New GUI for the Atari 8-bit

[Irgendwer]

9 minutes ago, MrFish said:

I never thought mono-spaced fonts are without benefits

Benefits are often seen only in regard to ease of implementation, CPU friendliness , same indentation, ASCII-art - so for most developers the usability aspect is surprising.

[+DarkLord]

14 hours ago, MrFish said:

I know those are various speed and usability enhancements. Did any of them provide proportional fonts for the filenames and menus (I can't remember if they did or not)?

 

 

NVDI supports Speedo, TrueType and Postscript fonts, system wide.

 

The speed increase is pretty impressive. It almost feels like you've added

a hardware accelerator, because of the "snappy" response. 

 

[+MrFish]

4 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

NVDI supports Speedo, TrueType and Postscript fonts, system wide.

OK, I thought I had seen some screenshots before where it was displaying proportional fonts on menus and filenames.

 

[+MrFish]

8 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

Benefits are often seen only in regard to ease of implementation, CPU friendliness , same indentation, ASCII-art - so for most developers the usability aspect is surprising.

Monospaced fonts were used pretty much exclusively on computers until the Xerox GUI, and then the Mac and Windows that followed.

 

[leech]

On 3/15/2024 at 7:52 AM, Stephen said:

I will say one thing about the whole open source vs closed source thing.  I've been guilty in the past, on several occasions of asking for source, or at least wishing it was available.  BUT - let's use the Jaguar as an example.  Source code for at least 9 of the commercially released games has been available since (conveniently enough) 14 years.  Guess what has come from it?  Precisely (and this is a highly technical term) fuck all.  Not a single update to any of the games has been published.  Not a single project using any of the said source has come out.

 

John's point of making the source usable to other people taking as long as him re-doing it is 100% valid.  Many times in my job, it is simply easier to restart and just do it myself rather than taking existing code and fixing it up.  It's either too messy, too inefficient, not able to be understood, etc.

Ha, I wasn't even aware that there was source code available for Jag games.  I kind of go through periods of roaming around, paying strong attention to stuff, then wandering off again.  A lot of open source depends really on finding someone who wants to pick a project that interests them.  Like I definitely want to learn to code, if for no other reason than to try and port that Ultima IV remaster to the Atari...but finding the time...

[leech]

On 3/16/2024 at 12:34 PM, flashjazzcat said:

It doesn't seem unnatural that a discussion regarding the pros and cons of open-sourcing broke out as a result of someone remarking that the fact the project is closed-source and maintained by one person with limited time is something of a logistical drawback (which could be reasonably argued), although my view is that the 'opposite' situation (open-source, several programmers, lots of time) doesn't necessarily incite progress, let alone guarantee it.

Ha, yeah, you almost need a full comittee, like some open source projects have some 6 month plan of features they want to target, work on those during that 6 months, while setting others for the next 6 months of work, and so on.  They basically have project management and assigned tasks if they are large enough projects.

I think the benefit in case of GOS to being opened up would be more in the API of it, so people could write applications for it, granted that of course would all depend on how complete it was.

There is also the curiosity of "how the hell did he make that work so well?" so people want to look at the source!

[Cyprian]

21 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

(Just to support my statement...)

These fonts look cool, what's their name (menu, icon, file list)?

 

[Cyprian]

On 3/20/2024 at 4:35 AM, MrFish said:

I know those are various speed and usability enhancements. Did any of them provide proportional fonts for the filenames and menus (I can't remember if they did or not)?

 

GEM (on both platforms -PC and Atari) and Amiga OS used mono-spaced fonts due to performance issue.

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, Cyprian said:

These fonts look cool, what's their name (menu, icon, file list)?

I'm not sure what the pop-up menu font is, but the Menu bar is displaying "Chicago" from the Mac, or it's a copy of Chicago.

The file list and icons are both displaying "Geneva" from the Mac, or a copy of Geneva.

 

Here are the originals.

 

     

 

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, Cyprian said:

GEM (on both platforms -PC and Atari) and Amiga OS used mono-spaced fonts due to performance issue.

I'm not sure why they would need to, unless their OSes were just that much less efficient internally. Both the Atari 520 ST and Amiga 500 were running the same processor as the original Mac, at the same speed (Motorola 68000 @ 8 MHz) -- although the Amiga 500 was running it just slightly slower at ~ 7 MHz.

 

I'm not sure what processor people were using to run GEM on the PC's with -- maybe a 80286 @ 8 or 10 MHz in the same time frame, which should have been comparable to the 68000 being run on the competition.

 

[Cyprian]

19 minutes ago, MrFish said:

I'm not sure why they would need to, unless their OSes were just that much less efficient internally. Both the Atari 520 ST and Amiga 500 were running the same processor as the original Mac, at the same speed (Motorola 68000 @ 8 MHz) -- although the Amiga 500 was running it just slightly slower at ~ 7 MHz.

 

I'm not sure what processor people were using to run GEM on the PC's with -- maybe a 80286 @ 8 or 10 MHz in the same time frame, which should have been comparable to the 68000 being run on the competition.

 

why mono-spaced spacing fonts? because it's faster - each letter (8x8 or 8x16) fits in its own byte in memory, so you just need to copy the font data from the source to the destination. Whereas with a proportional font, each letter must be also ORed and shifted in the destination memory.

 

Btw. GEM supports proportional from the beginning (this is GDOS in Atari world)

[+MrFish]

12 minutes ago, Cyprian said:

why mono-spaced spacing fonts? because it's faster - each letter (8x8 or 8x16) fits in its own byte in memory, so you just need to copy the font data from the source to the destination. Whereas with a proportional font, each letter must be also ORed and shifted in the destination memory.

I didn't ask why it's faster, that's obvious; I asked why they would need to. You said it was due to performace issue, which I took to mean they found it necessary in order to avoid an unusable system. If you just meant that they were interested in using it to get better performance than the Macs -- or just better than what they would get otherwise, without it being a necessity -- then that's different. I can understand it, but they give up a lot in order to get the performance, which is exactly what I'm taking issue with.

 

[atarixle]

1 hour ago, MrFish said:

I'm not sure what the pop-up menu font is, but the Menu bar is displaying "Chicago" from the Mac, or it's a copy of Chicago.

The file list and icons are both displaying "Geneva" from the Mac, or a copy of Geneva.

 

Here are the originals.

 

     

 

Wait, the tiny one is one of my BOSS-X - Fonts. It's name is "MACSMALL.FNT'. Oops. I was inspired to re-create this pixel-by-pixel.

 

The Chicago-Font, I first saw on Atari-Related screenshots (perhaps MagicMac-screenshots), so I named my 8x8 sized recreation "ATARIST.FNT".

[Irgendwer]

3 hours ago, MrFish said:

I can understand it, but they give up a lot in order to get the performance, which is exactly what I'm taking issue with.

It's not only about performance but also development time. Products like NVDI only had a chance, while the original VDI was already slow. But it was good enough to ship a product.

Putting a further burden on the processor with proportional fonts while increasing the development time (coping with them in the applications (resource editors, desk, tools)) made no sense from the management standpoint.

It also explains the price tag difference between the Macs and Ataris.

 

Having a usable graphical user interface already made a difference big enough to tickle the desire to upgrade to those machines.

 

PCs are even a different story while they offer very fast hardware text modes (contrary to the Atari 16/32 bit line)... ...and there were quite many window libraries/interfaces for applications for those modes.

Users wanted those interfaces but not necessarily proportional fonts.

Edited March 21 by Irgendwer

[FifthPlayer]

9 hours ago, MrFish said:

I'm not sure what the pop-up menu font is, but the Menu bar is displaying "Chicago" from the Mac, or it's a copy of Chicago.

The file list and icons are both displaying "Geneva" from the Mac, or a copy of Geneva.

 

Just about everything from that particular GUI (MagiC OS) is an almost-verbatim copy of late-stage Classic Mac.  I'm not sure it has any historical value in terms of innovation in user interface typography.

Edited March 21 by FifthPlayer

[+MrFish]

10 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

It's not only about performance but also development time. Products like NVDI only had a chance, while the original VDI was already slow. But it was good enough to ship a product.

Putting a further burden on the processor with proportional fonts while increasing the development time (coping with them in the applications (resource editors, desk, tools)) made no sense from the management standpoint.

It's no big secret that the Tramiels were in a desperate situation.    

 

10 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

It also explains the price tag difference between the Macs and Ataris.

The Atari ST's packed a lot for their price. I like them; but I do think a comparison is useful for illustrating that the 8-bit's are capable of having a usable GUI, in part by taking a different path than the ST's did.

 

10 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

Having a usable graphical user interface already made a difference big enough to tickle the desire to upgrade to those machines.

It was a big selling point; graphical user interfaces were becoming all the rage.

 

10 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

PCs are even a different story while they offer very fast hardware text modes (contrary to the Atari 16/32 bit line)...

PC's were a different story because they were already heavily ingrained in the business world under text-based MS-DOS. So, everything had to logically grow out of that tree.

 

[+MrFish]

23 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

Just about everything from that particular GUI (MagiC OS) is an almost-verbatim copy of late-stage Classic Mac.

Late-stage Classic Mac and early-stage through later-stage PowerPC systems. Basically, System 7.5 - 9.x.

  

23 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

I'm not sure it has any historical value in terms of innovation in user interface typography.

Nothing I can see. I'd have to use the system (or watch some detailed videos on it) to see if anything else was different.

 

[+MrFish]

8 hours ago, atarixle said:

Wait, the tiny one is one of my BOSS-X - Fonts. It's name is "MACSMALL.FNT'. Oops. I was inspired to re-create this pixel-by-pixel.

 

The Chicago-Font, I first saw on Atari-Related screenshots (perhaps MagicMac-screenshots), so I named my 8x8 sized recreation "ATARIST.FNT".

Our two main system fonts are based on Chicago and Geneva too. Our icon font is a reduced version of our system font that's based on Geneva; our Chicago-style font is also a reduction. All of our fonts are different enough, because of scaling and me interjecting some of my own design ideas. Susan Kare (original designer of Mac fonts, icons, etc.) gets big credit for helping make the Mac as revolutionary and influential as it was/is.

 

[Matej]

What about NewGUI for VBXE??? To promote graphics card. Also support Rapidus 20mhz to have 16bit gui. VBXE: 640x240p in 64 colours, 320x240p in 1024 colours??? 

 

[+MrFish]

50 minutes ago, Matej said:

What about NewGUI for VBXE??? To promote graphics card. Also support Rapidus 20mhz to have 16bit gui. VBXE: 640x240p in 64 colours, 320x240p in 1024 colours???

On 12/15/2016 at 5:05 PM, Matej said:

Also any plans for VBXE version??? As I will have VBXE.

And I want see color icons! Blitter support!

On 6/28/2017 at 2:27 AM, Matej said:

Any plans for NewGUI-VBXE??? With colors and hires?

 

Searching this thread, I came up with 103 replies containing the term "VBXE". So, it's been talked about fairly extensively here already, which you can read about by doing your own search.

 

Do you have any more-specific questions about having VBXE supported? Because the general question has already been asked multiple times by yourself (and I'm sure others too), and I'd guess answered by Jon as many times too.

 

Some discussion about VBXE support was given just a few pages ago too, which might answer some questions you have in mind.

 

[+MrFish]

6 hours ago, MrFish said:

Susan Kare (original designer of Mac fonts, icons, etc.) gets big credit for helping make the Mac as revolutionary and influential as it was/is.

Here she is, hard at work.

 

 

 

[FifthPlayer]

4 hours ago, MrFish said:

Late-stage Classic Mac and early-stage through later-stage PowerPC systems. Basically, System 7.5 - 9.x.

  

Nothing I can see. I'd have to use the system (or watch some detailed videos on it) to see if anything else was different.

 

My definition of "Classic Mac" is everything before OS X, but yes, System 7.5-9.x exactly describes what I was thinking of. 

 

Anyway, MagiC OS, being a slavish copy of the Mac GUI, doesn't appear to break any new ground in its use of proportional vs. monospace type, regardless of what other merits it may have.

[+Stephen]

2 hours ago, Matej said:

What about NewGUI for VBXE??? To promote graphics card. Also support Rapidus 20mhz to have 16bit gui. VBXE: 640x240p in 64 colours, 320x240p in 1024 colours??? 

 

Not trying to be pedantic, but while the VBXE has 4 palettes, there are restrictions to how they can be displayed.   You can't just have an arbitrary 1024 colours on screen, as each palette is only 256 entries.  Each scanline can use any of the 4 palettes.

[+MrFish]

19 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

My definition of "Classic Mac" is everything before OS X, but yes, System 7.5-9.x exactly describes what I was thinking of. 

OK... I always think of the Classic era in terms of 68K Macs, and the classic Mac OS from the first version through System 7.0 -- though there was a lot of overlap in OS support for 68K via emulation after PowerPC took center stage.

 

19 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

Anyway, MagiC OS, being a slavish copy of the Mac GUI, doesn't appear to break any new ground in its use of proportional vs. monospace type, regardless of what other merits it may have.

Right, it's just a step forward for the ST's.

 

[drac030]

35 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

Anyway, MagiC OS, being a slavish copy of the Mac GUI,

As much as I have a bad opinion on "MagiC OS", it was not a copy (slavish or not) of the Mac GUI. It was a new implementation of GEM+GEMDOS. Buggy for sure, but, as far as I know, having nothing to do with a Mac. It is only a Mac font which is in use, which, by the way, was also used by NVDI.