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Comment by statico

3 years ago

This site design is one of the best retro Mac site designs I've seen. The author really nailed the pixel perfect fonts — it looks perfect on my low-DPI and high-DPI displays.

If anyone's interested, there's an active HyperCard community with some fun projects. There's a Discord server, too. https://hypercard.org/

I found that community through the Avara community, a port of the classic Mac multiplayer networked mech shooter from Ambrosia: https://github.com/avaraline/Avara

Also, if you're into retro Mac stuff or just want nostalgia, the Infinite Mac project is amazing. You can run all the major Mac OS Classic releases right in the browser, you can drag and drop files from Macintosh Archive or Macintosh Garden onto the window, and you can even create an AppleTalk network between browsers: https://infinitemac.org/

14 comments

statico

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lmm  3 years ago

> The author really nailed the pixel perfect fonts — it looks perfect on my low-DPI and high-DPI displays.

It has some weird rainbow effect to it on mine, and the background flickers when I scroll.

  • teraflop  3 years ago

    Yeah, it looks like the font is scaled slightly wrong along the x-axis, so that the displayed pixels don't quite line up with screen pixels. Specifically, the text is rendered about 0.5% too narrow, causing a moire-type pattern that repeats about every 200 pixels.

    Adding this custom CSS rule seems to fix it for me:

        p { transform: scale(1.005, 1); }

  • thrdbndndn  3 years ago

    Same here, I think it's caused by the font it's using (BitGeneva12 [1], which obviously is a geneva [2] clone but I can't find where it (the font) is from. Maybe the author created it themselves?).

    [1]

        src: url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.eot);
    src: url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.eot?iefix) format('eot'),url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.woff) format('woff'),url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.ttf) format('truetype'),url(//www.hypertalking.com/wp-content/themes/hypertalking/fonts/bitgeneva12-webfont.svg#webfontx0MbJbLm) format('svg');

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_(typeface)

  • kalleboo  3 years ago

    This seems to be because Firefox has no way to disable text antialiasing (whereas Safari and Chrome support -webkit-font-smoothing), so Firefox is trying to antialias a pixel font which just looks weird

  • Prickle  3 years ago

    Same here. Also a more minor issue for people like myself, the site causes some 'glare'(?) and is difficult to look at.

    I've had this issue since my childhood, now that I think of it. On paper (especially grids) and websites. I should probably figure out what it is.

birracerveza  3 years ago

The website is really good but the font is blurry on my windows machine, only in this blog post.

If I adblock the (beautiful) “Great Wave” image, the font reads perfectly.

vertis  3 years ago

How I miss Escape Velocity and Ambrosia Software. It was the first game I bought. Had to call the US at some weird hour from Australia and pay with Dad's credit card over the phone.

I'm aware there are similar games like Endless Sky (which I've played quite a bit).

I really wish the people behind Ambrosia could be encouraged to open source everything.

mouse_  3 years ago

It's beautiful, but unfortunate that the font is trying to use cleartype, which screws up the aesthetic bigly.