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Amiga Pointer Archive

heckmeck.de

65 pointserickhill19 comments

Ahhh Devs:system-configuration or SYS:system-configuration at 232 bytes. I remember being 11 and trying to make my own compilation disks and trying to figure out what file kept the system prefs on my A500. Don’t forget to copy the RAM: handler from L: if you wanted to use RAM:

  I used Kindwords to make my first compilation disks until I discovered Diskmaster 1.3 and then later on Diskmaster 1.3 and shell commands. 

  This is a nice pointer collection, I used to enjoy putting in compilation disks and seeing the 4 system colours and the 4 mouse sprite colours. I also remember the compilation disks that used “rainbow” or “stripes” which changed the background or text colour on each scanline.


  Bonus points for the kiwi pointer (personal NZ bias).

There was no way around the kiwis, they New Zealand Amiga Users Group was very productive back in the day!

https://www.aminet.net/package/util/mouse/EgoMouse

Anyone still using an Amiga should try EgoMouse; it makes your mouse pointer rotate to face to the direction of movement; yes, this makes it ridiculously difficult to "drive", but it's fun

Just seeing .lha archives really takes me back!

Some real ingenuity and creativity on display. The Amiga only had two pointer modes, the normal one and a "busy" pointer, and the system preferences provided a nice little pixel painter specifically for drawing pointers, so making your own was a low threshold activity.

Applications could define their own as needed, of course (the pointer was just a hardware sprite).

"Low threshold activity" is a good point.

While editing the mouse pointer of a modern-day OS is pretty much inaccessible, the "cursor" CSS feature in the major browsers immediately felt low threshold, accessible and fun again. Changing the "real" mouse pointer via CSS! Only on a website, but cool nonetheless!

That little fun feature alone helped getting this project off the ground. I tried to make my adaption of the pointer editor low threshold, too! :)

How sure are we?

https://www.hi-toro.com/images/pointers.jpg

The missing part is the editor - similarly windows lacked (or hid it way too well) the icon editor, unlike OS/2 where I recall spending hours as small kid making custom icons for games like MSFS

Sure about what?

https://www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?t=1179

The Amiga Pointer Archive is missing one: We went to get a Fast Ram upgrade for a A1000, and we looked at his work, and it was cross between a jeweler and sim-city. We had the work done, and he put his boot disk into test it. He had the most interesting pointer... the boot disk was called Romeo, and the pointer was just a 3x3 square diamond, with a single line of pixels, to a 2x2 square diamond of pixels with a hole on the center... so you could literally see a single pixel through it. I had never seen anything like it, so I copied on my Macintosh, ( System 6.0.8, and system 7.0.1 ), and later to windows 3.1 onward to Windows XP, later screens became too large to need anything close to a single pixel pointer.

I wish I had the disk, that we got it from... just a single 3.5" Floppy labeled "Romeo" and we all knew what it was.

Are you quoting this from somewhere?

There's one on there the matches that shape, but without the transparent centre pixel. Crosshairs, row 2, 4th from left

I scanned all disks, I've only seen "Bravo Romeo Delta" (a 1992 game) and a Romeo Knight music disk. But the site has a pointer editor, did it look like this?

https://heckmeck.de/pointers/?user-content=00000000000000000...

I've also scanned all "tiny" cursors with 13 pixels or less. Surprisingly, there is no pointer with this exact shape yet!

I find it a bit sad that contextual pointers aren't nearly as common as they used to be.

They can certainly be overdone or done poorly, but done well they give a really nice indicator that can account for some combination of context of what's under the pointer to be operated on, any modifiers active, and any ambient state.

Like with most things related to UI regressions, I blame smartphones.

Wow. You're going to want to turn on "color thumbnails". Beautiful.

I think I'm a little sleep-deprived: I briefly thought that this was going to be about pointers to peek/poke to. And then I remembered that AmigaOS relies heavily on handles/jump tables...

I miss the customizations such as custom pointers, window blinds, folder icons, etc that you used to be able to do with your PC.

We had some great designs back then. And some eye sores too.

Can we bring back the ability to skin our windows again? Customize the look and feel of our OS to our liking or am I just going to get the obligatory “Switch to Linux”?

you say that in a way that sounds disparaging, but you might actually enjoy it if you want to get lost down the rabbit hole of UI customization again :)

> "[…] or am I just going to get the obligatory “Switch to Linux”?"

You could try FreeBSD 15!

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