On the Amiga, you were able to, nah!, you were invited to customize everything on your desktop: the colors, the mouse pointer, the keyboard repeat rate, the screen position.
While this could get out of hand from time to time, it provided a great way to customize your disks. You only needed to include a 232-byte system file to boot with your colors and mouse cursor. (As long as you were booting into AmigaDOS, and not using a custom trackloader.) This way, you could:
- design a fancy, futuristic, or goofy mouse cursor,
- use your logo as the pointer,
- set all colors to black and use a fully-transparent mouse cursor to hide the fact that you’re using DOS at all.
One day I wondered: Wouldn’t it be fun to automatically gather all the preferences files ever released and collect them into a gallery of system settings?
This weekend I finally got around to write a system-preferences extractor using ADFlib and the docs, and designed a template for the preview images:
Hmm, come to think of it: The enlarged mouse pointer seems kinda redundant the longer I’m staring at it…
Anyway, since I’ve already coded everything, I’m only one full TOSEC download away from building a more-or-less comprehensive gallery. Oh, and a round of pouët scraping, probably…
