Tag: windows

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Ancient Web: Orbital Viewer Rendered Quantum Mechanics on Windows 3.1

There was a period when “visualize a quantum orbital” meant downloading a 600 KB Windows program from somebody’s personal website.

Visit Orbital Viewer

David Manthey’s Orbital Viewer first appeared in 1998 and was still being updated in 2004. The download page supports a wonderfully specific range of systems: Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000, ME, XP, and even Windows 3.1x with Win32s.

The program does much more than draw the familiar dumbbell-shaped p orbital.

Chemistry rendered like graphics software

Orbital Viewer can draw atomic orbitals with principal quantum number up to 30 and build molecular orbitals using linear combinations of atomic orbitals.

Rendering options include probability-point plots, polygon surfaces, and ray tracing. The program can show asymptotes, cut away parts of an orbital to reveal internal structure, apply translucence and refraction, add lighting and shadows, and produce animations.

It also supports several forms of stereo viewing: red-blue anaglyphs, stereograms, stereoscopes, LCD shutter glasses, Chromadepth, and overlays.

Output formats include TIFF, PPM, BMP, AVI, and VRML.

That feature list is a small time capsule of late-1990s scientific visualization. VRML mattered. AVI export mattered. A 1.8 MB PDF manual counted as a substantial companion download.

The site’s news archive preserves the software’s development history: version 1.00 in March 1998, later bug fixes, added Digistar output, hosting changes, and a 2004 release that made stereo colors configurable.

The page is valuable because it preserves both the program and the assumptions around it. Scientific visualization did not always happen in a browser or notebook environment. It could be a tiny downloadable executable maintained by one person for years.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many examples of useful software surviving because its author kept the old download page online.

Orbital Viewer is one of the better ones: serious math, serious rendering, and a file small enough to fit on a floppy disk.

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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.

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