Windows 3.1 tiled background .bmp archive

Here's someone's personal archive of weird miscellanea, including old Windows wallpapers which is what reminded me. I use unironically use the classic Packard Bell tile background on my computers because it reminds me of my grandmother's PC which is one of the first I ever used.

https://www.dvd3000.ca/wp/extra/pb.html

If you want your nostalgia in multimedia - https://canyonmid.com/

I know this isnt related to the post, but does anyone remember the artist or website that had a bunch of cool textures and colorful tiled wallpaper for the early days of linux? think mid-90s.

I've been scratching my head for years and my searches have never found it, but there has to be some white beards here that can recall it.

I remember there were some really cool options available, I believe in a square format for better tiling. If anyone can remember and post a link or archive I would very much appreciate it.

I sort of miss when my way of using GUI desktops involved the wallpaper sometimes being visible. These days It’s all quarter/half/full windows that rarely close, and certainly are never minimized.

we have a crt tv with built in vhs in our office and have a bunch of old tapes

one is “Mastering Windows 3.1”

it’s fun to run in the background while working

for your enjoyment, here’s a similar 3.1 tutorial video from that era uploaded to YouTube

https://youtu.be/KRi5mjMgORk?si=OFH7UhOQif5EUCtg

Somewhat related: https://pixelmoondust.neocities.org/archives/archivedtiles/b...

back in the 3.11/95 era when doing troubleshooting of slow PC's I would always change the bitmap wallpaper to a solid color. nothing more painful then watching a slow machine waste resources trying to render a desktop background.

Tiles were comparably slow to draw. Windows 3.1 and maybe more recent Windows had a background option called "patterns". These are 8x8 patterns of black-over-something. Second color is customizable. It could be white, but also something else. EGA/VGA hardware specific is that 8 pixel wide repeating stuff can be drawn relatively quickly. Patterns were not inside files. They are probably inside registry? Or ini files?

Whatever. The end result is that patterns are forgotten and omitted from retro background collections.

Some time ago I wanted the original MS solitaire playing card files. Wasn't too hard to find a copy of the binary, but the interesting thing to me is it appeared the files were handwritten- a couple possible typos in color and not a single byte longer than they needed to be.

Gosh, my brain just got all fuzzy going through those one after the next. Transitioning from the previous era of CGA to 16 colors was so very exciting at the time.

Exactly as I remember - very few of them actually usable as backgrounds because they're so garish.

Love this. Do it again, but for the whole package history of propaganda-debian.

Edit: I guess the package still exists, even though many desktop refuse to tile jpg. :/

What tickles me is that Andreas put these on GitHub 13 years ago.

That’s long enough in tech to be considered retro in and of itself… let alone the age of these tiled backgrounds!

the 256color.bmp looks wrong, it's supposed to look more 3d, because it actually does use the 256 color pallette

Boy how I love them all, especially Egypt, which looks like the shekel symbol, and the arches.

And if you want your nostalgia interactive - https://pieter.com

It's weird that those give me nostalgia when I clearly remember our PC having a monochrome monitor. I wonder if my brain is retrofitting stuff or whether if any of those survived to Windows 98.

Funny coincidence. I was just (as in just now) looking for a graphics driver for my old Pentium laptop to get Windows 3.1 to work at the full 800x600 resolution.

Peak Windows. Everything went downhill from there.

One of my hobbies is to install older versions of windows and play around with them a bit - at the moment I have 86Box emulating an old machine with windows 3.11 installed and Visual C++, and I'm writing a little implementaiton of DFT so I can simulate a water molecule. Mostly because I want to go back to the days of when I had a 486 in my bedroom, I finally got a graphical desktop working, and the feeling of joy with the old wallpapers, the clock running, a coding IDE, I spent hours in there learning about memory allocations, functions, OpenGL, such good memories that turned into a lifelong career.

the leaves one is really nice.

It seems to be missing that tiled red brick.

Oh, man, does that bring back the memories!

Thanks for sharing. :-)

Last night I dreamed of flying toasters

Delightful! Glad someone posted this

Sigh ... boots C64 with a rather odd coax to SCART to HDMI daisy-chain video interface. I also have a QSII joystick that I didn't quite manage to ruin playing Daley Thompson decathalon.

It's funny that these all look more modern than you typically see on desktops.

very good

thanks bro <3

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