I need to search my own timeline and hard drive and figure out how often I do this. It's... frighteningly often. I think once a month is the lowest I ever manage, and there was one day where I did it something like 40 times in one day. I had to write an automation system to install it for me
the palette of "It's now safe to turn off your computer" is interesting. It's basically greyscale, but in shades of orangey-brown, except color 0 is black and color 255 is white.
Color 0 being black makes sense for CRT-border reasons, but why not just set up the palette so that the darkest color is 0? also, why white? there's no white in this image.
@foone Oh! OR: maybe white is used in the debug builds for debug output at shutdown. _Not_ taking it out is one less code change between test and ship.
which makes sense, a lot of DOS resolutions did, but it's still odd to see, in our future where 60hz is the default and we only see more than that in rare gaming circumstances
I've annotated the Windows 95 boot animation: The screen doesn't update any pixels once it's initially drawn, instead the VGA palette just has a subsection (colors 236-255) that's rotated, saving on CPU cycles during the loading screen.
This is animated at the correct speed: 7 frames at 70hz, so 0.1 seconds per frame
@foone If I remember correctly, one of the betas (after dropping the Chicago branding for Windows 95) had ◀️ animation that went across the bottom of the screen. Probably used the same palette cycling?
@foone something I have wondered about for years: I thought I saw a mention somewhere about that screen being a bitmap image, but I distinctly remember having it glitch out on a really early version of Windows 95 and some extra text displayed over it in a really wide pixelated font. It said something like whenLevel( keyNumber
I have never seen this happen again since but it always suggested to me that this was just text being rendered in a funky low res font. Was that the case?
@vxo yeah I'm not sure about that one, but this resolution was supposedly picked to be able to easily drop back to text mode on error. I know a lot of DOS extender programs ended up with fat-font errors when they crashed, but I can't recall win95 ever doing it
@foone Boot screen should run with the same timings as text mode; this was done so displays could switch between the boot logo and config.sys/autoexec.bat text without monitor going dark (which is why boot screen uses such weird 320x400 resolution).
@foone I wonder if that might have been another program that was still running at the time that doodled on top of it. It was really odd and I never saw it happen again after that.
@retroswim yeah, it's lovely. I think it's kinda better than the final release, I wish they'd kept it, maybe with some more colors to make the arrows smother?