Jason Scott's Weblog
I’m going to mention two backup projects. Both have been under way for some time, but the world randomly decided the end of November 2016 was the big day, so here I am. The first is that the Internet Archive is adding another complete mirror of the Wayback machine to one of our satellite offices […]
So, Mark Trade and I have never talked, once. All I know about Mark is that due to his efforts, over 200 scans of magazines are up on the Archive. These are very good scans, too. The kind of scans that a person looking to find a long-lost article, verify a hard-to-grab fact, or needs to […]
The previous entry got the attention it needed, and the maintainers of the VLC project connected with both Emularity developers and Emscripten developers and the process has begun. The best example of where we are is this screenshot: The upshot of this is that a javascript compiled version of the VLC player now runs, spits […]
Almost five years ago to today, I made a simple proposal to the world: Port MAME/MESS to Javascript. That happened. I mean, it cost a dozen people hundreds of hours of their lives…. and there were tears, rage, crisis, drama, and broken hearts and feelings… but it did happen, and the elation and the world […]
In 2009, Josh Miller was walking through the Timonium Hamboree and Computer Festival in Baltimore, Maryland. Among the booths of equipment, sales, and demonstrations, he found a vendor was selling an old collection of 3.5″ floppy disks for DOS and Windows. He bought it, and kept it. A few years later, he asked me if I wanted […]
In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in programs, and bugfixes were included in this release, which I stress was done as a hobby project. The project is understatement itself, simply […]
People often ask me if there’s a way they can help. I think I have something. So, the Internet Archive has had a wild hit on its hand with the Hip Hop Mixtapes collection, which I’ve been culling from multiple sources and then shoving into the Archive’s drives through a series of increasingly complicated scripts. […]
As I enter into a new phase of doing things and how I do things, let’s start with something pleasant. As part of the work with pulling Prince of Persia source code from a collection of disks a number of years back (the lion’s share of the work done by Tony Diaz), Jordan Mechner handed […]
Just a quick update on the whole “JSMESS is now just something MAME does and so we should theoretically be able to update the Internet Archive’s emulation quickly” front. It works. MAME, that lovely thing, went from version 0.174 to 0.175 yesterday. It was pointed out to me pretty soon after the program dropped. Taking […]
Some time ago, I wrote about the amazing efforts to bring a realm of accuracy to emulation, especially arcade machine emulation. The work was (and is) amazing, but one problematic aspect was that the main components for this work in MAME were for the Windows version only, with plans to make it more cross-platform down the […]