Old Computer Challenge 2024 Day 3
Today I tried photo editing. I planted two Italian Alder trees in the garden to extend the dappled edge of my forest garden area, and took some photos. The planting went fine, and I even took photos using my Mavica FD-200 at a fairly low resolution.
Unfortunately for me, editing photos in Windows 3.1 wasn't as good as making low quality memes with Sesame Street characters. The first problem is that I'm stuck with a 256 colour limit. This is because there's no native Windows 3.x driver (at least that I could find) for the T42's Radeon FireGL chipset. Instead I use a modified version of the SVGA driver for Windows, topping out at 1024x768 in 256 colours.
I'd completely forgotten about this. My PPC Mac runs in 16 or 24-bit, as does my Amiga 4000. Even my CDTV can do photo editing in 4096 colours. The dithering looks pretty bad in Photoshop, making it hard to see what I'm editing. To make matters worse, the colour-indexing approach Windows takes doesn't work between apps, leading to weird colour artifacts as shown above when I tried moving a screenshot from Photoshop to Paint Shop Pro.
I don't think art packages were designed on Windows 3.x with the idea you might touch up in one, then copy and paste to do something else in another.
I also tried to play with other comic and art type tools I'd found. These included a series of Cartoon Maker apps by Instinct Corporation. They made a set of themed apps for creating cartoons based on various comic book characters. Unfortunately I couldn't install any of them. Running setup.exe just hangs Windows, with no obvious way to figure out why. I also tried Glider for Windows, which was way worse than it's Mac counterpart for some reason. I managed to get a Lexmark compilation tool CD working that included Spark Interactive's Comic Creator, but I couldn't get the setup to run. I found some screenshots here, and might try it under Dosbox at some point.
I installed Myst but it insisted on running only from CD. I'm not really keen on burning a CD just to play Myst a couple of times. I appreciate how it looked at the time (and desparately wanted to play the Amiga version) but I've struggled to get into it before and suspect I'll have the same.
I definitely think something is wrong as most apps with an Installshield setup.exe seem to have the hanging problem. Not everything I do every day is successful but that's ok. Part of the OCC is learning new things, and relearning old things. I sincerely doubt I'll continue with Windows 3.11 after OCC (compared to DOS for gaming) but it's certainly taken off the rose tinted memories I had of it remote booting from a Netware network.