back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

caligari truespace 4.0 source for win9x

as released by the scene group Revolt in 1998

this is not my release - just my archival work. the source for truespace has been hiding in plain sight for 25+ years. having exhausted all my known avenues for finding an "official" seal of approval from the publisher, community-based preservation is the only possibility now.

the story: apparently someone from Revolt went to caligari's public FTP server in the late 90s, and found that an employee had left the full source for TrueSpace 4 in a /pub folder. it was released on BBSes and on IRC in the late 90s, and disappeared from the internet soon after.

doing some research on TrueSpace - truly the best piece of 3D modelling/rendering software aside from Bryce in the 90s - i stumbled upon a brief mention of the source code in an ancient usenet post. tracking down the release involved searching the *exceptional* scenelist.org NFO database, and trying to figure out the exact filename of the warez release.

SCiZE, the scenelist.org owner, did not have the files on his BBS. fortunately, he knew exactly where to find the release: it was buried in the massive 500GB "ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection" on IA. knowing the exact filename made it so much easier to track down in there!

so, have some fun with it. this doesn't belong on github or any publicly scrapable source site. just download it and let's see who can manage to compile it first :)

see the instructions in revolt.nfo for extra help on compiling

https://archive.org/details/ts4src

#VideoGames #SoftwarePreservation #Xbox #C++

"...this new tool, called XenonRecomp, simply gives fan developers a path to creating PC versions of Xbox 360 games. As the GitHub page explains, it 'converts Xbox 360 executables into C++ code, which can then be recompiled for any platform.' It's not magic - you can't simply drag a 360 .iso file in and get a perfectly functional PC port - but it could make things much easier for fan developers to create their own ports."

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/sonic-the-hedgehog/sonic-fans-are-leading-the-charge-on-a-new-preservation-tool-that-can-help-give-any-xbox-360-game-a-native-pc-port/

SOLVED!

Thanks to @accela I now know that Atari/Bioware Linux installer for the original version of Neverwinter Nights (not the recent Enhanced Edition) can be downloaded from https://neverwintervault.org/platform/linux

I'm contemplating a 2003 era retro Linux PC build.

friendly request for fellow software preservationists:

i've been looking for a particular Win95-based program that was in use roughly from 1997-2000 called Peck's Power Post. it was a usenet binary posting program that was incredibly popular on binary groups in the late 90s, before it was replaced by Power Post 2000.

I know that the filename was PPP06B.ZIP and/or PPP06BF.ZIP

unfortunately, WBM didn't keep a proper archive of the file. the snapshot of http://www.visi.com/~loganx/PPP06b.zip appears to be corrupted, only downloading a 1MB file.

the file is approximately 4MB total.

discmaster and WBM have been searched exhaustively for this file with no luck. if you happen to know of another source for this very obscure program, i'd be indebted.

lost to mmorpg history are the design/code/bug exploits that players researched and shared with one another. developers worked feverishly to patch these as quickly as possible, relying upon word of mouth from players who submitted bug reports, or (more surreptitiously) having their own incognito accounts on forums where players shared exploit info.

in the Ultima Online era, one of the most important and widely used was xsploitz.com. for several years, it was the grand central station of dark knowledge among players.

much of the site was not archived because it was hidden behind an apache authentication wall. thankfully, the administrator posted daily updates on exploits that were made public. (these were only made public after they had been thoroughly used and abused by insiders of course)

as far as i know, this is the first time this history has been publicly available again in 20+ years, purely due to link rot

https://web.archive.org/web/19991118232649/http://xsploitz.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20000119044454/http://www.xsploitz.com:80/old.html

Video Game Preservation – Stop Killing Games! - It’s been an ongoing issue for years now. People who buy video games, especially p... - https://hackaday.com/2024/08/10/video-game-preservation-stop-killing-games/ #softwarepreservation #digitalpreservation #consumerprotection #preservation #videogames #petition #games #news

found this 1984 CompuServe brochure inside of a copy of Tandy DeskMate for my old CoCo.

i'm most interested in two things:

image 1 - it has alternate cover art and copy, positioning CompuServe as the business leader's info source. there is another version of the same brochure with a bunch of gaming art on the front cover

image 2 - the a la carte service fees are TOTALLY INSANE, and far worse than any computing historian has remembered them. $12.50 USD / hr for 300 baud, and $15 USD / hr for 1200 baud. imagine the phone bills mom and dad got from the kid trying to download sierra adventure game hints

if anyone has a beef with SaaS, here's where that shit began

scanned and archived the entire booklet here for future researchers:

https://archive.org/details/compuserve_intropak

this week's expenditures on shareware preservation:

$4 for this canadian craptacular assortment of public domain and shareware games for Windows 3.1 and 95! admittedly, i was only interested in it because it featured a cockroach carrying a bindle on the front cover:
https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/112758835666872769

as it turns out, blessed were the many who got to witness this incredible Visual Basic 3 interface in its day.

although that has to be the most ominous sounding splash screen for a CD i've ever seen, like you're going to meet certain doom if you click through.

i've archived the CD image, and scans of the jewel case over at IA:
https://archive.org/details/bestofwin95_2

enjoy!

just stumbled upon a very obscure and surprisingly important patch that disappeared from github years ago: u7dcp

TIL that Ultima VII: The Black Gate's memory manager - VooDoo - force-enables L1 cache on your machine whether you like it or not. this made it impossible for too-fast machines (like a Pentium 90 or 486 DX2-66/DX4-100) to slow down the game's internal timer

7+ years ago, pippeli wrote an ASMx86 patch to disable this assembly instruction, which allows you to set L1 cache on/off to your taste. in other words: U7 can run at the right speed on many more modern machines using this DOS patch.

after some sleuthing, source and binary are now permanently archived here:

https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/ultima/u7dcp/

westwood's FTP server was archived in 2017 before it went down for good

https://archive.org/details/falconk_archivebot_ftp_westwood_com_20170314

Hello #Android hackers out there: if I wanted to slurp the installed software (OS and APKs) off of a device I have in my physical possession, where should I start looking for software / howtos?

Notes: the thing in question is NOT a phone. It’s a VR headset and it’s NOT an Oculus. And yes, it has an SD card slot.

Boosts OK!

I just took the opportunity I still have to download PetitModem, a program that uses audio to transfer files between a 3DS and PC. It's very useful, and I kinda regret not getting it earlier.

I got it to create an easily accessible version of AVC3, the last of my virtual computers. While running it will be quite difficult in the future (especially if you haven't got PetitModem on your SB installation), it is at least on the public internet now!

It is downloadable with the code T5CEW3J4 while the Nintendo Network is still around.

This is the software preservation I was referring to in a previous toot. I am really sad about needing to move on from SmileBASIC, it was a wonderful little platform and this is the biggest software project I have ever made!

I will make more fantasy computers in the future, whenever I get over needing to code for the PC. ​

https://github.com/lasamflir/virtualcomputer3archive

Enjoy!

You'll have already seen the text of the this if you follow my high-traffic chatter account, but I remembered that I have a blog that I can use for things!

In this case:

Working with IMA floppy disk images on Linux

https://hauntedgames.net/working-with-ima-floppy-disk-images-on-linux