A Vintage Web Game Gallery
My major project over the last week and a half or so has been curating a collection of old Flash, Shockwave, and Java games on my #CGHMN site. Your first thought is probably, "why do that when Flashpoint Archive already exists?" Indeed, most if not all of these games are already preserved and curated there. The difference is that, while Flashpoint uses emulators and containers to make the games playable on modern systems, I'm specifically targeting vintage machines with the original plugins. You can visit my site from Win95 or System 7 running Netscape 3 and everything will work exactly like it did in 1997. Or WinXP, IE 6, and 2002. You get the idea.I downloaded a few Flash and Shockwave collections from archive.org, and pretty much all the Java games I could get from Java Boutique for my initial population. The curation process is slow since I'm working alone. For each game I have to figure out the correct window size, minimum plugin version, any needed parameters, and often the correct locations and filenames for extra data files. For most games I use my own viewer page written in PHP but some need to be run from a static HTML file in a separate directory in order to work correctly. And then there's getting a screenshot, writing a description, and correctly crediting the author. I try to add a game or two each day.
Flash games are generally pretty easy to deal with, but Shockwave and Java are harder. Java games are often extremely picky about what browser and JVM you use, while Shockwave games sometimes need Xtras which the player tries to download from a no-longer-existent (but thankfully somewhat-preserved) server. Both usually need data files and parameters to run properly. Getting the necessary info often involves trying to find the original website in the Wayback Machine and digging through the HTML source.
Anyway, if you're on CGHMN and you want to take a look, it's at:
http://www.n8fq.retro/webgames/
#RetroComputing #RetroWeb #blog