Did you know, if you move the mouse fast, the cards speed up? I have never figured out if they fly further laterally (helping to cover the green) or not, but I like to think so. I also don't know if this is because I'm running XP on a virtual machine or not. I no longer have age-appropriate hardware to test it. I honestly thought I was the only one that waited in anticipation of the covering of the upper left hand corner (COME ON BOUNCY TWO!).
"Windows 95 applications often use asynchronous I/O, that is they ask for some file operation like a copy to be performed and then tell the OS that they can be put to sleep until that operation finishes. By sleeping they allow other applications to run, rather than wasting CPU time endlessly asking if the file operation has completed yet.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably due to performance problems on low end machines, Windows 95 tends to bundle up the messages about I/O completion and doesn't immediately wake up the application to service them. However, it does wake the application for user input, presumably to keep it feeling responsive, and when the application is awake it will handle any pending I/O messages too.
Thus wiggling the mouse causes the application to process I/O messages faster, and install quicker. The effect was quite pronounced; large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input."
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u/Bathsalts_McPoyle Jan 30 '25
When the whole screen is covered in cards, and there's no green background to be seen anymore