181–190 of 236 posts
What I find interesting about projects like this is how much of the OS "feel" doesn't survive emulation. The visual layer comes through fine, but the things that actually defined the experience — keyboard click latency, the specific mouse acceleration curves of period hardware, the way a CRT scanline gave System 7 fonts a totally different texture than a sharp LCD does, the audible click-thunk of Atari ST or early Ma…
I tend to associate the Amiga with razor-sharp interlaced displays, so seeing 640x400 noninterlaced in an emulator leaves something missing. The Amiga also had an unusually smooth mouse response due to its interrupt prioritization and use of hardware sprites for the mouse cursor. I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga. Again, this is not captured via emulation; not even my MiSTer seems…
I remember the contrast between a SPARCStation and an SGI O2 and how the O2 mouse was smoother than the Sun's. Same between Windows and Macs at the time.
Design priorities...
This triggered a rabbit hole search that had me rediscover Packard Bell Navigator[1]. The nostalgia and joy this page brings me is hard to describe. I hope everyone remembers their formative tech journey so fondly. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
> Packard Bell Navigator is an alternative shell for the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 operating systems Huh. I thought the term "shell" generally referred to command line interfaces to the OS and that Unity's way of describing itself as a graphical shell was some "new" (2011) generalization of the term, but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that.
In Windows 3.1, the SYSTEM.INI had a setting called "shell" for overriding the default program started after Windows had loaded. Use of the word "shell" in this sense to describe a graphical interface dates back at least this far.
There was also a crude character-mode graphical interface called MS-DOS Shell, in 1988.
"shell" might be best generalised as "the first interactive program to run after boot" rather than "command line interface".
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> Packard Bell Navigator is an alternative shell for the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 operating systems Huh. I thought the term "shell" generally referred to command line interfaces to the OS and that Unity's way of describing itself as a graphical shell was some "new" (2011) generalization of the term, but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that.
> but I guess there is at least this precedent for using the word like that. In Windows 3.1, the SYSTEM.INI had a setting called "shell" for overriding the default program started after Windows had loaded. Use of the word "shell" in this sense to describe a graphical interface dates back at least this far. There was also a crude character-mode graphical interface called MS-DOS Shell, in 1988. "shell" might be best ge…
Scrolling is extremely laggy.
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Omg, I am dead. Dick Pick. That is the best name, not just for a developer :D
Just a few weeks ago I met a guy with the same first name, but his last name was Head. No joke. I spared him the jokes.
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Your comment reminds me of HP's obscure EFI OS called QuickLook. I would guess there are a lot of obscure OSs out there.
I'd watch this if I were you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs
Do you have that Windows 3.1 version that came with the Compaq that had the DE that was like a paper folder instead of an empty desktop, and that you could put the icons in the different tabs of the paper folder?
I believe you are speaking of Tabworks?
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I tend to associate the Amiga with razor-sharp interlaced displays, so seeing 640x400 noninterlaced in an emulator leaves something missing. The Amiga also had an unusually smooth mouse response due to its interrupt prioritization and use of hardware sprites for the mouse cursor. I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga. Again, this is not captured via emulation; not even my MiSTer seems…
> I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga I remember the contrast between a SPARCStation and an SGI O2 and how the O2 mouse was smoother than the Sun's. Same between Windows and Macs at the time. Design priorities...
What's strange, is that SunOS, Solaris, and even NextStep all supported higher baud serial mice. If you look at the mouse driver on SunOS for example, you'll see the logic which loops over baud rates until it detects valid mouse data.
And Sun did ship a mouse with a higher polling rate/baud. One. The wired ball mouse for the SPARCstation Voyager.
NetBSD doesn't have the baud detection loop, so there, for this single mouse, you have to change the kernel to make it work: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/faq.html#voyager-mouse