this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Not a fever dream, I remember this, too. You basically got a "transparent" image through which you could see the rendered live (or game, as it happened with those, too). As soon as you closed the video player/game, or saved and reloaded the image, the effect was gone and you were stuck with a... I think it was just a black image?
I think it just remapped the memory of the video process, but I could be way off...
Back then, there was less hardware acceleration for the regular desktop stuff. Probably it just copied the data from the software rendering, and there it just defined that this part of the screen was hardware accelerated and this region pointed to vram instead of regular RAM.
Yup. Wormholes in your memory.
I think this essentially predated GPUs?
I remember this from Win 95 and Win 98, maybe even XP? You usually had a GPU, but they were more simple than today's GPUs. Oftentimes they were on-board (in contrast to today's iGPUs that are part of the processor, not part of the mainboard).
In the very early times you had 3D cards like the 3Dfx Vodoo cards. Those could only render 3D. Your desktop and other programs were still rendered by your normal GPU or on-board graphics card. They did only render 3D. You had to put a small cable from the output of your regular GPU to your 3D card's input and then plug you monitor into the 3D card. While you didn't do 3D, the 3Dfx Vodoo would just output everything it received from your regular GPU. When you played a game, it would output whatever it rendered instead.
Dam, this is actually awesome, I actually wanted to do something similar to this but couldn't figure things out.
I need to try again, might be able to make a virtual desktop screen and make xrandr pipe that output to that window.
Basically the thing I wanted to make is kind of like the picture in picture mode we have in browsers but for anything. Like just have those app open in a different virtual window and only remap the portion you wanna see into a always on top window.
Omg it wasn't a fever dream! 🥹