Then comes along Archive95 which is an archive of the pre-IA internet of 1995. It primarily uses two sources, the World Wide Web Directory and the German language Einblick ins Internet, to give an impression of an era when the web was small and monitors were bulky as heck.

– glmdgrielson, a young whippersnapper

glmdgrielson: So, first question, what is Gaming Alexandria?
Hubz: At it’s core it’s both a Discord community and a separate website dedicated to preserving various aspects of video games, such as scans, interviews, unreleased games, youtube videos etc. It mainly started as a site where I could share high quality scans but has grown thanks to many people joining up with various skills to help expand the website. The Discord community itself is really an entity unto itself at this point where lots of gaming historians/preservationists have come together to share their works and also help each other out when needed with various projects. I love getting to see all the passion in everybody’s projects that they put forth and the willingness of the community to offer help when asked.

g: Tell me more about this community. I’m active in the server, but what does it look like from your end?
H: From an admin standpoint I have access to all the channels which include the private #staff and #mods channels where we discuss upcoming articles or projects for the site as well as handling the occasional argument or bad apple in the chat. Dylan Mansfeld (DillyDylan) handles a lot of great articles on undumped/prototype games that were previously unreleased. Ethan Johnson writes for his own blog (https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/) and Gaming Alexandria at times and is our editor so he glances through and cleans up all the articles that get posted. Jonas Rosland who is the Executive Director of the NPO, I’m a board member of, called Hit Save (https://hitsave.org/) does a lot of thankless technical work behind the scenes that includes a NAS he has setup for not only the staff of the website to store project files but the community at large which is a huge help. Wietse van Bruggen (Densy) handles a lot of the moderation of the chat and has been a huge help keeping the Discord community friendly and clean with his balanced moderation style. Last but not least there is Stefan Gancer (Gazimaluke) who did the original site redesign and has been a great idea man for ways to improve the site and community as time has gone on. For me personally I try to keep up with all the chat in the channels (though it can be tough at times!) just to have an idea of what’s going on and seeing what I can help with or connect people to further projects as well as post my scans and projects as they’re completed. Thanks to the rest of the staff I rarely have to step in and moderate which is very nice!

g: I’m going to skip over the omission of Norm and ask about the history of how the site has evolved.
H: LOL yes Norm is a menace to society and must be stopped.

Editor’s note: Hubz has a mock rivalry with Norm, a.k.a. the Gaming Historian and is a frequent running gag on the server. I do not believe there is actual malice.

The website itself started officially on October 23rd, 2015 and was just a basic text website that I could easily upload to in order to share my scans, it was very barebones. The reason I wanted to get high quality scans out was due to using an emulator frontend called Hyperspin. For popular systems it had a lot of decent quality artwork for boxes. But for lesser known systems it was sorely lacking and that triggered my OCD and made be realize that scanning stuff in high resolution was something that needed to be done. Slowly, but surely, I met others that wanted to scan in high quality and have their stuff hosted and they would submit stuff such as Densy. At some point I got involved with the VGPC discord and met Kirkland who had been quietly doing something similar with his collection and collaborated with him and others on establishing scanning standards to use going forward to have some level of consistent quality with those that were willing to do it which eventually led to what is the https://scanning.guide/. In late 2018 the site was graciously redone by Gazimaluke and relaunched in the design you see now. We started branching out into actual articles written by our staff and releasing prototypes and unreleased games that we came across. The site continues doing this to this day, though we are branching out into more guest authors from the community posting interviews and articles as well in the near future.

g: As well as hosting my site, for which I am grateful for. So, what is the day to day like for you?
H: Day to day on the scanning I try to get at least one magazine done daily. Doesn’t always happen but, in general, I debind a magazine the night before, then in the morning scan it in before leaving for work. If work gets slow I work on processing the scans, or else I’ll do it later that night and get them uploaded to the site and the Internet Archive.

g: Interesting. So how big do you think your archive is by this point?
H: Archive upload-wise I’m probably right around 2900 items if you count stuff that was removed lol. Then there’s a bunch on the site that wasn’t done to the higher scanning standards I go by now that’s not on the archive. So I’d guess in the 3000-4000 item range currently.

g: Do you know how big it is in terms of filesize?
H: Let me see real quick…
Looks like 2.5TB which is another reason I’m so thankful to have the Internet Archive to host my scans on due to the space and bandwidth that would be required otherwise.
The site alone usually has about half a TB of traffic per month so I can only imagine what it would be like if the magazine scans were also hosted directly on it.

g: Neat. Is there anything interesting that you got to be a part of due to GA that you would like to share?
H: Biggest thing is probably working with The Video Game History Foundation on scanning their extensive magazine collection so digital copies can be provided along with physical copies at their library. Being able to leverage the Internet Archive so people all over the world can easily access the magazines I’ve scanned that they might not have been able to easily otherwise is a great feeling personally for me. So many of these things are quite difficult to acquire and expensive as time goes on so having them as an ally in the preservation world is a godsend. There’s been lots of other connections and other projects I’ve worked on as well but I won’t ramble forever on that. Not only is Gaming Alexandria a tight community that likes to help each other out but there’s plenty of other preservation groups like VGHF, TCRF, and Hidden Palace just to name a few and we all get along great and try to push preservation forward together.
There’s so much work that needs to be done that we need all the help we can get and we need to support each other any way we can I think.

g: True that. Last question for now: anything that you would recommend to a would-be archivist?
H: I think it’s a good idea to preserve what interests you, which seems to go without saying, but I mean it more from a sense of not only going after what is popular. While you might not get much fanfare initially for the more obscure stuff it’s likely you’ll be the only one doing it and it’s important it’s being done. If you do good work for long enough it will get noticed, and to make good work easier it’s best to go with what you’re passionate about. The other thing I would suggest is not beating yourself up or comparing your output to others. Do what you can when you want to, this is a hobby after all. If you make yourself miserable trying to do something your output will naturally suffer or you might even burn out and stop altogether. Like I said before, we need all the help we can get, so try to avoid that if at all possible.

g: Thank you for being here, overlord Hubz. It’s been good talking to you.
H: No problem! Thaks for the interview.

– glmdgrielson, being a very good minion interviewer

Desert Bus For Hope is a yearly charity stream, running under the premise that the more money that is received, the longer the stream goes on for, and the more the organizers have to play the dullest video game imaginable. So dull, in fact, that Desert Bus has never been officially released, actually. This year’s fundraiser gave us a stream that is just exactly an hour under one week: 6 days and 23 hours! So this was a very long stream with a lot of data to preserve. So follows the story of how that happens.

Note: DBx refers to the iteration of Desert Bus for Hope. For example, this year, 2021, was DB15. Also, I have only minimally modified our interview, by adding in links where applicable and making minor spelling corrections. 

glmdgrielson: So first off, outside of the VST, what are you up to?

Sokar: I do video editing and Linux server security / software support, and various other (computer related) consulting things for “real work”.

g: So you started off with just the poster for DB6, according to the site, correct? How did that work?

S: We didn’t actually start doing the interactive postermaps till DB8, then I worked backwards to do all the previous ones (still not done).
The VST itself started formally during DB6.

g: That’s when Graham contacted MasterGunner, who presumably contacted you, correct?

S: Tracking the run live in some way was a confluence of ideas between me, Lady, and other members of the chat at the time, Graham knew how to get ahold of Gunner about making live edits because he was one of the people who helped with the DB5 torrent.
I honestly don’t remember how most of the DB6 VST crew was put together, it was very last minute.

g: Do you know anything about how that torrent was made?

S: The first DB5 torrent?

g: Yes.

S: Kroze (one of the chat mods) was physically at DB5 and brought a blank external HDD with him specifically for recording the entire stream, then after the run Fugi and dave_random worked together to create the torrect (with all the files split into 15min chunks) I wanna say the torrent file was initially distributed via Fugi’s server.
DB5 was the first time the entire run was successfully recorded.
LRR had previously toyed with the idea (DB3, but ended up doing clips instead) and steamcastle attempted to record all of DB4 but was unsuccessful.

g: And DB6 was the first year the VST existed. What was that first year like?

S: The first year was VERY short handed, we only had 14 people, a LOT of the “night” shifts were either just me by myself or me and BillTheCat
We really didn’t know what we were doing, the first rendition of the DB6 sheet didn’t even have end times for events.
There was just “Start Time” “Event Type” “Description” and “Video Link”.
At some point we (the VST) will just re-spreadsheet the entire run, because we were so short handed we missed a lot of things, when I went back to make the DB6 postermap I think I ended up uploading ~17(ish) new videos because that was how many posterevents weren’t even on the sheet.

g: What sort of equipment or software did you use back then?

S: We used google sheets (and still do, but not in the same way anymore), and then all the “editing” was done via Twitch’s Highlight system at the time, which then had a checkbox to auto upload the video to youtube.
Then there were a few people with youtube access that could enable monetization and other things like that.
Twitch’s Highlight editor (especially at the time we used it (DB6/DB7)) was extremely painful to use on very long VODs, there was no “seek by time”. You had to use the slider and kinda position it where you wanted and then just wait and be quick on the cut button.
We didn’t actually start capturing the run ourselves until Twitch’s overzealous VOD muting happened ( 2014-08-06 ) and we had to figure out a new way of doing things.

g: And just two years down the line, you had to start making your own tools. What was that like?

S: When that happened we had roughly 3 months to figure out what to do. dave_random put in a ton of time figuring out how to capture the run (using livestreamer which has since been forked to streamlink). The way it worked during DB8 was that the video would get uploaded to youtube with a couple of minutes on either side of the video, then the video editors would go in and edit the video using youtube’s editor.
Then we found out that there is a limit tied to youtube’s editor and you can only have a set number of videos “editing” at once, then you get locked out of the editor for a while, we (the VST and DesertBus in general) always end up being en edge case.
MasterGunner wrote the first version of our own editor so we could edit the video before it got sent to youtube.
The VST website itself also didn’t exist till DB9, a lot of the poster revisions archive only exists because J and myself kept copies of all the revisions.

g: After DB9 is when you started trying to backup the previous years, right?

S: Yea, so (internally) the VST had talked about archival problems over the years, and when Anubis169 went to DB9 (in person) to volunteer, he also went with the express purpose to grab as many of the Desert Bus files as he could find at the time.
When he got back home he and I went over the files he managed to get and he sent me a copy of everything he grabbed, I also spent the time trying to figure out how uStream had stored all the DB1 and DB2 clips then downloaded a copy of all of them.
It turned out to be a very good time to do that, since for a few years later IBM bought uStream and deleted all archives

g: So that looks to be all of the history questions I have. Now for the fun part: describe the process of archiving a Bus.

S: As in as it currently stands?
As in “how did this year work”?

g: Yes. How would the process of archival go as it currently stands?

S: well, that’s a hard one, haha

g: Not surprised, given the scope of the event we’re dealing with.

S: For old stuff: I already (also) flew to Victoria to get the missing DB3 and DB4 files, which was successful, the next time I go it will be to recover old prize data (I’m in the process or making a full prize archive)
For what we “regularly” capture setting up for a new run goes pretty much like this:
The current version of the wubloader (our capture architecture) (re-written by ekimekim, and chrusher after DB12) is used by ekim all year, so he reguarly workes on it and fixes it to work around anything twitch changes.
~3 months before the run we will put out the signup form to the internal VST place, a week or so after that it will be the IRC channel, and the LRR discord (in the desertbus channel)
During about 2 of those 3 months I’ll finish up any new stuff for the VST website I’m working on, so they are ready for the run.
The VST Org. Committee has meetings during the year to talk about any changes we want to make to any of the internal tools of our external facing stuff, the first of which usually happens in June for a new run.
Sorry, some of this is out of order.

g: You’re fine.

S: If we need to inform regular VST members of some major changes we’ve made we schedule meetings over some form of video chat for them to signup for and then to do a quick check over on everything new so we can get any questions answered and have everyone on the same page (usually about 30min per-session).
New people will get a separate training session that’s usually about 90-120 min in length, new people will always start off as “spreadsheeters”, we don’t rotate in new editors until they’ve been around for a couple years and they kind of have a feel for what we do.
For setting up the VST website for the run, there’s a separate “front page” for when the run is live, and also the head node is dropped back to being non-public and we stand up a 8-node globally located DNS cluster to handle the load, it runs on a 5 minute update cycle because late-run when there is a new poster revision a full update and sync takes about 3 & 1/2 minutes.
For setting up a “new year” on the VST site, there’s an amount of manual work, but it’s only about 3 hours or so, really depends on how many of the other things we track are setup at that point.

g: Other stuff being things like the charts, the clock, chat stats?

S: The clock is pretty easy, the chat stats require the chat capture be enabled and going, the graphs require that the donation capture is going already, so that can’t be setup till donations re-set, the gamejam page can’t be setup till Famout gets the gamejam on itch.io setup, the gameshows page can’t be setup till Noy2222 actually knows what gameshows he’s doing this year. The spreadsheet page can’t be setup until all the google docs spreadsheets are setupThe posters page requires that Lunsford has the poster that they’re drawing be setup somewhere for us to query. And the animated poster evolution page requires 3 poster revisions before that works at all. The postermap page is updated manually when I have time to draw/trace and then import the new postermap(ImageMap) of the poster Lunsford has drawn (still not done with this year’s yet)
For standing up our capture infastructure: There’s at minimum 2 nodes on “hardware” as in non-virtualized, that are “editing” nodes, only one of which actually uploads to the youtube channel, after that (usually) all the other nodes are virtualized and (this year) were provided by 6 different people, these are completely separate from the VST website nodes.
We also always try to make sure all the capture nodes are geographically distributed so a random network outage can’t hurt us, and so if one node misses a segment the other 7 can fill in the blank.
Once all of those are stood up and working, they’re all imported into the monitoring dashboard so we know if one of them has a problem. Usually we have all the capture (and website) hardware stood up about 1 week before the run starts. Then we have time to test it and ekimekim and chrusher (Wubloader), ElementalAlchemist (who coded the new version of thrimbletrimmer, our editor), and myself (website) have time to fix any bugs / finish any new features. At that point all the approved (new and old) VST members will also get an invite to the private sheet. Also, we invite any new VST members to the private chat space we use during the run (self-hosted Zulip).

We also spend a lot of time working on the schedule (as part of the signup form people tell us their available hours), people are limited to a max of 6 hour shifts, so scheduling ~60 people over a week where we try to maintain ~8 active people on the private spreadsheet is actually quite complex. ekimekim created a python script to create an initial rough guess, we then have a VST Org meeting to smooth things out. The resulting (schedule) spreadsheet is then given to everyone on the VST so they can check for errors in their personal schedule, and then (for during the run) the schedule’s csv is fed in to a zulip bot that announces who’s going on/off shift. Also, once I have the VST website nodes setup I give J access to one (geographically) near him, that he also uses for his own capture of the chat, twitch, and poster revisions, that way if the VST website head-node misses something we have a backup copy with the stuff J sets up as well.
I think that’s it, everything I’m thinking of now is post-run stuff. Oh, J also runs a capture of all of the Prize data that we preserve for the (upcoming) prize archive.

g: Well, that’s one heck of a process. Mind going into the tech used, like Wubloader and thrimbletrimmer?

S: Sure, wubloader is a ekimekim/chrusher coded Python3 project that is a custom HLS capture (as in we capture every 2-second long .ts segment twitch sends out when the stream is going). It uses PostgreSQL for backend databases, nginx for web, FFMPEG for doing the actual video editing, and docker for easier node deployment. It uses the GoogleDocs API for interaction with the private sheet and the YouTube API for uploading to youtube / managing the playlists.
Thrimbletrimmer (Now coded by ElementalAlchemist) uses HLS.js and a bunch of custom javascript and html for the editing interface, it can make multiple cuts (so we can cut the middle out of a video) and has the ability to add the chapter markers to the description if we want to do that on a longer video.

g: So the upload process is done by Thrimbletrimmer?

S: When someone makes an edit in Thrimbletrimmer, it talks to thrimshim (that then passes the actual edits on to the wubloader that then does the edit and uploads the video to youtube.
thrimshim is a piece of the wubloader that is kind of like an API to all the data in wubloader
so when a video is marked in the private sheet for upload there is a link to thrimbletrimmer that has a UUID on it, that thrimbletrimmer passes to thrimshim so it knows which video segments correspond to the requested video. On the way back it’s like “edit this uuid with the following edits, here’s the video title and description”

g: So what about the Twitch chat? How do you grab that?

S: Twitch chat is captured in 2 ways: via irssi (unix command line IRC client) both J and myself run a capture using that, and (this year) ekimekim coded up a capture for it that also captures all the meta-data for each chat message.
So before the run starts, J and I just setup our irssi sessions on 2 respective servers, and just leave them running in screen. ekimekim runs his custom capture off 2 of the wubloader nodes

g: So how has this setup evolved over time?

S: For chat capture or video capture?

g: Both.

S: Chat capture has largely been the same, old (pre-DB6) chat capture was just done with whoever made the capture’s IRC program (mIRC or IceChat).
Video capture has changed quite a bit, the first version of the wubloader (DB8) [coded by dave_random] was done with livestreamer (saved to mp4 files) and only did rough cuts, the 2nd version (DB9-12) came with Thrimbletrimmer (coded by MasterGunner) which did specific cuts, but also still used livestreamer as the capture source, During DB12 we discovered Twitch had implemented a “24-hour watch limit” which caused both capture nodes to miss part of Ash & Alex’s driver intro. Starting with DB13 ekimekim and Chrusher implemented a custom home-grown capture method that attaches directly to the HLS stream, and resets itself every so often to avoid the 24 hour watch limit.
The new capture metod saves all the 2-second long .ts files as they come out and each node fills in for any other node that got a partial or missed segment, now the capture nodes are a cluster instead of independent.
The editing process has gone from using twitch highlights -> using youtube’s editor -> using a custom editor coded by MasterGunner -> using a further improved editor coded by ElementalAlchemist.
Compared to using twitch or youtube’s editor the ones coded by MasterGunner and ElementalAlchemist are an amazing improvement, and much less buggy.

g: Anything else you want to add? Advice for somebody considering a similar archival project? Other than “don’t”?

S: Honestly: “Start on the first year of the event”, “Ask us (the VST) for advice”, “Preserve everything, backtracking to get something you missed is always more painful”
“Don’t try to do it by yourself”
The VST only works because of all the people involved and learning from the mistakes we’ve made over the years.

g: Any closing thoughts before I wrap up this interview?

S: All of this would never have happened if LoadingReadyRun wouldn’t have put “First Annual” on the website banner back in 2007 as a joke.

g: Thank you for your time!

– glmdgrielson, along for the eight hour, mind-numbingly dull drive

The announcement came from longtime tech reviewer and moderator Charles Jefferies. As he reminisces over the rise and fall of NotebookReview and her sister sites, which have today only been reduced to unfrequented forums, he implores what remains of the once strong gearhead community to decide on what platform to migrate to in their exodus.

On behalf of the small but dedicated volunteer staff here, we wish you the best. We wish we could send you off a little more gracefully. Please enjoy the remaining time.

Best,
Charles Jefferies & the NBR Moderation Team

So without further ado, a complete list of sites closing down in the TechnologyGuide network are as follows:

• NotebookReview: a site dedicated to laptop news and reviews.
• TabletPCReview: tablet and pc reviews!
• Brighthand: smartphones and smartdevices.
• DigitalCameraReview: camera reviews, as well as tips for photography and editing.
• TechnologyGuide: the nexus of the network, TechnologyGuide had a little bit of everything from all the other sites, and then some.
• DesktopReview: now-defunct Desktop review site, which had already been absorbed into NotebookReview. Likewise, for PrinterComparison and its archive.

It should also be noted that Archive Team has been made aware of the situation as well. Yet we are not aware of any archivebot/grab-site grabs at this time. Be sure to comment or reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any archives you would like to share, and to stay tuned to catch up on any updates.

Note: I have added links where relevant, but have not otherwise altered the text of this interview.

glmdgrielson: So, first off, outside of i-Mode, could you tell me a bit about yourself?

RockmanCosmo: I’m a very big Mega Man fan. I also run two scanlation projects that aim to scanlate the entirety of the Rockman DASH Daibouken Guide and Rockman DASH manhua. Both have never been translated into English before, and the Daibouken Guide especially has untranslated developer scribbles that will help give everyone greater insight into its development.

Rockman DASH is more commonly known as Megaman Legends in the English-speaking world. Info on these projects can be found here: https://rockmancosmo.weebly.com

g: Interesting. So tell me, how did you get involved with i-Mode?

R: Last December, I was browsing Twitter and I came upon a video of someone playing Rockman.EXE Phantom of Network on a flip phone. Being a Mega Man fan, I knew about the Rockman feature phone games and how rare they were. I researched the phone model and contacted Protodude, who runs Rockman Corner, the most prominent Rockman blog on the internet. The phone was a BREW phone and ran on EZweb. Protodude invited me to a group chat, where I continued to do research on EZweb documentation. A member of the group knew somebody who had the EXE games on a similar feature phone. It turned out the EXE games were actually on an i-mode phone, and we were able to raise money to rent the phone indefinitely and have it shipped to a member of our team. Once we got the phone and started to get the EXE games off of it, I looked for people online who had expertise with feature phone extraction. I came upon a community called >Kahvibreak, and I found some very knowledgable people in its Discord server. That is when I truly discovered the hidden world of feature phone preservation and i-mode.

Even then, I was still mostly focused on the Rockman preservation projects. It was only in June 2021 that I learned about the i-mode website shutdown deadline. As months passed with no awareness being raised by gaming preservation organizations, I decided to write an open letter to them in September. I saw that all feature phone/i-mode projects were suffering from the lack of expertise, which was a result of this sect of preservation being largely overlooked by mainstream public.

For reference, Rockman.EXE is the Japanese name for the Mega Man Battle Network series, which consist of RPGs about cyber security and cyberspace.

g: And that’s how you found out about Hit Save!, I presume?

R: I had known about Hit Save before, but I was never involved with them. Someone told me that my open letter was posted in there, and that’s when I joined the server to contribute to further discussion.

g: And that’s where I found you to do this interview. So what happened next?

R: You referring to what happened after I released the open letter?

g: That and when you joined Hit Save for further discussion, yes.

R: OK. Before I answer that, I’d like to make a minor correction – I wrote the open letter in October, not September. Sorry for the incorrect month!
I contacted the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), Game Preservation Society (GPS), and other prominent gaming preservation individuals at the end of October. Unfortunately, not many of them were responsive.
Most of the individuals left me on read, and the GPS initially ignored me. However, the VGHF got back to me, said that they wanted to put something out on social media, and asked me for resources that they could cite. I answered them promptly, but they didn’t get back to me for a week. I sent a follow up email, still nothing. They responded to my second follow up email (two weeks later), saying that their PSA should come out “soon”. I emailed them a third time two weeks later, they finally put out a PSA on Twitter.

With the i-mode website shutting down at the end of the month, the folks at Rockman Corner wanted to spread awareness for an important preservation project they're working on. DoCoMo's multimedia phone service, i-mode, hosted video games from dozens of well-known franchises. https://t.co/HpYlDqTjUd

— Video Game History Foundation (@GameHistoryOrg) November 17, 2021

The GPS surprisingly reached out to me after its president saw my open letter in the Hit Save! server. I was able to speak to the GPS president and helped him kickstart a GPS effort to save as many games as possible before the deadline. Via a successful fundraiser, they were able to save 500+ games before the website shut down today.
Overall, my open letter reached more people than I would have ever imagined. I think it was successful in raising awareness among gamers and preservation organizations.

g: Today as in November 30th, 2021? …I picked a heck of a time to interview. So how did the archival go? Any idea how complete it is?

R: As I had said, the GPS was able to download 500+ games. They’re being stored on SD cards, IIRC. There were around 200 storefronts still active before the shutdown, and I don’t know how many games were in each store. One thing’s for sure – what was on the store at the time of the shutdown is a small percentage of what there used to be. Publishers like Capcom and Taito already shut down their i-mode stores, so those games are left to linger on hardware.

And yeah, you picked a fitting day for an interview

g: Gonna be quite awkward when I publish it though. Either way, any interesting finds you want to share from the archiving, if there are any?

R: The GPS will likely be giving out a list of games they’ve archived, so look out for that. They’ve downloaded all the Sega store games, so that’s pretty cool.

As for the Rockman.EXE project, we’ve got a progress report:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X3TN1QIvINPMDC6fmwo6vHCgAT477j0FM1zYkWZzdZY/edit

These two Rockman Corner articles are relevant, too.

https://www.rockman-corner.com/2021/09/rockman-exe-phantom-of-networklegend-of.html
https://www.rockman-corner.com/2021/09/we-have-secured-rockman-dash-great.html

Any kind of progress in these projects are “interesting finds”, since nobody’s gotten this far before. In a sense, we’re pioneers in a heavily undocumented ecosystem.

g: We’ve hit the point where it stops being archival and starts being archaeology. I suppose now is a good time to ask, just what was i-mode?

R: Prior to the advent of the iPhone, feature phones were incredibly popular in Japan. Major mobile providers like DoCoMo and au created dedicated mobile internet services to connect users to an assortment of utilities. The most prominent feature phone service at the time was DoCoMo’s i-mode service. Launched in 1999, i-mode was the world’s first true multimedia phone service. You could connect to the service to access a bunch of utilities, from weather to news to email. I-mode (and its competitors) also had proprietary storefronts to purchase and download video games. Each publisher would have its own game storefront on the i-mode website, which could only be accessed through i-mode compatible phones.

g: An interesting piece of information that I should have asked for at the start of this interview. Whoops. Anything else you’d like to add?

R: If there’s a takeaway from the massive loss of i-mode games, it’s this: it is important to raise awareness as soon as possible. What happened with i-mode in the past month is a result of not enough awareness being raised beforehand. For example, the GPS said in a letter to a Kahvibreak member earlier this year that i-mode wasn’t an emergency. After I spoke with the GPS president, he realized how urgent the situation was and regretted not taking action earlier. There are probably other niche sects of video games that I’m not aware of who need more awareness. Raising awareness to the general public helps small groups like ours find people with specific technical knowledge. Organizations and smaller groups should work together to spread the word; the organizations don’t have to take their own action – all I want is for them to spread the word to people who wouldn’t have known otherwise.

That’s a bit of a spiel, but I hope I was able to get my point across!

g: That’s fine, and I’m glad I was able to have this talk with you.

R: Same. Thanks for doing this! I’m glad that more people will get to learn about i-mode preservation and the lessons we can learn from it.

For those interested in more, the specific bird that you can use to yell at our interview subject is @RockmanCosmo.

It has since been revealed to me that the GPS got 876 games. Out of 3000. Eep.

– glmdgrielson, irritated about having to type an entire Google Docs link in all of its incomprehensible glory.

…hrm, “straight up gone”, you say? Well, if there’s one place to check for straight up gone stuff, it’s the Internet Archive. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a new project from the Archive: Internet Archive Scholar. Fresh with a very 90s VHS-style logo, Internet Archive Scholar lets you search up any of the scholarly papers stored on the massive archive at your convenience.

IA Scholar started as an Archive Lab project built on Fatcat, a publicly editable catalogue of open publications. IA Scholar had been in closed-beta since September 2020 and having now matured, today it officially enters open-beta with a grand announcement you can read on the IA’s Blog.

Be sure to also check out Archive Lab for other crazy projects supported by IA. Have a look at GifCities the GeoCities-era GIF search engine, it even has a Twitter bot that tweets GIFs periodically.

It’s a non-profit founded by some of our overlords our friends at Gaming Alexandria. The group is trying to make a worldwide effort, so if you know some odd group that operates out of Antarctica or some such, they’d be happy to hear about it! (Well, as long as the group is real, of course.) If you’d like to get in touch, you can head to the main site or the obligatory Discord server!

Now then, I’m off to go find some ink ribbons…

– glmdgrielson, doing a quick shameless plug! (Please don’t throw Jewel Satellite at me!)

Omar, the person running it, has admitted that he’s been feeling some burnout. The problem now is that we have a big project that no longer has anybody to do maintenance work.

This is a bit of a problem since that’s where most of the annotations are. I personally don’t think the annotations themselves are going away just yet when this happens, given that there are a few other instances, such as the one at Snopyta. this could be a problem because if somebody doesn’t take up the reins soon, the annotations could be very much @#$%ed. So if you’re willing, give it a go!

– glmdgrielson

Now, they aren’t just uploading the games online (like that’s a worry). Like with our overlords Gaming Alexandria, they focus on things like promotional material or related memorabilia.

For example, here is a little comic based on the days when it was Madou Monogatari. Wish I understood a lick of what it says.

If this sort of thing sounds interesting to you, there is a page that links to their archive as well as things that they need to get done.

Note: the team over there is having some tough times and could use a little help.

– glmdgrielson

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our other Community Spotlights.

So let’s talk about Ruffle. This is one of the latest attempts to rebuild Flash. And by that I mean, this is a Rust-based emulator of Flash. Mozilla tried their hand at it before with Shumway but well, that died. This is another go at it.

It’s still not quite at “drop-in replacement” stage yet and its ActionScript support isn’t all there yet, but hey, there’s a demo page where you can play an old take on Metal Slug if you want!