Mastodawn

Nina Kalinina Dec 21

I discovered a wonderful hack that likely would allow me to run Windows 2 on my vintage Apricot PC Xi before the New Year.

Quick recap: Apricot PC is a British computer from 1983, not compatible with the IBM PC. It had a Windows 1 port, but not Windows 2, and thus couldn't run Word, Excel, or Illustrator. With a bit of driver-writing, I managed to start Windows 2 on it, but my video driver is rudimentary and cannot be used for practical purposes. Windows video drivers are super-complicated, so I was fully expecting to spend over a month writing one (at least there are docs for everything!)

But I just discovered a way to run Windows 2 with Windows 1 video drivers. So if I had a Windows 1 driver for Apricot, I could use it in Windows 2. Of course, it's never that simple...

Find the difference between Windows 2 with Win1 driver and Windows 2 with the real Win2 driver - both are EGA 640x350!

🧵 thread with a few more screenshots and pointers

Nina Kalinina Dec 21

As you might know, graphical drivers for Windows 1/2/3 are _complicated_. They are expected to implement a huge chunk of Windows GDI, the graphical abstraction library. This means they're responsible for drawing parts of the window decorations, and so on.

You also might remember that Windows 1 had window decorations _completely_ different from Windows 2, as it was using tiled windows instead of overlapping ones. But for some reason, Windows 1 video drivers can render floating windows just fine, and even can draw minimize and maximize buttons.

However, Windows 1 drivers handle fonts in a different way. Windows 2 is supposed to offer a new Font API, but most apps are using the legacy entry point for ExtTextOut. The font format is completely different, though. So, imagine you transplant a Windows 1 driver to the Windows 2 system. The second screenshot is what you get.

(🧵2/? continue)

Nina Kalinina Dec 21

All my previous experiments with Windows 2 running on Windows 1 drivers ended here. But I had a stray thought: if fonts for Windows 1 and Windows 2 are different, maybe I can just bring fonts from Windows 1?

Turns out, I can! Windows 2 with Windows 1 video driver and fonts seems to work as expected - I can run Word, I can run little games, I probably should be able to run most, if not all, programs this way.

The fonts are different from the regular Windows 2, but who cares if it works, right?

So... circling back to the beginning of the thread: for my Windows 2 on Apricot PC port, I can just use the existing Windows 1 driver!

...Except I can't. Windows 1&2 use a thing called "fast boot"; the SETUP tool links all the drivers together in WIN100.BIN and WIN100.OVL files. The only Apricot PC video driver available is hard-linked to the Windows kernel.

So, my next task is to unlink the driver from the kernel. But this is far easier than writing a new driver.

🧵 3/3 fin~

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Dec 21

@nina_kali_nina you say "fonts" … but are we talking "outline" scalable fonts? Or just preset size bitmap fonts?

Hmm wow I've never seen that interface on WordWin before … is that, yikes, installation within a Word macro? No wonder the viruses broke out here first.

Nina Kalinina Dec 21

@whophd preset bitmap fonts. Windows 1/2 doesn't support scalable fonts out of the box (there's Adobe extension for Windows 2 that enables Type 1 fonts in some programs).

And yes, that's Word For Windows macros installer, fascinating stuff :)

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Dec 21

@nina_kali_nina Do you see the fonts named 'Roman', 'Modern', or 'Script'?

You wouldn't believe (actually, you would) how hard these are to google.

Anyway they're a dumpster fire but they totally work … if you are into non-intersecting polygons. This is when Adobe Type Manager was hella expensive, and TrueType was a liberating dream coming soon, from two enemies joining forces f.f.s.finally.

BTW, yes this screenshot is from Windows 3.0 Runtime (or something like that … CONTROL.EXE not found haha) but they are the fonts that Windows 3 inherited, I swear

#Windows2 #Windows3 #outlinefonts #Modern #Roman #Script

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Dec 21

@nina_kali_nina That @ sign is not so much a circle, as a hexadecagon

I even found curly quotes! Singular quotes, though. Very hard, you needed to remember 0145 and 0146, which of course I do

Nina Kalinina Dec 21

@whophd I bet those look great when printed by a Postscript printer...

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Dec 21

@nina_kali_nina IKR, but I literally handed in assignments with these and a dot-matrix printer … it was galling, embarrassing … I'd use the bitmap fonts whenever I could, but sometimes you had to go bigger

But still better than handwriting everything

(Didn't stop my English teacher rejecting printouts on the basis of "can't prove it wasn't photocopied", which surprisingly was an attitude better suited to 2025 than 1985)

@whophd reminds me how in 2010 my university demanded some assignments to be hand-written to reduce cheating 🥲 I bet this forbidden technique is in vogue again, with "no, we're writing the essay right here, right now, in this class room, with the phones off"

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Dec 22

@nina_kali_nina 😵

the only faculty at my university to use paper submissions into the 2000s was the IT one, but maybe they “knew”

(This didn’t excuse their habit of having 11:59pm deadlines … no excuse not to use 5pm or 9am)

The question remains, is a good AI-assisted answer a good answer? What happens if you just judge it (harshly) on the final result? Isn’t this just like the transition from pre-calculators to post-calculators in maths? The questions need refining now?

Nina Kalinina Dec 22

@whophd if my uni taught me anything, good AI-assisted answer is a bad answer. WolframAlpha for year 1 math becomes a blocker for year 2 physics (difficult math problems are supposed to become trivial, if all done well). Looking up things for year 2 physics exam is a blocker for year 3 courses in advanced physics, because by year 3 many problems are already from a space that requires original research. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with looking up things, or using CADs for simplifying calculations, but they all produce _inputs_ for further work, not _outputs_.

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Dec 23

@nina_kali_nina yep, “AI creates more work, not less” is the first conclusion I drew when using generative AI video restoration … but it’s a new tool to the toolbelt. Or more like, you have construction equipment from shovels to heavy machinery, and now you’re adding dynamite — excellent addition to your capabilities, but also needs training, and without training it makes things worse. Plus causes new types of problems in the wrong hands.

I still can’t really argue against testing people against the metrics they’ll be at work, whether that’s job interviews or exams allowing StackExchange … because law exams have been open book for decades or centuries. Memorisation is not the point; “rings a bell” is.

And yet, “qualifications” means you know the fundamentals. Without those you’re useless in an emergency. And you’re not professional if you’re that.

So is AI to essays what calculators are to maths?

Calculators don’t help with algebra except where it doesn’t matter? I like the idea of “sanity check” of all work, in all disciplines — it’s pretty applicable to everything.

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Dec 23

@nina_kali_nina … my other new favourite analogy — I invented this yesterday — is that AI is to technology in the 2020s, what microwaves were to cooking in the 1970s

So much excitement, a whole new method of heating. New cookbooks with new recipes, all a little enthusiastic beyond reasonable. Didn’t last into the 1980s.

Meanwhile the “establishment” was aghast at this prospect of “progress” — they probably worried that by the year 2000, we’d all have abandoned our ovens and stoves, and the culinary world would have regressed to the Stone Age. Sounds like LLMs now? Thankfully MasterChef was 30 years away and proved them wrong.

And yet you’d be a lesser kitchen without one. It helps you do things you would be trying to avoid before.

And 10-year-olds were masters of a new domain — they could handle the freezer-to-microwave food chain, and (rightly or wrongly) had the first realisation that “wow, I can imagine my bachelor future now” haha — not great, not terrible; it was a new option for survival. Tin cans had rightful supremacy for a century but now Spam had competition.

Sounds like a lot of new fans of technology now — liberated from their dependence on others

There’s almost no examples of using a microwave to turn food from “inedible” to “edible” — it’s always a red flag if you think you’re about to achieve that. Poached eggs is maybe the only example, where it makes it much easier to do a middling job; a good chef would never. But a bad one couldn’t do it with a pot.

But I think rice cookers are basically pointless because the microwave is right there. It’s because the microwave is still unconventional and easy to misunderstand. You have to be a bit sciencey to use it, and know it’s a dehumidifier.

Like AI, it’s solving new problems, not replacing old solutions.

Nina Kalinina Dec 23

@whophd I will avoid commenting on microwaves-AI comparison, but I will comment on the rice cookers vs microwaves: if I had to choose between a microwave and a rice cooker, I'd keep the rice cooker. If I had to keep my kitchen as minimal as possible, my rice cooker would have been the only appliance I'd keep, even over a kettle and a stove. And it seems I'm not alone here, there are millions of people in the rice cooker cult. It can make rice, it can bake, it can lightly fry things, it can prepare yoghurt, it can make curry - and none of it is going to be a compromise in taste. I do have a microwave, but the only job it does well is cooking mushrooms. Everyone says it's great for thawing and reheating, but it really isn't.

Nina Kalinina Dec 23

@whophd the factual imprecision with plausible look is a big no-no for me personally. And also all the fascists making the tools, too. :)

Here's a strawman of an argument: tactical missiles potentially can be used as a mining tool, but it's probably bad idea to go buy them and hope this action will make the world a better place.