[jonnyasmar]

What I find interesting about projects like this is how much of the OS "feel" doesn't survive emulation. The visual layer comes through fine, but the things that actually defined the experience — keyboard click latency, the specific mouse acceleration curves of period hardware, the way a CRT scanline gave System 7 fonts a totally different texture than a sharp LCD does, the audible click-thunk of Atari ST or early Mac dialogs — none of that gets preserved.

Run System 7 in an emulator and the menus look right, but the input feels wrong. What we're really preserving in these collections is the screen output, not the interaction. Which is fine for an archive — just worth being honest it's a museum of appearances, not of use.

[bitwize]

I tend to associate the Amiga with razor-sharp interlaced displays, so seeing 640x400 noninterlaced in an emulator leaves something missing. The Amiga also had an unusually smooth mouse response due to its interrupt prioritization and use of hardware sprites for the mouse cursor. I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga. Again, this is not captured via emulation; not even my MiSTer seems to get it right.

[rbanffy]

> I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga

I remember the contrast between a SPARCStation and an SGI O2 and how the O2 mouse was smoother than the Sun's. Same between Windows and Macs at the time.

Design priorities...

[spijdar]

This one is weird -- the problem with Suns is the mice they shipped used a really low baud rate, so they're basically "running at 20 FPS".

What's strange, is that SunOS, Solaris, and even NextStep all supported higher baud serial mice. If you look at the mouse driver on SunOS for example, you'll see the logic which loops over baud rates until it detects valid mouse data.

And Sun did ship a mouse with a higher polling rate/baud. One. The wired ball mouse for the SPARCstation Voyager.

NetBSD doesn't have the baud detection loop, so there, for this single mouse, you have to change the kernel to make it work: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/faq.html#voyager-mouse

[rbanffy]

I really love my C64 Maxi - it's a little ARM board running a custom version of (AFAIK) VICE, but it is shaped like a C64/VIC-20/C16. Mine has the VIC-20 colors and keycap titles (the keycaps have the C64 shape though, and caps lock doesn't lock).

It "feels right".

I wish we could have USB versions of period appropriate keyboards such as the VT-100/200/300, the ADM-3A, Apollo, Xerox Star, Symbolics, Apollo Domain etc, as I believe a lot of the realism is the physical parts of the machine you actually touch.

The screen is important, but if you have a fast-refresh HDR monitor, you'll be close enough. Many more recent machines had keyboards that were very close to modern ones and didn't any have special keys absent from a PC-104/105 key one. Mice are also relatively easy, as few machines had very different kinds of mice.