One thing that bothers me a lot when browsing Neocities is when web pages suddently start blasting music in my ears without any sort of warning.

I share pretty much the same experience and agree 100%. During my teens I pretty much spent all of my free time either on a PC or on a game console. I moved on now (sorta) and am trying to make an effort to do other things too, but I can't bring myself to say that I wasted all that time. My time online is part of my identity, and will continue be part of my identity.

The saving grace in my case is that I pretty much spent my youth and teenage years creating stuff and educate myself on various topics.

At first it was Scratch projects, then it was YT videos, then it as was website creation, after that it was datamining and wiki-editing, and now I am the admin of a preservation project and I do some RPG Maker games.

Some of the skills I learnt definitively translate into real experience. For example, web designing and general computers skill helped me greatly during my studies to become a professional graphic designer.

When you understand that knowledge is power and that you are in the greatest library of mankind, it can give you a huge advantage in life. That being said, I don't want to imagine what would happened if I had spent all that time on social media instead...

Have you felt this shift in your own life? Do you view it as a good or bad thing?

Since I was young, I pretty much spend every waking hours on the internet, but growing up I noticed adults spending more time on the computer as time went on.

I think that spending most of your time on a computer is not inherently bad in a vacuum as it is pretty much just a tool you can use to educate and entertain yourself.

That being said, most people are constantly on social media - this has undoubtebly negative effects on society, so yeah I'd argue that in most case it's a bad thing. People should definitely take their eyes off the screen more often.

Woah!!! Runescape archiving!!! Thats so cool... I spent many years of my life in that game... That bit about how you got the music sounds so satisfying... To be like, 'wait!! I figured it out!!! I got em!!!'

Indeed. Sadly not all the music in the game's history survived. Many track, especially during early RuneScape 2 are lost unless someone find old game data on their computer.

For me, this is the book Bobby Pendragon 9: Raven Rise. The story in the book is so well done that I was basically seduced in a fictional cult until the end of the story. It really show the power fiction can have.

I love it when lost RuneScape caches are found. This game is an abyss of unreleased content, and who know what is missing.

But so far one of my favorite find the Yoptin interface in RuneScape Classic.






A dataminer of the RuneScape Archive found this interface in an old client and cache. It reveals that Jagex was considering letting players gain more inventory spaces by submitting their personal information.

Thankfully, this never made it into the final game as the devs opted for a subscription model instead. Still, that is an interesting piece of history that was uncovered.

I too enjoy CDs - although I am more interested in software than music. Last year, I started to make some hand-crafted square CD covers. Most of them were for games that far exceeded the 700 mb, but I enjoy doing it regardless.

You probably already know this if you are a Windows user, but WinCDEmu is a great tool for archiving the content of CDs or simulating them.

Hi, welcome to the forum!

Archiving is a noble pursuit, I salute you And ooph thank you about the CSS! Im not sure I could replicate this forum design if I tried again today, it kinda captured a mood at that moment!

Thanks for the welcome.

Hey, manpaint. I love what you're doing with the RuneScape Archive.

I used to play on Ultima Online free-servers a lot, and I don't know if that would have been possible at all without people's old copies of the game client. Definitely there was lots of digging around for specific client versions.

The people who do the work of actually reverse engineering the clients to see how things worked are amazing.

Thanks! It is true that client reverse-engeneering can lead to a lot of goods things. Two examples on top of my head:

Back in the day RuneScape music used some sort of proprietary MIDI format. During a brief period of time (2009-2013) the music sounded very unique. Sadly not all of it was archived and most were thoughts to be lost to time. But that was not actually the case as I managed to trick old clients to play specific music tracks, thus allowing me to archive the music of the RuneScape HD era.

Another example was RuneScape Classic replays. As soon as the game was announced to be shut down, some people made a client that could create "replays" - essentially creating "videos" in data format of how the server behaved. Using this tool, we managed to preserve most of RuneScape Classic.

Danball has some decent browser games. My favorite is Powder Game 2, which is a

"realistic physic simulator" where you can mix multiple elements and see what happens.

Game series that I used to love, like Metal Gear Solid and Zelda, were way better in my opinion before they went open world. It's not like Zelda was ever linear to begin with, but the open areas like Hyrule Field and the Great Sea were the spaces between more traditionally designed levels. Those sort of classic overworlds helped make the game's world feel bigger and more real, but most of the actual gameplay took place in heavily choreographed locations that felt unique and hand-crafted. BotW did have more traditional dungeons as well, but the architecture of all of them looked exactly the same other than being arranged in a different configuration for whatever puzzle you had to solve.

Yeah, I felt the same thing when I played BOTW. At first the open-world is nice but the novelty quickly disappeared. Most of the dungeons of the game are completelty soulless, the only notable exception to this was Hyrule Castle.

What they should have done IMO, is something more close to the world of Twilight Princess. I think some kind of lobby (i.e Hyrule Field) allowing you to tackle several linear and hand-crafted regions in the order you want would have worked better.

That being said, the ability to be able to wear and equip pretty much anything was nice. Sadly the durability system siphoned most of the fun of that feature.

Hi, my name is manpaint and I am new here. I fell in the Yesterweb rabbit hole a few days ago and fell in love with the it's vibe. I found this site through Sadgirl's webring and I must say that the CSS here is lovely.

As for me, I am a profesional graphic designer and hobbysist archivist. I also like to make some RPG Maker games from time-to-time. I like old stuff and was happy to discover that there was some people out there keeping the old web alive.

I have yet to make a personal website as I was busy doing some work for the RuneScape Archive, but I certainly will make one at some point.