Waffle’s Revenge
February 24, 2025 7:22 AM   Subscribe

If you didn't want clouds or houndstooth, Windows 95 offered the option to tile 8x8 pixel 1-bit patterns on your desktop. Stored as eight decimal numbers describing the bit pattern of each row.

The format is seeing use today on the Playdate console, and you can relive the experience of fiddling with the pattern editor using this tool.
posted by lucidium (22 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Just yesterday I added my old Windows98 Black Thatch bit-map file to my brand-new Windows 11 upgrade, in order to make my current desktop look all Windows 95.
posted by Rash at 7:27 AM on February 24, 2025 [2 favorites]


I spent hours as a kid messing with these, making my own.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:31 AM on February 24, 2025 [9 favorites]


I think of these as Mac Paint patterns, since that's the version of them that I grew up on. As a kid I thought of the thatch as the latticed top crust of a pie for whatever reason, and I still sort of taste pie crust in my head when I see it. Blueberry pie specifically. I don't know. Memories are weird.
posted by Birds, snakes, and aeroplanes at 7:31 AM on February 24, 2025 [10 favorites]


These are useful for all kinds of pixel art! I suppose you can view them as a type of dithering. I recently bought Aseprite, and one of the cool things it can do is use custom dithering matrices. I think I'll mess around tonight and try to recreate some of these classic patterns.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:31 AM on February 24, 2025 [1 favorite]


DNA: gfxp.set({0xBD, 0xDE, 0x5F, 0xBA, 0x7B, 0xF5, 0xB6, 0x7B})
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:35 AM on February 24, 2025


There's a story about how this was also an option on the original Macintosh PC. Bill Atkinson, the creator of MacPaint, was opposed to it because he felt like you need have a certain level of skill in graphic design to make a pattern that looks good, and it would give the computer a bad reputation if people saw it with a shitty background. He lost that fight, but when you ran MacPaint the background would revert to the default 50% dithered pattern.
posted by zixyer at 10:13 AM on February 24, 2025 [6 favorites]


Reverting the background was kind of a shitty thing to do. Especially if your lighting setup made that alternate dither migraine-tastic.

> (patterns recreated using the dec → bin functionality in windows calculator and manually plugging the results into nes screen tool. accuracy not guaranteed)

oh the poor sod
posted by scruss at 10:42 AM on February 24, 2025


In 1992, my roommate used ResEdit to make the desktop pattern on my Mac Classic into houndstooth. Here's to you, CarSick, you visionary genius!
posted by wenestvedt at 12:03 PM on February 24, 2025 [3 favorites]


hexatron's hexagonal tiling:
gfxp.set({0x77, 0x77, 0x77, 0xAA, 0xDD, 0xDD, 0xDD, 0xAA})
posted by hexatron at 1:02 PM on February 24, 2025 [1 favorite]


I don't have a Playdate but I want to see these patterns people here are making, is there a way to input them into the gfxp tool?
posted by JHarris at 1:50 PM on February 24, 2025 [1 favorite]


Playdate has some pros and cons as a game console but it is currently the best 1-bit pattern viewer on the market!

I don't have one either, I was thinking maybe you could pass the string in vial the URL but if so I can't figure it out.
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:04 PM on February 24, 2025 [1 favorite]


Looks like the share link is outdated, but if you paste the hex codes separated by dashes on the end of
dev.crankit.app/tools/gfxp/?p=
it'll load in.

> DNA: dev.crankit.app/tools/gfxp/?p=BD-DE-5F-BA-7B-F5-B6-7B
> hexagonal tiling: dev.crankit.app/tools/gfxp/?p=77-77-77-AA-DD-DD-DD-AA

Flowers
posted by lucidium at 4:03 PM on February 24, 2025 [5 favorites]


I wonder if it's against the spirit of this to offer slightly larger fields, like 16x16? 8x8 is so limiting.
posted by JHarris at 6:14 PM on February 24, 2025


limitations are the point!
posted by scruss at 6:22 PM on February 24, 2025 [1 favorite]


Yes. but it's a chosen limitation. What could you do with 4x4, would that be better? It's chosen to be 8x8 probably because Win95 and classic MacOS used that.

It's just a B&W image used as wallpaper, I don't care that much. I just think, sometimes, it'd be nice to have a few more dots to work with.
posted by JHarris at 7:49 PM on February 24, 2025


8x8 was ubiquitous enough for Macs that when I was designing some of the first Mac graphics accelerators rendering an 8x8 (8 or 24-bit) pattern was one of our 3 basic operations on those first bits of hardware
posted by mbo at 8:17 PM on February 24, 2025 [1 favorite]


Here are all of the Windows tiles reformatted as GFXP links to the crankit app: If I am visited by the arsedness today, I may get round to posting any 8×8 X11 bitmaps I can find.
posted by scruss at 7:39 AM on February 25, 2025 [2 favorites]


and the (few) X11 bitmaps that fit into 8×8: root_weave is still the classiest B&W desktop
posted by scruss at 10:40 AM on February 25, 2025 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure what this is, but in the words of Samantha Irby: I like it!: C7-EF-FE-7C-3E-7F-F7-E3.

Also, if you needed the original MacPaint pattern bar (here's a numbered key [PNG], as I couldn't find official names anywhere), I got you: Also, I realize I messed up the X11 bitmaps because they're inverted. So here they are again, with the right polarity: posted by scruss at 2:13 PM on February 25, 2025 [1 favorite]


And guess who got the Windows bitmaps inverted? Anyway, they are fixed here: posted by scruss at 2:32 PM on February 25, 2025 [2 favorites]


Dang scruss you are the MVP of 1-bit pattern day!
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:35 PM on February 25, 2025 [1 favorite]


Whoa, thanks scruss. I was unfamiliar with the MacPaint ones, I really like the lightness of "circles and dots" and "sweater". "Faint zigzags" is wild, like some optical illusion magic.
posted by lucidium at 5:54 AM on February 26, 2025


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