DesertFOXNorton Speed Disk 8.0 for DOS and Windows 3.1. 
😎
#Defrag #Norton #DOS #Retro #RetroComputing #Win31 #90s #IBMPC #Oldschool #Nostalgia
vga256after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures.
when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction.
the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn collection of individual programs. there was no IDE. all of the content was written in RTF files, which were then compiled with links to external resources like wavs and avi's.
i cannot imagine what a nightmare this was for the MS Home teams to work with. there is no drag and drop of any kind, no object linking and embedding (OLÉ!), nor animation editor. this is a dog's breakfast of individual programs written by different people.
i'm frankly amazed that the MS Homes teams put together such well-designed programs *despite* how painful this toolkit is to use
the one thing i can say in its favour is that it has one badass tetricube logo for cover art :D
huge thank you to @david_rysk and @philpem for archiving this extremely obscure piece of software
https://archive.org/details/microsoft-multimedia-viewer-2.0-rips-20210921-1.7z
an extremely underrated 2 hour interview with robyn miller by [email protected] several years ago
they provide a walking tour through several of cyan's early titles such as the Manhole, Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx. a live art director's commentary.
what i love the most is how much robyn makes it clear how these games were never built for "gamers" as we understand them now. robyn played very few games, and wasn't familiar with genre expectations.
he and rand just focused on making games that let the player explore a world at their own pace, and all else is secondary to exploration and discovery.
The Manhole 30th anniversary celebration with Robyn Miller
a 1995 issue of CD-ROM Today! has an article where parents review an edutainment game, and then have their kid write a oneliner review of it as well.
SimTown 👌🏽
okay so i found something pretty awesome
the 3d scenes in Myst were all built using a mac modeller/renderer called Strata Vision 3D. i bought a boxed copy of this program with the intention of trying to recreate a model or two in the game, using the original renderer.
the box came with an extra disc - a library of shapes and textures. i noticed on the inside flap of the cd that it apparently included textures from Myst!
unfortunately, it turns out the disc was a demo. you browsed through the library until you found something you wanted, and then called a 1-800# to buy a serial number. you could enter the serial number and instantly have access to that texture.
unfortunately, no one has ever figured out how to crack Strata Clip 3D, and i couldn't figure it out today either.
fortunately, some creative digging turned up the Myst textures. they've been hiding on a Warez cd from 1996 for the past 30 years.
i just managed to load the program into system 7 and it's all there. these are the original textures used to render some areas of Myst. i still need to install Strata Vision to test them out, but afaik this is the first time these original textures have been seen since.
this is insanely impressive work, and i don’t think i’ve ever seen people talk about it.
lots of us remember Broderbund’s Living Books series from the 90s - like Just Grandma & Me or Arthur’s Teacher Trouble. the cartooning was exquisitely well done, and the voice work was top notch.
they completely disappeared in the late 90s because they were built for 16-bit Win 3.1, and compatibility problems only got worse with every revision of Windows into the 32-bit era
apparently back in 2010, one of the original managers from the Living Books team hired several programmers who had built the runtime. they either had access to the source (likely) or reversed it, bought the rights back from the holders, and released 32 and 64 bit iOS and Android editions of the Living Books titles with tap support and a nice launcher.
this is really, really well done. the art and sound have aged very well despite not having any remastering.
it’s called Wanderful Interactive Storybooks on the play and apple stores. there is a free version with samples from 7 books.
#android #ios #retrogaming #macintosh #win31 #kids #edutainment #multimedia
Eine grüne Schlange auf blauem Grund und insgesamt exakt 52.224 Bytes groß. "MAMBA.EXE" war eines der Spiele meiner Kindheit. Einfach, ohne Story und ohne Ton. Damals für Windows 3.1. Ein Klassiker von Data Becker! 😉
Link: https://archive.org/details/mamba_de
#RetroGaming #Windows #Win31 #PCGaming #Retro #Gaming #RetroGaming #90er #90s
when i was a kid with my first 2x cd-rom drive, buying a cd-rom in a retail box was a $100+ CAD affair. so at my house that never happened.
all of my software on CD were either pack-ins that came with the computer, or from cheap multi-disc compilation packs like Sirius Software's 5ft10 pak.
one of those pack-ins was a copy of Encarta '94. it had a nondescript jewel case without cover art - just a green MS certificate of authenticity. i never knew what the retail box looked like, until today.
holy cow is it beautiful. the box is a hardcover flip-open activity book, designed for kidhands to pull open and rifle through. visually, it models the Dorling Kindersley UK educational books - I assume they did the graphic design.
the user manual is a thick kid friendly comic book. there's even a separate manual that teaches kids how to write a book report and *then* an entire section of proper citations and giving research credit.
MS was a big, big place in those days. its educational division was more or less walled off from the rest of the murderous beast, and it shows. this program is thoughtful, beautiful, and suffused with craftsmanship.
i'm right in the middle of retooling the Multimedia HyperGuide podcast, and now i have to do an episode on Encarta. it's so damned well made. in the mean time, feel free to listen to previous episodes here:
https://podcast.vga256.com
after a 4 year hiatus, i finally completed my podcast series on Another World. 🤯
if you're new to the podcast: Multimedia HyperGuide is my love letter to 1990s multimedia CD-ROM games, edutainment and productivity software. each episode is an hour-long dive into a specific game or application.
listen in-browser here:
https://podcast.vga256.com
podcast player rss here:
https://podcast.vga256.com/rss.xml
apple podcasts here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/multimedia-hyperguide-windows-3-1-macintosh-and-ms/id1393890581
#podcasts #retrogaming #retrocomputing #dosgaming #msdos #win31 #amiga #macintosh #vintageApple
it's hard to imagine that back in the mid-90s, the stiff and strait-laced MS had an entire department for making kids multimedia
their edutainment department was mostly independent of the rest of the monster, and produced some really unique educational software. Dinosaurs is one of their best - the combination of high production value, solid paleontological detail, and skeumorphic interfaces makes for a totally memorable experience.
i found this non-interactive demo buried in the program. i heard one of the former MS developers mention recently that scenes like these were built in Macromedia Director, and then nested within the program (built in C/C++) using a Director runtime.
you might notice the weird random b+w noise around the window, and in some of the background. that's a byproduct of the team using indexed palettes to handle the hundreds of compressed images. every single image was run through DeBabelizer to extract its index, and then averaged with other images to find shared colour palettes from 256 colours. the team had to make sure that the colour palette chosen never intruded into the "safe palette" used by the window frame, titlebar, and background. obviously, this one paletting error snuck past QA.