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#41
General Discussion / The NeXT INDeX (2026 Edition!)
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 21, 2026, 06:16 AMI've updated the INDeX to a new look meant to mimic the appearance of vintage NeXT documentation and packaging.
If it seems primitive—that's the point! It's designed to look good in OmniWeb 3. The only modern web tech is a bit of CSS that I added to make sure modern browsers don't try to do anything fancy.
The newest section is the NEWSFEED at the top, which is automatically generated from the latest stories of a number of RSS and Atom feeds—a mix of blogs, forum posts, and project updates. Let me know if you have any suggestions for additional feeds to include here; I've tried to steer clear of anything related to gaming or 8-bit machines in this section since they would likely drown out everything else.
If it seems primitive—that's the point! It's designed to look good in OmniWeb 3. The only modern web tech is a bit of CSS that I added to make sure modern browsers don't try to do anything fancy.
The newest section is the NEWSFEED at the top, which is automatically generated from the latest stories of a number of RSS and Atom feeds—a mix of blogs, forum posts, and project updates. Let me know if you have any suggestions for additional feeds to include here; I've tried to steer clear of anything related to gaming or 8-bit machines in this section since they would likely drown out everything else.
#42
Hardware / Re: Desks and Desktops, Show T...
Last post by ZombiePhysicist - Mar 20, 2026, 10:15 PMWow what a fantastic collection and display space! Kudos!
#43
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 20, 2026, 08:45 PMHmm. OK, alternate theory: perhaps mouse input on Windows + SDL3 is actually not very performant and I was so accustomed to it that seeing SDL2 Previous running on WebAssembly was like black magic to me. 
Still, maybe there's a way to do this without disassembling half the operating system. From what I can tell the kernel never actually handles absolute mouse coordinates; that part is left up to some other part of the OS, presumably DPS.
If you were to clone the mouse acceleration function in the emulator, it would be possible to guess how the guest OS believes the cursor has moved, compare it to where the host expects it to be, and to send corrections the next time the mouse device is polled for updates, a bit like how latency compensation code code works in multiplayer games. (Though notably the corrections themselves would have to be adjusted for acceleration—basically we'd need an inverse version of the acceleration function, too.)
Of course, it would ideally be a GPL-friendly clean-room re-implementation of the acceleration function, rewritten from a specification of how it works. The Darwin-0.1 tree on GitHub contains the mouse acceleration code, and I could definitely write up such a spec if you think this seems doable and worth doing.
Still, maybe there's a way to do this without disassembling half the operating system. From what I can tell the kernel never actually handles absolute mouse coordinates; that part is left up to some other part of the OS, presumably DPS.
If you were to clone the mouse acceleration function in the emulator, it would be possible to guess how the guest OS believes the cursor has moved, compare it to where the host expects it to be, and to send corrections the next time the mouse device is polled for updates, a bit like how latency compensation code code works in multiplayer games. (Though notably the corrections themselves would have to be adjusted for acceleration—basically we'd need an inverse version of the acceleration function, too.)
Of course, it would ideally be a GPL-friendly clean-room re-implementation of the acceleration function, rewritten from a specification of how it works. The Darwin-0.1 tree on GitHub contains the mouse acceleration code, and I could definitely write up such a spec if you think this seems doable and worth doing.
#44
Hardware / Re: Desks and Desktops, Show T...
Last post by KennyPowers - Mar 20, 2026, 08:41 PMThese pics are a little out-of-date...this stuff is always getting moved around and changed. Yes, there's some black hardware hiding in there. The Cube now has a working NeXT laser printer, PLI super-floppy, and external NeXT CD-ROM connected, as well as a working MO drive and several 2GB partitions on its internal BlueSCSI. I have a monstrous 21" Color MegaPixel sitting in the corner if I can ever get my cranky Dimension board to work 
I'm currently mocking up an upcoming VCF exhibit in front of the desks in the basement, so it's a little cramped in there:
I'm currently mocking up an upcoming VCF exhibit in front of the desks in the basement, so it's a little cramped in there:
#45
Hardware / Re: Desks and Desktops, Show T...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 20, 2026, 07:58 PM #46
Hardware / Re: Desks and Desktops, Show T...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 20, 2026, 07:55 PMQuote from: dlsa on Mar 20, 2026, 09:23 AMHi NexT Community !Wow! It's a shame ImgBB ruined your image links! That is a VERY impressive collection! What are you compiling in that first picture?
Been a long time fan of NeXT since 1990. I was just a teenager and drewled at the adds in the magazines.
On September of 2020 I bought my first NeXT machine on eBay. A NeXTStation Turbo.
Since then I've been buying them and now have 15 machines. I really love this stuff.
#47
Hardware / Re: Desks and Desktops, Show T...
Last post by dlsa - Mar 20, 2026, 09:23 AMHi NexT Community !
Been a long time fan of NeXT since 1990. I was just a teenager and drewled at the adds in the magazines.
On September of 2020 I bought my first NeXT machine on eBay. A NeXTStation Turbo.
Since then I've been buying them and now have 15 machines. I really love this stuff.
Been a long time fan of NeXT since 1990. I was just a teenager and drewled at the adds in the magazines.
On September of 2020 I bought my first NeXT machine on eBay. A NeXTStation Turbo.
Since then I've been buying them and now have 15 machines. I really love this stuff.
#48
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by andreas_g - Mar 20, 2026, 07:50 AMI checked the code and it seems to use the original mouse handling. There is no code to input absolute mouse coordinates.
#49
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 20, 2026, 07:00 AMQuote from: andreas_g on Mar 20, 2026, 05:15 AMThis sounds very interesting! Can you point me to the code that handles this?The Previous tree for infinitemac.org is here: https://github.com/mihaip/previous/tree/829b8627316985762556720cb0996a4a573cecb7
I'm afraid I don't know the codebase nearly well enough to identify where it is, and my remarks about how it works are purely speculative! Maybe if you do a mass diff against a revision from the same era? Seems like it's from the softfloat branch around a year before you started work on SDL3.
#50
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by andreas_g - Mar 20, 2026, 05:15 AMQuote from: Rhetorica on Mar 19, 2026, 09:07 PMFWIW the web version of Previous at infinitemac.org completely overrides the mouse coordinates with host system input values. This is probably very hacky and most likely only works if the addresses used by the OS to store this information are hardcoded in advance, but it's such a huge QoL improvement that @andreas_g should definitely consider implementing it (and the requisite guest OS version sniffing) as an experimental option anyway, even if just for fully-patched NS3.3 and OS4.2.
This sounds very interesting! Can you point me to the code that handles this?