Tag: softwarepreservation

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Ancient Web: Kitana Rebuilt Battle Isle 2 in 23,000 Lines of BASIC

There are easier ways to preserve a 1994 strategy game than spending hundreds of hours rewriting it in BASIC. Kitana chose the educationally irresponsible option.

Visit Kitana’s Castle

Battle Isle 2020 is a from-scratch Windows reimplementation of Blue Byte’s Battle Isle 2 and Battle Isle 3. It is not a port of the original DOS source code. Instead, Daniel Bekowies reconstructed the behavior while still requiring the original game data for graphics, sounds, music, videos, and missions.

The project page says the program grew beyond 23,000 lines of PowerBasic code spread across more than 400 functions, with some assembly language mixed in.

Preservation by reverse engineering the assumptions

The interesting work was not merely drawing hex maps on a modern screen.

The original games encode terrain, units, missions, weather, movement, graphics, and other behavior in old formats that have to be understood before a replacement engine can use them. The project estimates roughly 60 hours went into decoding file formats alone, on top of more than 800 hours of programming.

The resulting program adds things a modern machine can provide without abandoning the original structure: scalable display, mouse controls, speech output, improved AI, multiplayer over LAN and Internet, a map editor, new campaigns, and compatibility with original mission content.

The AI can simulate possible combat outcomes before choosing an attack. Multiplayer replaces the old practice of handing save files between players with a live server-based mode. The map editor can build new missions using original units and terrain.

This is preservation through reimplementation rather than freezing software in an emulator.

It also preserves knowledge that would otherwise stay buried inside undocumented binary files.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like Kitana because the web is full of people who quietly reverse-engineered obsolete software simply because they wanted it to keep working.

Twenty-three thousand lines of BASIC is an absurd amount of affection for a hex-grid war game.

Which is why it belongs here.

Return to Kitana’s Castle

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Ancient Web: Star Fighter 3000 Kept an Acorn Game Alive Long Enough to Outlive Its Hardware

Star Fighter 3000 has the kind of software history that only exists because somebody kept caring after the original machine stopped being normal.

Visit the Star Fighter 3000 archive

The game was launched in late 1994 for the Acorn Archimedes and Risc PC by Fednet Software. Andrew Hutchings and Tim Parry wrote it in ARM assembly language, combining a 3D flight shooter with mission structure, formations, ground targets, upgrades, and the wonderfully excessive tone of 1990s game fiction.

Then the hardware changed.

That is where the archive becomes more interesting than a normal fan page.

Compatibility became part of the game’s history

The original code made extensive use of techniques that were perfectly reasonable on the machines it targeted, including self-modifying code. StrongARM upgrades and later RISC OS changes exposed assumptions that no longer held.

In 2000 Christopher Bazley released SFpatch to address incompatibilities. Later releases incorporated fixes directly, added improved sound support, restored effects, and eventually produced versions capable of running on newer RISC OS systems.

By 2003 a 32-bit-compatible edition ran natively on the Iyonix PC and could run in a window on the RISC OS desktop. Development and fixes continued after that.

In 2014, twenty years after the original launch, Star Fighter 3000 was made available as a free download.

The archive documents gameplay, development history, versions, upgrades, technical fixes, and the strange path a commercial game takes when the community becomes its long-term maintenance department.

That kind of history is easy to flatten into a release date and a screenshot.

The site preserves the messier truth: old software survives because people patch around processors, operating systems, sound systems, memory assumptions, and everything else that changed underneath it.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes pages like this because software preservation often happens in tiny specialist sites long before institutions notice the problem.

Star Fighter 3000 did not merely survive emulation.

People kept repairing the actual lineage.

Return to the Star Fighter 3000 archive

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Ancient Web: The HP 9845C Demo Preserves Early Color Computer Graphics

There is a surviving software demo for the HP 9845C that needed two tapes, more than 4,000 lines of BASIC, a light pen, and enough graphics tricks to make a 1980 computer look like it was trying to escape the decade.

See the HP 9845C Demo archive

HP9845.net documents the package in unusually good detail. The demo contains 36 cases spread across color graphics, engineering, scientific work, management graphics, and advanced graphics. The machine could display up to 4,913 colors, and the software demonstrates wireframes, shaded 3D surfaces, ordered dithering, data visualization, interactive light-pen control, mapping, architecture, stress analysis, astronomy, and even a small gravity game.

The name attached to the demo makes the page even stranger: Colin Cantwell.

Cantwell worked on spacecraft designs for Star Wars, including early concepts connected with the X-wing, TIE fighter and Star Destroyer. The HP archive says he also consulted on the 9845C color system and later programmed the tactical NORAD screens seen in WarGames using an HP 9845C.

The software survived by inches

Magnetic media does not care that something is historically interesting.

The archive explains that surviving demo tapes commonly suffer from deterioration, and multiple versions of the software made reconstruction difficult. A complete set of files eventually turned up on a backup disk held by another HP collector, allowing the full demo to run again.

That one paragraph contains most of digital preservation: old media fails, incomplete copies multiply, somebody kept a backup, and suddenly the thing is recoverable.

The page does more than describe it. There is a large screenshot gallery, the complete demo disk image, the original demo guide, video footage, and instructions for running the software through an HP 9845C emulator based on MAME.

A technical page that earns its URL

This is the kind of old-web material search engines are good at only after somebody has done the hard part. The page ties together a specific computer, part numbers, software, a designer, screenshots, damaged media, downloadable artifacts, and enough context to explain why any of it matters.

Webmasters building historical resources should notice the pattern: preserve the files, but preserve the explanation around the files too.

This HP page was found in the larger CacheRat Ancient Web research list.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

The screenshots alone are worth the visit. The fact that you can still download the demo is better.

Return to the HP 9845C Demo archive