i noticed that John Broomhall's exceptionally creepy X-COM UFO Defense soundtrack for the (surprisingly good) PSX port didn't have a lossless version available anywhere.

that has been now rectified:
https://archive.org/details/x-com-ufo-defense-ost-psx

extended digipres info for anyone interested:
weirdly, binchunker couldn't extract the redbook audio tracks from the PSX cd (even in psx mode), and every track had to be manually imported into audacity as raw audio. if anyone has to do this again, the correct settings for import are: Signed 16-bit PCM/Stereo/Little-Endian/44100hz

#digipres #softwarePreservation #retroGaming #playstation

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a fantastic itch.io account archiving loads of C64 games and applications—mostly in Spanish! The collection has grown massively and is a real treasure trove. #C64 #retrocomputing #retrograming #softwarepreservation #gamepreservation
🎮💾 https://c64cracks.itch.io/

The National Software Reference Library (NSRL) is in the midst of making the freely acquired software in their collection available to the public. The software titles are stored in Library of Congress Bagit format.

As of May 2025, 105831 applications are candidates to be released.

https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rds.nsrl.nist.gov/software/NSRL_free_bags_README.htm

#nist #softwarepreservation #retrocomputing #nrsl #loc #software #datahoarder #datahoarding #digipres #digitalpreservation

On May 28, 2025 Eleanor Young will give the talk "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System" at the 2025 IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering and Industry Summit (CCECE). She will discuss what other historical software recovery groups can learn from the Medley Interlisp Project.

https://ccece2025.ieee.ca/technical-program

https://ccece2025.ieee.ca

#retrocomputing #interlisp #lisp #SoftwarePreservation

if we don't packet analyze the DG client and build a server emulator first, someone else will.

https://archive.org/details/disneygirlfriends2001

#win95 #softwarePreservation

back in the mid-90s just prior to sierra's downfall into fmv and poorly funded titles (their sale to CUC international), the company started looking for low-risk low-profit income avenues.

in the post-doom FPS feeding frenzy, the bloom was off adventure games. they were expensive to produce, and their audience was shrinking fast.

one solution was recycling old software, and honestly, it was great for a 13 year old kid like me, because it meant that i could buy a "sierra game" for $10 instead of the $60-$80 i would normally have to pay for a flagship title

Crazy Nick's Software Picks were collections of mini-games taken from sierra adventures. there were several of them - LSL, King's Quest - I happened to find this Conquest of the Longbow pack at a pharmacy.

the games were *great* - Archery and Nine Men's Morris kept me absolutely occupied for weeks. I had no idea at the time that they were culled from a full sierra adventure, until I discovered it by accident in my twenties.

today i found my copy of the game, buried in another game box. it still has the greasy kid fingerprint from me eating a bag of Old Dutch (regular) chips while i played

#sierra #retroGaming #adventureGames #softwarePreservation #dosGaming

today's archival/software preservation work -

i noticed that PCBoard BBS software's wikipedia article mentioned something kinda weird - that just before clark development went bankrupt in 1997, it was building a server called MetaWorlds... an attempt at bridging the ansi-based BBS with the WWW.

sadly, the software never made it out of beta, and was nowhere to be found.. until today it seems! i managed to dig it out of the glorious ibm wgam-wbiz collection, and i've uploaded a copy to IA:

https://archive.org/details/metaworlds_beta

i honestly don't really understand what MetaWorlds does, so i'm hoping a PCBoard wiz manages to get it talking to their pcb instance, and lets us know how it all works.

update: located a newer beta. uploaded here: https://archive.org/details/metaworlds-beta-17

final update: version 1.02 (final) found!
https://archive.org/details/pcb-metaworlds

#bbs #softwarePreservation #retroComputing

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 :)

#softwarePreservation #webPreservation #win31 #worldWideWeb #yeg #bbs #alberta

it took 20 years of ebay searches but i finally found them: the internet software diskettes i got from the U of A in the mid 90s!

looking forward to imaging these when i get home tonight and uploading them to IA

#win31 #softwarePreservation #yeg

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

#warez #win95 #softwarePreservation

Eelco Vriezekol, the admin of the marvelous #Signetics2650 page, added the audio from the #Instructor50 #cassette I recently digitized. He also did a transcription of the spoken parts!

https://ztpe.nl/2650/hardware/signetics-instructor-50/

#RetroComputing #SoftwarePreservation #Assembly #AudioTape #Programming

Here's my fork of #httpget 0.2 and 1.3 (that later would become #curl) minimally fixed to build and run on modern Linux. Please note that these fixes are exactly that: They just make the commands actually build, run, and perform the basic task. Other than that, I attempted to preserve as much of the original buggy behaviour as possible. There are known security issues with these commands, and these #vulnerabilities remain. I repeat, do *NOT* use these commands for anything but research and toying around. You have been warned.

https://github.com/piru/httpget/tree/minimal-fixes

#oss #opensource #softwarepreservation

The Story of X-Copy: Amiga’s Most Famous Copy Tool & Rare Cyclone Hardware
#Amiga #RetroComputing #XCopy #KryoFlux #SoftwarePreservation #RobSmithDev #VintageGaming #Cyclone
https://theoasisbbs.com/the-story-of-x-copy-amigas-most-famous-copy-tool-rare-cyclone-hardware/?feed_id=1727&_unique_id=67b5e42fb1854

urgh. after a week of very interesting research and digging, i've located the source code for a very popular 3d rendering/modelling program from the 90s and 2000s: Caligari trueSpace

does anyone in the digital preservation world know someone at the Microsoft Open Source Programs (OSPO) office?
i'd love for this to be officially sanctioned as an OSS project.

#digitpres #softwarePreservation #windows98

Hello from the Medley Interlisp Project! We revive and modernize the Medley Interlisp extensible graphical operating and programming environment created at Xerox PARC.

https://interlisp.org

We post news & updates, tips, historical info, and more. We look forward to connecting with researchers, software preservation experts, Lisp programmers, retrocomputing enthusiasts, and anyone interested.

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing #VintageComputing #SoftwarePreservation #xerox #introduction #parc

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.

#LinuxGaming #RetroGaming #SoftwarePreservation

Versioning as memory?

by @beet_keeper

So, it turns out my theme of the moment is code hygiene (or maybe memory?).

Today I am thinking about versioning, especially in relation to its impact on digital preservation; both software preservation and the impact of versions on long-term preservation efforts in other contexts.

#Archives #Code #codeHygiene #Coding #digipres #DigitalPreservation #git #OpenSource #software #SoftwareDevelopment #softwarePreservation

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. 🙏

#softwarePreservation #worldWideWeb #usenet

(It's mostly just a rebrand, but…) it's cool to see GOG pushing a "preservation program" with the games that they've fixed/ported/updated.

https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program

#GOG #PCGaming #SoftwarePreservation

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https://www.softwareheritage.org/2024/10/24/book-a-software-heritage-ambassador/

You can follow some of the #SoftwareHeritage ambassadors here:
https://mstdn.social/@harishpillay@floss.social
https://mastodon.uno/@FlaviaMarzano
https://mstdn.social/@CMFrancoise@mastodon.social
https://mastodon.social/@carenes
https://mastodon.social/@toscalix

#OpenScience #SoftwarePreservation