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Comment by statico | Hacker News Reader

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/

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> 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.

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.

Do you have astigmatism?

I just looked it up and based off of anecdotal evidence, I think the answer is yes.

I have had glasses for nearsightedness in my left eye but it isn't bad enough for most situations. Never had an eye exam in my life.

I have astigmatism. I had the same issue with grids, certain fonts with lots of vertical lines, and other regular high contrast repeating patterns.

Got some glasses a few years ago for the first time from an optometrist, and now it doesn’t bother me anymore.

So I would recommend getting it checked out.

Thankyou for the recommendation! I'll go about scheduling that.

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)

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); }

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

Nope, I'm using Chromium.

Digging into it, it looks like the various CSS font smoothing selectors only work on macOS, not Linux or Windows.

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.

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.

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

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