New Web Resource: The Visual Catalog of Retro Macintosh Software (a.k.a. a whole lotta icons!)

[marciot]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to make an announcement on a new vintage Mac exhibit and resource I created. The "Visual Catalog of Retro Macintosh Software" is a fun way to browse vintage icons or to find retro software. It presents just over 75 thousand icons culled from several Mac CD-ROMs as an endless grid of icons. Browse to your heart's content, and if something catches your eye, hover your mouse over the icon and it will tell you the file's name and where it came from, so you can track down the original!

Here is a small sampling of icons from the collection:

There are 75,022 more where these came from!​

 

[David Cook]

Really cool!

Aside: Doesn't quite work in the Firefox browser.

 

[joevt]

Aside: Doesn't quite work in the Firefox browser.

Can you right click the bad icon and do "Open image in new tab"?

You can copy the url using something like "Copy image address"?

The first missing icon (top row, 4th column) has a url like this:

data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACAAAAAgCAIAAAD8GO2jAAAABnRSTlMAEgA0AFbV7Hr+AAABIUlEQVR42u2WTQrCMBSEi1Bwq+dw6cpVTtET9ALeIAsP4JF6Jt0KddqRxyNJTUhSRHGQkBY73/tLabM/dqv+mu8H1FUYMFZSkBEHDMMQXQWAS4eRBug3WB/3lvvprrojDAIcRhxAF2MM9tfzyVpLdy0HoBlJGYgF3Eli+Lft5ZWWBxBGHABT/JtrsDcaEFZKk1EcxM69JOGUaGmu4j2ws2iEDR7pDq2ZxX4UAegOL1o78kuXA2DITb/zAShdEQAPs/pL/QO4NAMAOP5BTAWA9JZ7q8TGRN9OSRm8CRNjlg9AjHBfOtg6xUwA3DE8cpil9HLoSg8aG8sXC0i4nOZVMUoBNBJT/wTUyUBXRgIfE5Q0RdFCVwBk62cA6+r/bfpxwBP8KxPd2Dz3uAAAAACZzi2ZAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC

I can paste that into Safari and it will show the icon.

The base64 data can be converted to a binary png file like this:

base64 -d <<< 'paste the base 64 data here starting after the comma' > theicon.png

Then you can load the png into Firefox?

 

[David Cook]

Interestingly, for the broken images, they display the text of the link. Whereas the working images display the image.

 

[joevt]

I didn't notice any special characters that don't exist in other icon data links.
Might want to log a bug with FireFox.
What about PowerFox?
https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/powerfox-new-web-browser-for-leopard-on-powerpc.5024/

 

[marciot]

Really cool!

Aside: Doesn't quite work in the Firefox browser.

View attachment 29555

Thank you for reporting this. It turns out that in my latest update I broke the PNG encoder such that it was generating PNG files that were subtly corrupt. Some PNG decoders, such as the one in Chrome, are forgiving, while the one in Firefox is a bit less forgiving, but also downright inconsistent (as all the icons are bad, but yet it appears able to show some of them). There is a tool under Linux called "pngcheck" that verifies that all the files are corrupt.

I was able to fix the encoder, but I will need to regenerate the entire collection. I should be able to post an update later today with this fix.

 

[David Cook]

Thank you for reporting this. It turns out that in my latest update I broke the PNG encoder such that it was generating PNG files that were subtly corrupt. Some PNG decoders, such as the one in Chrome, are forgiving, while the one in Firefox is a bit less forgiving, but also downright inconsistent (as all the icons are bad, but yet it appears able to show some of them). There is a tool under Linux called "pngcheck" that verifies that all the files are corrupt.

I was able to fix the encoder, but I will need to regenerate the entire collection. I should be able to post an update later today with this fix.

Cool. Glad you found the issue.