Who here still uses an old version of art programs like Photoshop from CS1 up until CS6, and how do you keep its drivers, particularly drawing tablet drivers, running?

alexyorim said:
how do you keep its drivers, particularly drawing tablet drivers, running?

In my case, I think I might've just got lucky. My tablet is from 2012, but it still works as well as it did on day one.
That said, it's probably in part due to it just not having that many bells and whistles, and thus not many potential points of failure.

Paint Tool Sai shall always be fun to use, Dood

Still learning new things about the program
and I've been using it for a 'hot second', Dood
T‿T)~★

lendrimujina said:
In my case, I think I might've just got lucky. My tablet is from 2012, but it still works as well as it did on day one.
That said, it's probably in part due to it just not having that many bells and whistles, and thus not many potential points of failure.

Lucky here too, While not from 2012, the one I've
been using still works as well as it did from-
well- Like you said, Day one, Dood
╹‿╹)~★

As long as the driver has a functional WinTab API it shouldn't really matter what drawing program you use if it's using that API (versus something like Windows Ink because it's terrible). WinTab is super old so you'd be hard-pressed to find something that won't use it.

Regardless, both my tablet from 2011 and 2019 work just fine in both SAI 1.2.5 and SAI 2.

"Who still uses an old version of art programs?" People that didn't want to pay Adobe in perpetuity?
Hmm, how good of support exists for tablet entry in other OSes?

alphamule said:
"Who still uses an old version of art programs?" People that didn't want to pay Adobe in perpetuity?
Hmm, how good of support exists for tablet entry in other OSes?

Varies. Take Linux, if you have a Wacom, support is pretty good, assuming your tablet isn't super recent. If you don't, your tablet is probably still supported but not all features might work. For example, with my Monoprice 12", there's a row of clickable 'action buttons' along the top which don't seem to do anything. I suspect there's no actual hardware involved in this feature and the windows driver just figures out what you clicked based on location, so theoretically it wouldn't be that hard to implement, but it just isn't implemented in Linux.

More generally it's important to know the tablet's chipset, because that's the main determining factor for support. There are a lot more products than there are chipsets. USB interrogation tools like lsusb will often give this information.

There's also situations where the driver can support the tablet, but not to the standards of the paint program, so the paint program ends up needing specific hacks to deal with odd behaviour of the driver. So you can't assume just because the tablet appears to function generally fine in your OS that it will work in your paint program. Painting is less tolerant of nonsensical events than general UI coding.

I suspect there's no actual hardware involved in this feature and the windows driver just figures out what you clicked based on location, so theoretically it wouldn't be that hard to implement, but it just isn't implemented in Linux.

Correct, it's just a single large touchpad. They cover up the non-used part and buttons are just hidden behind the shroud. Digitizers like ancient one I own have either buttons on the pointer device, or actual physical keys/knobs/whatever, to get better response than a touchpad.

savageorange said:
Painting is less tolerant of nonsensical events than general UI coding.

Well, namely because of all the fiddly human interface tricks like angles and pressure. ;)

Hypothetically, you can use an overlay sheet and get whatever UI you want on the front of a (blank) pad.