Continuing our trip in the wayback machine, have you ever wondered what today's internet would look like if you were using a 12 year old browser?
Well, wonder no more. You don't have to install Mosaic, Netscape 1.0 or Internet Explorer 2.0. Just pop on over to the Deja Vu Browser Emulator, choose your poison, and watch as all the things that make today's web beautiful are stripped away. The virtual browser will pop up inside of a browser window, giving you the surreal experience of surfing the web using the granddaddies of Firefox or Internet Explorer from within IE7 or Firefox 2.0.
You haven't lived until you've tried to watch YouTube videos using HotJava. And don't forget to enter http:// in the address bar. Older browsers didn't recognize web pages without the full address.
We supposed you could use the emulator to see how your web site looks on old browsers (or even mobile phone browsers), but the odds of anyone actually using IE 2.0 to visit your page are pretty slim.
Wow. We never thought about it this way before, but if the web still looked like this, you wouldn't need an iPhone with Safari to surf the web on your phone.
Remember back when the web was basically text and an occasional logo or product picture on a plain background? And remember when the idea of buying and selling things online was new and kind of scary?
This promotional video from 1994 does beg one question though. If this company was trying to promote itself, why does it tell viewers to email for more information at the end? Shouldn't they have an amazing web site of their own?
Got a hankerin' for some classic 8-bit gaming? Want to play right now? Look no further than vNES, a fantastic site of questionable legality that lets you play any of almost 400 classic Nintendo games in your browser, for free. As you may have already guessed, vNES is a basic Java-powered NES emulator, and it has games for every taste, including a few dozen Japanese titles, some funky unreleased and prototype games, and even a "Games That Aren't Fun At All" category. It has most of the classics, and more are being added every day. It works great without any noticeable slowdowns or glitches in most games, but beware: vNES can be a bit of a memory hog. Bookmark vNES while you still can, as I doubt Nintendo's IP lawyers are going to be as happy about it as I am, especially once they start selling these classic games for the Wii.
I've never made a very convincing pirate, even on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but like you I can enjoy a hearty "yarr" now and again. What I enjoy even more, though, is Ninja Loves Pirate, a gorgeous side-scroller for Windows in which you play the dual roles of (wait for it) stealthy ninja Ichiro and dread pirate Blackbeard, who must battle their way through (wait for it) evil zombies and robots. I'm not even kidding. Blackbeard and Ichiro each have their own special moves and skills, and the characters, enemies, and environments are composed of lush 16-bit-inspired graphics and excellent animations. The game does have a manual, but it's hidden on the Ninja Loves Pirate web site. Unfortunately only a demo is currently available, but it's challenging and satisfying to play, and I don't recommend you miss it. Matey.
Know any good pirate-themed time-wasters? Post them in the comments and I'll add them to this post.
Ahhh, nostalgia. SwfRoads is a Flash remake of SkyRoads, a game I have fond memories of playing on an old 486/DX2. It's an extremely simple game: You pilot a car/ship down a pseudo-3D track, dodging obstacles and jumping gaps along the way. Though SwfRoads is a direct remake, it's not identical to its progenitor. There are no fuel or O2 gauges, for example, and, though I could be mistaken, I think it's a bit harder. There's no time limit and your lives are unlimited, and you'll be glad for both. If you're feeling really nostalgic, you should check out BlueMoon Interactive's web site, where you can download both the demo and full versions of the original SkyRoads, plus the "Xmas Special" version. I wonder if I could get it running on DOSXBox.
Magellan, WebCrawler, Open Text. If you ever had any of those bookmarked, it was probably in the mid nineties, when they were among the cream of the web search crop. SearchEngineWatch is running a fun Where Are They Now? article on the search engines of yore (and now). It includes the dearly departed like Magellan, Open Text, and Infoseek, the new-again, including WebCrawler, Excite, and HotBot, and the ones that never really changed, like AltaVista. For those who have been online awhile, as well as the history buffs, it's an interesting trip down memory lane. Update: So it's an old article, but it's still interesting. Enjoy.
Emulation is for the weak! Brendan Robert has created Apple Game Server, a Java program that lets you ditch the diskettes and store all your Apple II games on your modern computer's hard drive and load them up on that old Apple you've had lying around for almost thirty years over a null modem serial cable. It doesn't get much more retro-fabulous than that. Apple Game Server should appeal to those who've held on to that ancient hardware all these years and are unsatisfied with the imperfections inherent to emulation, or those who've lost all their diskettes: it comes with 200 classic games. Don't toss out your disk drive just yet, though: Apple Game Server currently only works with games that fit in one file, so multiple-diskette games are still unplayable.
It's one thing to clone a video game in Flash; it's something else entirely to write an entire emulator for an entire game console, and I don't think it's done until now: Darron Schall and Claus Wahlers have released FC64, a Commodore 64 emulator implemented in Flash. For now FC64 is alpha-quality and very much a work in progress, but if you have Flash Player 9 beta installed you can play a live demo of Matrix, a homebrew C64 game by Llamasoft. Darron Schall has some more information about the project on his blog, and the full source code for you ActionScript jockeys is available at the FC64 web site.
Okay, the title of this post is
a complete lie—you can't get Google Maps in a terminal, at least not yet, but ASCII Maps is a fun Google Maps hack
that kinda feels like it. ASCII Maps replaces Google Maps' map and satellite imagery with colorful ASCII versions.
Scrolling around is agonizingly slow on my machine and it's liable to hurt your eyes after not much use, but it has
most of Google Map's features like searching and zooming. Sadly, there are not ASCII driving directions.
Whenever I think about my first days on the web c. 1995 I think of WebCrawler, the original and for awhile the
best fulltext web search engine. WebCrawler's creator, Brian Pinkerton, is
now working for Technorati ranking the world's blogs, which isn't much different from what he was doing 12 years ago:
ranking the world's then-tiny population of web sites. Back in March 1994, about six weeks after WebCrawler's launch
and long before PageRank, Alexa, or del.icio.us, Pinkerton took stock of WebCrawler's index and ranked the 25 most-linked pages on the web. Back then
WebCrawler knew about 72,000 documents on 2,200 servers, and the number one most-linked page (plus seven of the other
24) belonged to CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, and was a page describing what, exactly, the WWW is. Of
course, every page on the Top 25 is now long gone, and most of them can't even be found in the Internet Archive, so the closest
you'll be able to get to that original #1 page is this archived version from 1992.
Number two on the Top 25 is the home page for NCSA's
Mosaic web browser, the direct predecessor to Netscape Navigator.
I got a kick
out of this: MyOldMac.net has a Flash toy called Web SE that's a great little simulation of System 7 running on the
venerable Macintosh SE. Of course, it doesn't do everything your old Mac did, but many of the little details are
captured perfectly, like the Eyeballs in the menu bar, the AfterDark Warp screensaver, and classic sounds like
"Eep" and "Quack". Web SE includes some apps like MacDraw and MacWrite, plus a handful of classic
games, and it even has a simulation of Netscape 3.6 complete with screechy modem sounds. Hours—or at least a
solid twenty minutes—of fun.
I've seen a few classic video game mash-ups before, like the brilliant Pong vs. Asteroids (okay I just
made that up), but found many of them lacking. Mega Man vs.
Ghosts 'n Goblins, however, is a masterpiece. It's a Flash game that seamlessly blends the original Mega Man and
Ghosts 'n Goblins, a game I could never beat, into something that looks like it came right out of the basement of a
bored NES programmer in 1987. It's just a few levels, but extremely fun and a surprising challenge.
Sure, anyone can
set their terminal font to green on black and feel l33t but if you really want to go old-school you need GLTerminal. It's a full-screen terminal app for OS X that will make
your screen look like an old 1970s tube monitor "complete with flaws in brightness, warped display curvature, and
flicker." It also simulates screen lag and you can choose green or amber text. Though it really does work,
GLTerminal is "slighly broken," not open source, and abandonware, but industrious hackers are working as we
speak to smooth out some of the kinks.
Self-professed "scener" Jim Leonard put together an amazing demo of full-screen color video
running at 30fps with audio on his c. 1981 IBM Model 5150. The demo, called "8088 Corruption," can be seen at Google Video, isn't
DVD-quality by any stretch of the imagination, but is fairly amazing in its own right. "The playback system is
ludicrously simple," says Leonard, "it's the transcoder (compressor) that is very complex." You could
read about 8088 Corruption and even download the program itself at
Leonard's web site, but unfortunately it seems to be down. Instead, try the Google cache.
