Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tournament!

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marciot42
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Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tournament!

Post by marciot42 »

Hello all,

I've recently finished adding LocalTalk support to my online web museum, so I am proud to announce the first ever (maybe) MazeWars+ tournament on the Internet, Saturday, August 27th, 2016 at 11:00 am, MST :cool:

If there is enough of an interest, I might make it a regular thing!

Scroll to the bottom of the following page for a Google Calendar where I will post events:

http://retroweb.maclab.org/articles/Online-Games.html

-- Marcio
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adespoton
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Re: Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tourname

Post by adespoton »

I forgot to mention: you might want to contact archive.org about mirroring your system there. This is right up their alley, and they have LoC protection :)
peter_j
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Re: Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tourname

Post by peter_j »

adespoton wrote:I forgot to mention: you might want to contact archive.org about mirroring your system there. This is right up their alley, and they have LoC protection :)
If you do, Jason Scott is a good person to contact. jason at textfiles dot com. He is sometimes a bit slow to reply but he is "the curator of the Software collections held by Internet Archive."
marciot42
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Re: Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tourname

Post by marciot42 »

I "met" (in a virtual sense) Jason Scott in an IRC forum for MAME about a year ago. He liked my museum, but at the time, he was pre-occupied with recruiting MAME developers to work on his project. My project was about as different from his as could be: his was tied in very closely with MAME while my project is based-mostly on PCE, a competing emulator; his approach was more about gathering great heaps of old software, while mine was trying to tell a story with a chosen few.

At the time, my museum looked very much as it does today, but the underlying code was a first-prototype mess. I would have been embarrassed to have anyone else use it. Since the start of 2016, I spent nearly all my time cleaning it up. So perhaps now would be a good time to revisit with Scott and see if there is an opportunity to collaborate in some way.

-- Marcio
marciot42
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Re: Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tourname

Post by marciot42 »

One interesting idea would be to expand what I have into an open-collaboration platform. My design already uses a wiki-language for the articles, so it would be possible to expand it into something like wikipedia by adding a server-side database. Another interesting idea might be if I could take the site's look and feel and make it into a WordPress theme so people could blog about retro software.
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adespoton
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Re: Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tourname

Post by adespoton »

That sounds like an extremely good fit for archive.org -- do you have an account on there? Jason's the main curator, but those of us with accounts can add files and written content as well. The big thing would be deploying your framework on top of archive.org, which I think would be an excellent fit, if Jason is up for it.

Then again, what you are doing is also a good match for what I'm trying to do at apple.wikia.com, although I haven't got that far yet. I'm trying to document a history of the Mac OS, with interactive or video depictions of all the OS major releases, along with a demo of the software that was commonly used at the time, to show not only how the OS has changed, but how computer use has changed as well.

I'm also working on a youtube channel where we can host video of memorable retro computing; I've been toying with using Macintalk voices for the voiceovers, mapped against people's real voices (for tone and pronunciation). Still has some tweaking, but it's a neat effect :)
marciot42
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Re: Saturday: First Ever (Maybe) Internet MazeWars+ Tourname

Post by marciot42 »

I was not aware of "apple.wikia.org". The fact that it exists underscores one of the reasons I started my project in the first place. I looked out there and saw that there were great software archive sites like MacintoshGarden.org or System6Hell, great emulators, and great history sites, but it's all fragmented making it hard to see the big picture. I figured there had to be a way to bring it all together.

I originally called my project the "retroweb-browser" because I envisioned a web-browser like environment where you could surf a web of hyper-linked articles by different people, on different servers, related to computer history and right next to it there would be a computer where you could try out the things as you read about them.

There were significant challenges in making it work cross-site, however, so I eventually dropped that function and renamed the project from "retroweb-browser" to "retroweb-vintage-computer-museum" and wrote all the content myself. This entailed a move to a traditional single-host model, which is how it stands right now; moving from site-to-site, even if they shared the same framework, would require reloading the page and hence stopping whatever emulator was running.

So, as it stands, a single host platform like a wiki would probably be the best approach to complete my vision of a multiple-collaborator retroweb, but I would definitely need the hosting resources of a bigger organization, such as IA, to pull it off.

-- Marcio
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