Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

I like themes like this. The only thing that hampers the authenticity for me, and this isn't the fault of the author really, is the super high resolution fonts compared to what was available back then. There's just something charming about low resolution fonts that are readable enough on screen, probably nostalgia.

I think any type of pixel font authentic to a couple decades ago won't look good on a 4K monitor, unfortunately. It got to the point where I ordered a 1024x768 monitor just to play old games with a period system.

I actually would think less of this as a look back into the past but hopefully as a real alternative to the current DEs, which obviously then needs to have high res fonts. That would be nice.

Another issue with modern recreations of old UIs is that the dimensions are usually subtly wrong, which for me ruins the feeling. Some of that is related to the fonts having different height, but in many cases it is just that something is one-pixel off and just looks wrong. For the 95-style UI the common issue are control borders (especially the high-light side of "3d" controls), of which there is a huge amount of examples on the screenshot.

For 4K monitors, why not just pixel-double? Integer scaling will solve many issues introduced by pixel fonts.

I wouldn't say that's so "obvious". I for one would prefer the original pixel fonts, but size adjusted to fit my screen density. By hand, if required.

If we're talking Windows 9x, the "original fonts" could also be TrueType, hence arbitrarily resized. Yes, the original Windows 95 included a pixel font for the UI but then TrueType fonts like Verdana and Tahoma were added soon after that and were commonly used.

You're right in that there's nothing stopping one from doing so (I even use an integer scaler for old games on my main computer), it's just a tradeoff between "doing what's possible" and "having the most authentic experience one can".

If we're talking about the subjective experience of recreating "a child's bedroom computer" from the mid 90s-early 00s, a widescreen aspect ratio alone would be jarring, since my conception of a monitor for such a system is a 4:3 CRT. So for me, little else would reach that level except a system with the same aspect ratio and a similar DPI.

Not only that, but UI design itself has undergone many shifts since that era to account for the types of monitors those UIs are being designed for. There's not as much of a need for pixel-perfect design when vector-based web UIs dominate the desktop application space nowadays, relegating those that go back to older UI paradigms to enthusiasts who still remember earlier times. Or maybe people who develop for fantasy consoles.

I should mention while I'm at it that those sort of faux-pixel art shaders used in some games come off as quite jarring to me since I expect UIs to be meticulously laid out for the original screen size, not just for blowing up arbitrary content 2x or 4x on a huge widescreen monitor. I sometimes feel those are meant to represent a nostalgic feeling of some kind, being pixelated and all, but really it just makes me wish there were some alternate reality in which people still designed games and desktop applications for 800x600 or 1024x768 monitors again.

It's interesting at present how there's stuff like 4K and then there's the playdate with a relatively tiny handheld resolution, but relatively little interest for new content for those types of resolutions in-between.

But didn't they include handcrafted hinting bytecode models something like that?

Pixel fonts don't accurately represent the 90's UIs because we don't use CRTs anymore. The poor souls buying the very first terrible flat screen monitors may have used computers like that, but most of that era was experienced using smudgy, edge blurring CRTs.

You could probably create a CRT-filter-based font for high resolution screens (though you'd probably still need to optimise for subpixel layout for accuracy, even on 4k monitors).

libpango's removal of bitmapped fonts in 2019 did serious harm to retro theming.

I love that you went all-in with a 1024x768 monitor

Most people vastly overstate the effect that CRT displays had on the appearance of legacy software.

Yes, very early on, when people used TVs or cheap composite monitors as the display devices for their computers, there were blurry pixel edges, bloom effects, dot crawl, color artifacting, and all the rest.

But by the '90s, we had high-quality monitors designed for high-resolution graphics with fast refresh rates, with crisp pixel boundaries and minimal artifacting. CRT filters overcompensate for this a lot, and end up making SVGA-era graphics anachronistically look like they're being displayed on composite monitors.

> If we're talking about the subjective experience of recreating "a child's bedroom computer" from the mid 90s-early 00s

Is that what this project is going for? I understood it to be attempting to apply design elements from that era to create a superior UI for a modern "child's bedroom computer".

CRT monitors did not have "crisp pixel boundaries". A CRT pixel is a Gaussian-blurred dot, not a "crisp" square as it is on modern displays. What "high-quality" CRT monitors did have was higher resolutions, even as high as 1600x1200, where individual pixels are basically not distinguishable.

By the early '90s, high-quality CRT displays had low dot pitches or very precise aperture grilles in addition to supporting a wider range of refresh rates, and better clarity of display was a major selling point.

People were typically using 640x480 or 800x600 in GUI enviroments, and most DOS games were at 320x200. 1600x1200 was incredibly uncommon, even where the video hardware and monitors supported it -- people were usually using 14" or 15" 4:3 displays, and that resolution was way too high to be usable on displays that size, and the necessarily lower refresh rates made flicker unbearable at higher resolutions.

At the common resolutions and with purpose-built CRT monitors, pixel boundaries were quite clear and distinguishable.

> At the common resolutions and with purpose-built CRT monitors, pixel boundaries were quite clear and distinguishable.

Being able to clearly resolve individual pixels (which I agree was a thing at resolutions like 640x480 or 800x600. 1024x768 is pushing it already though) is not the same as seeing "crisp" boundaries between them. The latter is what I was objecting to. 320x200 (sometimes also 320x240 or the like) is a special case since it was pixel-doubled on more modern VGA/SVGA display hardware, so that's the one case where a single pixel was genuinely seen as a small square with rather crisp boundaries, as opposed to a blurry dot.