In 2006, I made a screen capture of this nifty ANSI title screen from the BBS door game "Solar Realms Elite."

Seven years later, I realized this was a CUSTOM title screen, not SRE's default. Questions abounded: Where did it come from? Who had made it?

Well, a further 13 years on, I have finally solved the mystery! Join me on this voyage of retrocomputing discovery!

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2026/06/14/the-mystery-of-the-solar-realms-elite-title-screen/

#bbs #gamedev #gamehistory #history #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #textmode #ansiart #ansi

When most people think about the classic BBS door game Barren Realms Elite, they probably remember the drippy logo from John Dailey's 1999 release.

But, in fact, BRE went through *many* different title screens during the years it was under active development by its creator, Mehul Patel.

Check out this gallery of 14 BRE title screens, culled from my collection of 40 BRE releases between 1992 and 1997.

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2026/05/02/the-many-ansi-title-screens-of-barren-realms-elite/

#bbs #retrocomputing #retrogaming #vintagecomputing #ansiart

I always try to appreciate the good things in life, and the 85,000 CD-ROMs that people have uploaded to Internet Archive are one of those good things.

https://archive.org/details/cd-roms?and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22collection%22

It's from this collection we get DISCMASTER.

https://discmaster.textfiles.com

TIL: you can play card games on Gopher

gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/1

First update of the year and I added a whole collection of nice images from CU Amiga magazine.

I went down the rabbit hole and added scans from the magazines' Art Gallery section, which included lots more really cool art. But as usual it's been really difficult to find the original versions of these images.

https://amiga.lychesis.net/publications/CUAmiga.html

#Amiga #PixelArt #CUAmiga

A puzzle game called "Circuit Heat" that I made in 2003 just popped up on PC Format 161, alongside a version of Sticky Balls by The Pickford Bros. @stepickford

Of course, now I remember making it, but prior to today I had forgotten all about it! https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/42140/PCF161DVD_05_04/PCF161DVD_05_04.ISO/Gamemaker/Blitz%20Research%20Demo%20Disk/DemoDisk1%20Files/Puzzle/CircuitHeat

The DiscMaster Game Jam brought retro CD-ROM assets back to life, with over 300 creators from 12+ countries making 60+ games using materials preserved by the Internet Archive & served via DiscMaster.

Congrats to all the winners, and a huge thanks to everyone who joined in!

Play the games & hear the music ➡️ https://itch.io/jam/discmaster-jam/results/discmaster-spelunker

More on the jam ➡️ https://www.canberra.games/blog/discmaster-jam-winners-2025

Ready to resurrect a galaxy of GIFs, WAVs, and BMPs?

Join the DiscMaster Game Jam and build a game using strange and wonderful assets from vintage CD-ROMs archived by the Internet Archive. You’ll be assigned a unique collection to work from—textures, fonts, audio clips, and more, all in celebration of digital preservation.
⁠
$1,750 in prizes⁠
Judged by industry pros⁠
Open worldwide⁠
Starts April 20 (USA) / April 21 (AUS)⁠

Sign up here: https://itch.io/jam/discmaster-jam

today's archival/software preservation work -

i noticed that PCBoard BBS software's wikipedia article mentioned something kinda weird - that just before clark development went bankrupt in 1997, it was building a server called MetaWorlds... an attempt at bridging the ansi-based BBS with the WWW.

sadly, the software never made it out of beta, and was nowhere to be found.. until today it seems! i managed to dig it out of the glorious ibm wgam-wbiz collection, and i've uploaded a copy to IA:

https://archive.org/details/metaworlds_beta

i honestly don't really understand what MetaWorlds does, so i'm hoping a PCBoard wiz manages to get it talking to their pcb instance, and lets us know how it all works.

update: located a newer beta. uploaded here: https://archive.org/details/metaworlds-beta-17

final update: version 1.02 (final) found!
https://archive.org/details/pcb-metaworlds

#bbs #softwarePreservation #retroComputing