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Sorry for the loss, are you able to keep her high score saved too?

I wanted old school MS solitaire in windows 11 since the modern version has ads and extra useless features. I found that the Windows XP version works without hassle. Earlier versions aren't really different but I forget if I tried to run earlier versions. One quirk: however the winning animation is programmed, it takes almost 20 minutes to complete on a very wide monitor[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78z2zlwV-XQ

I’m still installing the classic (Windows 7) calculator [0] on each new Windows setup.

[0] https://win7games.com/#calc

My condolences. Such a nice way to honor her memory with one more backup.

I’m sorry for your loss. That is a wonderful story.

Thank you for sharing this. It was heartwarming to read!

She was right, the modern freecell sucks

<3

I'm so sorry for your loss, but now you have to tell us her high score!

Android used to have a dedicated menu key that would always bring up a menu. It was removed to chase Apple's 100% screen design.

I am fairly bothered about that but the one that really gets to me is the inconsistency of user interfaces across applications.

This precisely coincides with the web developers being allowed to wrap stuff into "apps" in Electron and the like.

So do I, but I don't think I'd blame mobile-first designs, and instead place the blame on Microsoft sucking at making decisions, sucking at design, and sucking at mobile. Every bad Windows UI has, imo, been the result of trying to be cool and likeable by dying their hair a different colour to get some attention and getting ahead of or catching up with Apple who was playing a different game the whole time.

Apple meanwhile has made some notable mistakes, but when they do, it's usually a thorough bad bet that's just missed the mark, but if they do, it's all throughout their OS in every corner. Even with their recent Liquid glass blunder, they're not really putting a veneer that looks like wood over a rotting corpse of a house, they're just picking bad materials to update an otherwise decent layout. Microsoft's whole track consumer UI/product record imo is trying and failing to bet small but intrusively on ideas that don't work, aren't cool, and have no longevity. You see it as soon as you open the control panel that still looks like the 90s; it's this uncomfortable amalgam of failed tepid temporary marketing pitches by some department that make no sense

Windows 95 was the last release that had serious user testing in controlled environments. (They were also cribbing lots of notes from NeXT, which helped.)

Something fundamentally switched around 1998-2002 in how interface design was viewed and approached. I started my career in software as a design summer intern at a company that made a Windows “groupware” application in 1997. They took pride in following the platform’s guidelines and actually testing their designs with real users being videotaped trying to use it. The company’s UI design department was tiny, but employed both an industrial designer and a cognitive scientist.

Five years later, everybody I met in UI design was a graphic designer who was drawing glossy website mockups in Photoshop. The elder lore of science-based UI design was completely lost when Web 2.0 happened and app designs became vibes-based. Even Apple couldn’t resist the tide. (Indeed Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997 was a major contributor because he had developed a taste for user-hostile skeuomorphism like the brushed metal QuickTime Player.)

The war on scroll bars has gotten pretty senseless.

The Desktop GUI was perfected with NeXTStep in 1990. Though some might say Smalltalk in 1984 (modulo some nice artwork and colours).

We could even have unified desktop.mobile codebases, with different GUI layouts. 280 North's objective-J/Cappuccino proved this.

IDK what we're even doing anymore.

Although I started with 98, I think Vista / 7 was the peak. It was user friendly enough for newbies but didn't sacrifice advanced controls. Just organized them better to bring focus to the more used parts.

> we lost the menu bar and replaced it with "mobile first" designs

What does this mean? I use lots of apps that still have a menu bar.

Some apps eschew it, like browsers, but not because they are “mobile first”, but because they are trying to maximize screen space.

Working directly with C API in Windows has not been a thing since Vista, as COM took the main role for API delivery.

The Windows SDK samples like Hilo make use of C++ with COM.

How can it be related to perfection to permanently waste a strip of space you rarely (and in some apps never) use?

Wasn't that Windows 8 ?

Windows95 still had failures of UI design, and those weren't fixed until XP.

The Menu + quick access bar was good for developers but terrible for users, at least compared to the ribbon.

Ribbon is absolutely an improvement for users but is more work for the XML layout and learning how to organize it.

I'm rather convinced that Ribbon is still the best way to organize quick actions, show their shortcuts (Alt to see keyboard shortcuts), and also have enough text to describe all the buttons. But it'd be nice if it were easier to make good Ribbons.

Menu was braindead easy, albeit through ancient process of .rc files and whatnot

> The desktop UI was perfected around the time of Windows 95

There’s no need to be hyperbolic or blinded by nostalgia. Yes, user interfaces have suffered several setbacks in the years since, but even if we concede every change was for the worse (they weren’t) it was by no means “perfected” and there was still plenty of area for improvement.

> The desktop UI was perfected around the time of Windows 95 and has gotten worse with every iteration since then.

Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.

95 feels kinda backwards tbh but 98SE/2000 is outrageously modern. A lot of the windows admin tools are unchanged from 2000 apart from the icons. I really think if you could run a modern browser on 2000 it could be a daily driver for most people

As computers, and smartphones got more popular, the audience got larger and the use scenarios got more and more distant from professional use. Dedicated professionals, like software engineers and stock brokers still prefer CLI and Bloomberg terminal even today. Ordinary office workers late 90s and early 00s window-based interfaces (the ones you're talking about). But smartphone users who just want to play their free games and scroll through facebook actually prefer the mobile-first UIs.

If you see this UI transition through the same lense as CLI-GUI one, a lot of things become more clear, in my opinion.

I agree with you generally but I don't think desktop UI is remotely close to perfected. Unless you mean the desktop as a skeumorphic concept than maybe.

I think we've actually completely stagnate on the human interaction side of OSes and only emacs has made any progress and then only for those willing to put the work in, not as a vanilla user ui.

i agree. i love the 120hz responsiveness of the UI. how fast the app loads, the buttons click. No lazy loading , placeholders, layout re-renders. Open the task manager: half a meg ram used.

Insanely great performance.

Makes me wonder if forking Wine to have a "Legacy Windows" compatibility layer... for... modern windows would be worth half a damn.

Your project's readme suggests that you tested on Proton. How poorly does the unmodified game run in Proton and/or Wine when you limit it to a single CPU? Very? Somewhat?

I think the point made here is that the application runs as if it were a modern application, even though the OS is completely unrecognizable when compared to the OS it was written for. There are other ways to run old applications on modern hardware with modern OSs, which the author would consider cheating for the purpose of TFA. Heck, I can run ancient DOS and gaming console applications on my phone if I wanted to.

a better example would be whether you could put a train from 1845 on a modern track, or fire a musketball from an M16

I guess this is one of those proverbial “I had to create an account to comment” messages:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

https://xkcd.com/1909/

It is amazing, though. Wintel is basically a Matryoshka doll (Russian nesting dolls), where each version contains all the previous versions. (Just look at how a PC boots up!)

The dedication to compatibility is commendable, and you don't really see it on the other OS's. On that note, this is one of my favorite articles:

Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux

https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

I think that's very funny. Speaking of which, EasyToon also runs in WINE, of course :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50250809

Give it a few centuries of evolution and maybe we'll get there

Solitaire's Journey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire%27s_Journey

Basically a 1992 rogue-lite where each room is a different solitaire game. eg: front parlor == clock solitaire, first bedroom == regular solitaire, upstairs is blocked by freecell, etc...

Screenshots: https://www.mobygames.com/game/1986/solitaires-journey/scree...

It's a fairly rich concept, you have a ton of different gameplay bound together by a very loose plot/quest mechanisms (eg: blue key == blue door ; boss == win 2 games of solitaire).

Definitely worth sharing if you've got some solitaire fans in your life!

Is there a but or maybe I don't know the rules. Sometimes I can't put a long sequence J 10 9 8 7 ... on a Q

I helped develop a web app used by major drug companies in 2001 that's still in use as far as I can tell. Marvel at the Dreamweaver-enabled design: https://resultview.q2labsolutions.com/resultview/logon/logon...

I think the sweet spot is WPF or actaully its FOSS version: AvaloniaUI. It is high level enough to be cross-platform and not stupidly verbose, however it is rather light pn resources. However, Win32 still wins in absolute minimalism.

While Win32 tends to deliver the most resource-efficient and responsive apps if the complexity is not high, I have settled on the latest .NET + C# + Windows App SDK / WinUI 3. Making an app look good and fit into the modern Windows look is extremely hard with Win32 C/C++ and writing and maintaining it requires energy that I'd rather spend elsewhere. Besides, modern frameworks are making great strides in speed, efficiency and QoL features. .NET 11 is full of optimizations, for example.

As someone who does raw Win32 API based UI... no. The Win32 UI system has been neglected for many years and is missing very basic functionality by modern standards, including dark mode support, antialiased rendering, hardware accelerated image stretching, and wide color gamut / HDR support. You're going to be working around a lot of ancient restrictions compared to a more modern UI and rendering layers on top of it.

yeah, it's still pretty good for a lot of things. I've found with AI it's now super easy to do native win32 apps really easily. It used to be doing all the plumbing was a PITA. There were wrappers to make it easier, but now you can do it directly. It means you get super performant, tiny binaries, that start instantly. Like windows should be. However, at home I've moved to linux a while back so way less useful to me now, though works fine with WINE. I still use it to make little utilities for work though.

Unless your name is Raymond Chen, you probably want to at least use ATL/MFC, which are frozen but still supported. Me, I'd take Qt any day, or wxWidgets if I wanted to go minimal.

Win32 API is great and responsive; ATL/WTL (and MFC) are still very useful abstractions with little cost. The biggest pain point is having to handle a lot of things manually, like DPI awareness (and themed controls). Even things like Emoji and other modern text features are not available through GDI and require DirectWrite iirc. Still, I'm surprised how useful it manages to be regardless how old it is.

I would say WinForms in C# is still the best today.

I wouldn't, because I do not think we should put up barriers in our application between OSs (Nor have to maintain separate UI code bases for each OS you think might use it). So I use cross-platform kits. There are compromises, but I don't care about the looks native qualification compared to works anywhere. Yes, the software looks like an EGUI app (etc. Substitute Qt), instead of Looks native, but I appreciate how I'm not setting up barriers between OSs or making extra work.

I am having a blast with AI + C + WinAPI. The responsiveness of WinAPI is awesome

I mean, if I was building a windows app, I would. Microsoft always tries to convince people to stop using it, but Win32 keeps working.

If Microsoft ever makes something that actually meets all the needs that Win32 addresses, they'll probably build a compat layer and a) your win32 code will still work in compat mode, b) that new thing may be worth targeting.

Microsoft (and Apple) poured a ton of money into usability research in the early 90s and it showed. I vaguely remember the story through how many versions of the trash icon Microsoft went for Windows 95 to get it right.

For me it was a bit sad to see the mad and creative UX world of the homecomputer era being bulldozed over with the minimalist uniform results of the scientific usability research.

Little did I know that a mere quarter century later we are back were we once started and everyone as clueless as we were in the 90s goes overboard everywhere as if there was no tomorrow.

Yeah, and it sadly makes me miss the nicely ordered and easily usable world - I'm gettin' old I guess.

Functionality isn't hidden and buttons looked like buttons (instead of the modern trend of having unstyled text or tiny icons having a 50-50 chance of being a button).

There are a couple versions of the Windows CD player here (along with other operating systems)

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/cdplayer/

I always liked the look of the more complicated ones like this:

https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2021-09-29-media-rack-download-win...

> The idea was that Windows, as a 16-bit operating system, could run a subset of Win32 apps that were compatible with the Win32s API surface.

386 mode in Windows 2 (sold as Windows/386) and 3 was really a 32-bit operating system for 16-bit applications.

Win32s allowed some 32-bit apps to run on windows 3.1 and up. Including many versions of Internet Explorer (Microsoft also released ie as a 16-bit application, though).

Tried it. If I open it with a disc in, it shows the "No CDROM devices found" message. If I open it without a disc in, it shows the menu, then when I put in a disc in Windows shows a weird error: https://files.catbox.moe/6y3qpy.png

It acts generally weird (buy a £10 dvd drive from ebay and try it yourself if you want any more detail, useful thing to have anyway) and obviously I can't get it to play anything.

The RTM version gets a bit further, doesn't show that weird Explorer error, but I still can't get it to play anything and opening the playlist crashes it vs on the Beta version where it actually listed the tracks.

I suspect the cd player is trying to take control of the drive and fighting with Windows trying to be helpful, don't know if there's a way to turn it off.

I can't say for certain but recently having done some work on windows with CDROM drives, i strongly suspect it would. I bet you could mount a music CD BIN/CUE with ImgDrive and it would work... Shit i guess i have to go try it don't I

Edit: i meant ImgDrive as a suggestion for those without optical drives. I have several, I'll test em out

I can't even run a binary from one Linux distro to the other, let alone one from a random Unix from the 80s. If a rebuild from source is allowed (which would need to allow modifications to the build system) that's a completely different game.

As an unmodified binary from the 1980s on current Linux/Unix? Highly unlikely.

Just used xev today (bought new mouse few days ago and it wasn't responding in chrome so I wanted to be sure).

xwm from 1984 and twm from 1989 will still execute on Xorg today.

And if you want to run them on Wayland, Worg will do that for you. https://github.com/jmalcolm137/Worg

Yeah I was kind of on the fence with this, but since the last version of Windows that shipped with NTVDM was Windows 10 32bit, and Windows 11 doesn't have a 32bit edition, I decided that using 3rd party tools would be cheating

I was aiming for something you could double click on vanilla Windows and would just work out of the box

https://felsqualle.com/posts/2022/12/16-bit-support-in-64-bi... is the full story.

but tl;dr is that ntvdm relied on the CPU running 16-bit code, so was naturally EOL on a 64-bit Windows, where that mode doesn't work.

winvdm adds it back via CPU emulation.

I can tell that the person making the video never actually tried to run Doom on a real Windows 2000 or XP machine, otherwise they would have noticed that the game has absolutely no sound. Sound support for DOS games in Windows 2000+ was not built into the operating system. You needed to install a third party tool called "VDMSound" if you wanted sound blaster emulation for DOS games.

FreeBSD /bin/cat has lots of recent changes of substance: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commits/main/bin/cat/...

Otoh, /usr/bin/true has only minor changes since initial import (1994) https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commits/main/usr.bin/...

/usr/bin/false is similar