Old Computer Challenge 2024 Day 2
In which I document some crashing, fixing, swearing and some slowness I’ve spotted.
I installed a few new applications one of which came with a dodgy Adobe Type Manager. On reboot Windows hung at the startup screen.
I tried using boot logging and other methods to find out what was going wrong but everything reported Windows was fine, which was of course a lie. I wasn’t going to break out SoftICE to fix this. Instead I backed up win.ini, progman.ini and system.ini, then extracted the original files from the Windows 3.11 installer and noticed everything came back.
A bit of whackamole debugging revealed it was Adobe Type Manager’s failed install at fault. After cleaning this up and removing the ATM references from various .ini files everything started fine. I still needed to be able to create PDFs, and grabbed an old copy of Acrobat Distiller 3.0.1. Once that was installed I needed something to test it with.
Shitposting, Early 90s Style
Sesame Street Animation Workshop Main Screen
While testing out multimedia software on Windows 3.11 I stumbled across the unexpected delight of Sesame Street’s Animation Workshop (called SSAW to save on typing). It’s a toy for young children that features 4 mini-tools: Stickers, free drawing, colouring in, and a dress-up toy. I can create scenes with the tools, then save them as BMPs in order to add text later with Photoshop 3. Combined with the sneakernet export this gives me a fully functioning 90s era 16-bit shitposting workflow.
My dedicated 16-bit shitposting setup
SSAW seems to have been released in 1997 but is still compatible with Windows 3.11. I think a lot of later apps used Win32s for compatibility, but I’m pleasantly surprised this worked so well. I think I'm going to spend more time playing with this, albeit not in the way the authors intended.
Encouragement from Elmo
My Zine workflow involves taking PDFs and pasting them together with pdfjam. This way I don't need to create a full template in a DTP package, and I can just focus on what I want in the pages. I can see SSAW being used a lot and am looking out for other toy tools to reuse.
I still need to be able to print PDFs from Windows 3.11. There are two options: Acrobat distiller and Ghostscript. I went with Acrobat Distiller even after the Adobe Type Manager problems for two reasons; One - I have a copy of Acrobat Distiller 3.0.1 knocking around that I never threw out, and two - I still have nightmares from using Ghostscript to generate PDFs on an Amiga. I installed the generic Windows PostScript driver before installing Acrobat Distiller, as recommended by Adobe. Now I have a PDF printer I can use from almost any Windows 3.11 tool.
I’ve tested PDF printing and it’s fine, but I need to work on the zine to put it through it’s paces. I have Publisher installed but I’m tempted by Aldus Pagemaker. Maybe the jank is part of the appeal. Maybe it's Elmo calling for trans rights. It's too early to tell.
Elmo reminding us all that trans rights are human rights
I now have Photoshop 3 and PhotoStyler in addition to PaintShop Pro. Each have their pros and cons. Photoshop 3 seems the most powerful, but it's not necessarily the best at everything. There are annoying quirks in Photoshop 3. For example, your save format options are dependent on your image's current colour indexing mode. I can see why they might’ve chosen that. Coming from an Amiga background with Datatypes it’s still frustrating. Same for the lack of JPEG or PNG import in Word 6. I might have a look at a WordPerfect version for a later post.
I’d also like to do some actual photo editing using photos taken on the Mavica. My display only has 256 colours, but that should be enough for anyone. So far my experience of Windows 3.11 has been a little clunky and not as good as it’s peers (MacOS and Workbench 3.x), but I suspect in many ways 3.11 was cursed by the size of the jump to Windows 9x. If OS/2, 9x and NT were all around the corner, why invest in making 16-bit Windows better?