If there's enough room, you could add special palette indexes that stay
constant or diminish more slowly with distance. To give a glow effect for
lights, torches, etc. I always appreciated this effect in Quake.
EDIT: Oh nevermind. I guess brightmaps are more flexible.
I have fond memories of Planet Quake and also Blues News (for the latest
scoop). I remember it spawned a whole bunch of other planet sites. I think some
of them became part of GameSpy (or its parent company). I
probably moved on by then.
I like the idea but you could take it a step further and have just a core
virtual machine that you could attach virtual (input/output) devices to. So
then the canvas and audio would just be virtual devices that met some
specification. Or say for example, you just want to listen to an audio
playlist, you could attach an audio device, a keyboard and a terminal device
(for feedback). A canvas device wouldn't necessarily be required (if there was
no use for one). And it would be up to the user to attach the devices required
by an application, or at least the user would have direct control.
TLDR: QEMU but much simpler and only WASM need be supported.
I thought I remember reading that there is some relation (or inspiration) from an older X11 toolkit called xforms. Which might also be of interest to someone.
I've been redoing some old projects in FTLK recently so this sparked my interest. And I just like delving into the history of things.
I remember sometime back in the 90's buying a used copy of Visual C++ 5.0 from
some dude at the mall. It felt kinda shady, like a drug deal was going down,
but I turned out well and I scored a legit(?) copy for much cheaper than market
value. I was very excited when I got it home, and it kept me busy for a long
while. There's a lot of good documentation (and source code) on those CD's and
it taught me a lot, (pretty much) coming from Quake C.
I think at some point I also started using DJGPP, which pushed me toward GCC (and Linux).
I thought I had gotten this (Descent 3) for free with a graphics card I purchased, but Freespace was what I was thinking of, though it might have been Freespace 2.
The graphics card was the Diamond Viper V770, if I recall correctly. Good times!
I has always assumed Program Manager's window decorations were inspired by
Motif but apparently it was the other way around, regarding
Presentation Manager; Program Manager's ancestor.
"Motif was directly inspired by the look and feel of the Presentation Manager interface"
I'm perfectly fine with a 20+ year old Dell computer. It suits (most of) my
needs, unless I need to build or compile even a medium sized project, then it's
torturous.
Admittedly, some websites are simply too slow but I don't often visit those,
and it's probably one of the reasons I prefer sites like HN.
Though, I can't honestly claim to be (intentionally) downsizing or "going
retro". Maybe I've just become something retro. ;-)
While looking at the old Unix Archives, it's easy to get the impression that
Unix really is the ultimate development environment, by and for programmers.
At least at it's inception, before it started seeing more general use.
It's just like Blade Runner, where there's thousand ads everywhere, all trying
to compete for the consumers attention. Now all we need is holographic ads that
project from the screen and dance around on your keyboard (while your trying to
type).
You might want to check out FluidSynth if you don't mind a command line
application. I don't think it has a graphical interface but it can run in the
background, so you might be able to use it with other applications which do.
EDIT: Oh nevermind. I guess brightmaps are more flexible.