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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

I remember windows 3.1 had a utility for drawing custom cursors. I had great fun making cursors (I was around 10 at the time I guess) and had completed forgotten about it until now!

I think that utility was a 16x16 grid, and indeed the easiest to see arrows utilsed the vertical, although actually a cursor which uses the horizontal and diagonal isn't bad either.

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The Commodore Amiga had something similar along with an early 'double 90 degree' cursor [1] and a 1/2 pixel ratio cursor in later versions if the OS [2]. Both are pretty delightful :)

[1] http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1cplpointer.png [2] http://geekometry.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/amigaos204-...

Welp, you just gave me a heap'o'nostalgia

Same here, when I was a kid I used to spend hours drawing custom cursors or custom icons.

Ditto. Ah, the good old days of Deluxe Paint III and AMOS.

Great! Now I want ye olde Amiga cursors for X11.

Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 had lots of fun themes. The cursor of the science theme was a glass tube with some chemical bubbling inside. Unfortunately, I can't even seem to locate pictures of those themes.

I hated sitting down to a machine with custom mouse cursors, mostly because the actual hit detection point was always in a weird spot.

Indeed, but the fun was not in using them, but drawing them!

I used to drive my dad crazy with this - also adding like those rainbow trails to the mouse or picking random icons for common programs (hey cool, the Word icon can now be a tree!)

I remember custom cursors from middle school, and having a friend with his cursor flipping the user the bird.

In this same vein, I remember spending hours making custom repeating tile pattern backgrounds in Windows 95. Before the modern Web, using a PC was quite a different experience than how they're used the majority of the time now.

Indeed. When i was little, i used to spend hours drawing meticulously detailed landscapes in profile (like in Worms etc), using MacPaint, following a particular method. I'd get a large circular brush and roughly bash out some terrain (hills and valleys, cliffs and overhangs, maybe some flat bits). Then go along the ground with the pencil tool and flip individual pixels to shape buildings, plant trees, park vehicles, build fortifications, dig tunnels, excavate secret bases, etc.

EDIT: It's possible i was inspired by the (lack of) landscape in Airborne, which i also played a lot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G7R9lV9eVY

I made my "hourglass" into a space shuttle taking off. Woo! Fire! :) I was about 12.

My favorite custom cursor was a banana.

The loading animation was the banana peeling. It blew my 10 year old mind.

And Macintosh had CURS resources, which easily let you design your own with ResEdit or use the ones built into the system ROM:

http://imgur.com/x0xRKCA

Or with Resorcerer... ([cough] 0000000000 [cough])

I remember one called Microangelo.

Indeed! For years I had a custom cursor, it was a mouse point with additional rays on the -x and +y axes. Hard to describe, if you picture the 'crosshatch' style cursor with an ordinary mouse pointer instead of two of the lines, you've got it.

I still feel it combines the precision of a crosshatch with the visibility of an ordinary mouse arrow. Perhaps I should recreate it for the Mac...

iirc it's really a 32x32 grid, but the "point" for the cursor is the center position, so the lower-right quadrand is used for a regular cursor, where say the text cursor is centered.

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