'm happy for people to try things, but please at least draw outlines around / highlights on the actionable UI elements. We're at a point now so far into flat UI extremism that opening a new application is like a giant guessing game to find out which parts of the UI you can click on and what they do.
(Even the HN page I am staring at right now has styled all the links to an indistinguisable gray / black that looks totally inactive.)
Re: Infinite Mac
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car. It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around. Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulat…
Working Model, by Knowledge Revolution. I used to work there, and my first project was making the jump from 2D to 3D.
This is why I love this orange site.
Re: Infinite Mac
#254Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.
Huh, that's funny. I never really thought about it, but I kind of feel the same way now that you point it out. Or rather, I used to love computers just for the sake of being computers and was always a little annoyed by people who saw them rather as a means to a different end. However, today, I definitely see my macbook pro, ipad and iphone as nothing more than a means to an end, the way people saw old PCs.
That's more a reflection of your mental state than anything relating to computers really. Kids today see ipads and nintendo switches the same way you saw old computers.
Re: Infinite Mac
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car. It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around. Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulat…
Working Model, by Knowledge Revolution. I used to work there, and my first project was making the jump from 2D to 3D.
I was going to say Interactive Physics but I think that came prior to that, by the same people
Re: Infinite Mac
#256Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/
Is there a way to use appletalk on a LAN? I would love to get a game of multiplayer bolo going in my office.
BOLO WAS THE BEST!
Re: Infinite Mac
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car. It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around. Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulat…
Working Model, by Knowledge Revolution. I used to work there, and my first project was making the jump from 2D to 3D.
Oh man, there’s a 3D version? I has endless fun playing with the 2D one in the uni computer lab.
Re: Infinite Mac
#258So cool!!!
Re: Infinite Mac
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
same. it's hard to describe how 10-year-old me felt about 8bit dithered graphics sparkling through phosphorus but 30 years later the magic is gone. I can't point to any one thing (maybe the advent of webapps) but it has something to do with software just generally becoming more and more sucky.
How user hostile technology has become killed the magic for me. I constantly have to think about not being tracked on the web, manipulated by an ad or astroturfed, scammed by companies with fake reviews, exploited by "algorithms", dodging dark patterns, fighting my OS to do what I want, protecting my data and privacy, hackers stealing my data from companies I entrusted it with, cryptoscams, IoT devices leaking my dat…
Exactly. On newer systems I sometimes feel a bit like an abused spouse. The love is there, but I'm always on guard, waiting for the insult or hit that comes out of nowhere. Every day it's "What unwanted thing will be forced on me this time?" or "How will I be taken advantage of now?"
I don't think it's entirely unintentional either. I think the feelings of being powerless to protect yourself, the expectations that at any time your own devices will have things silently changed leaving you with no choice but accept it, I suspect it's conditioning us to accept whatever is pushed on us and feel resigned as control is increasingly taken from us.
Re: Infinite Mac
#260Pretty cool. Tried to launch Warcraft though and it had a lot of graphical glitches (this is on Firefox/Windows)
same on firefox/linux