this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Can't scale tho, we always thought it looked better even back then but resolutions went up and it looked stupid small so they fix it on the next version but then resolutions went up again so they had to fix it again, eventually they said fuck it and mathematicaly defined everything so it can scale to any screen any size or aspect ratio, it's better this way despite what we lost.
Nothing is stopping this from being scalable.
Rasterization, you probably could simulate the 3D effect in real time these days although it would be a waste of resources but back then not a chance, you would generate each UI element once and take a picture of it and use that as the UI.
Yeah I was referring to modern day, vector images are everywhere and easy to render. "Waste of resources" is a weird thing to mention because it's entirely subjective. All visuals could be called that compared to a TUI.
You could totally replicate that winamp interface with vector graphics. You'd only have to maintain the same aspect ratio
Are you saying we should build a 3D rendering engine into the start up file of every application that does nothing but change a few variables??? We could now but why would we? And back then not a chance.
Vector graphics are 2d and used in websites all the time. ~NO WAIT don't make an electron.. too late..
This is not Vector it has shading and translucent glass and glare it was made on a primitive 3D engine thinking you could do this with vector is exactly why you don't have UI like this anymore, you cannot.
Vector elements can also have shading and translucency without requiring a 3D engine. Easily. If the reflections don't move, there's no need to use 3D rendering for any of this.
Modern operating systems have hardware accelerated graphics for the GUI. This is nothing new. Apple started doing this with Mac OS X more than 20 years ago. Drop shadows and animations for windows and everything. Windows Vista was when Microsoft started doing it.
The rendering engines are already there and loaded.
Hardware acceleration is not a rendering engine it is simply using the video card for assets instead of the cpu, to generate this on the fly you would either have to create your own engine from scratch in the start up, use an open source 3D engine and imbed it into the start up or pay a company to use theirs, none of which are efficient, useful or stable and I remind you this is all for a slider that can be created from a simple api and look ~as good and even if you disagree the vast majority of people do not so their is still no reason to pour more development time into a UI that would be more time consuming, complex and expensive to create than the app itself.
All you need to do to make something scalable is to design it with vector art rather than bitmaps. Even with variable resolutions, you can still make something look nice.
No, the real kicker is that nearly every 'app' these days is secretly a webpage, complete with everything that entails, pro or con.
WACUP can. Don't ask me what else it can do besides DPI scaling, the dev can't bother listing new features anywhere besides a mess of changelogs. It's a Winamp mod update...thing.
https://getwacup.com/