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I’ve just watched Episode 5 NeoHabitat (https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds?cid=1699451 https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds?cid=1699451), about ho

I’ve just watched Episode 5 NeoHabitat (https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds?cid=1699451 https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds?cid=1699451), about how a museum revived the game server and it is now possible to play it in a browser, as an alternative to the C64 client. I never played it back in the day, but this documentary seems to give a good overview. This year I’ve been doing contract maintenance work on the server part of its successor, WorldsAway, which is still running as https://www.vzones.com/ https://www.vzones.com/ The server is C++ and runs on Solaris 8. I’ve enjoyed going through that old code from around 1996, it was well made. Over the years, changes were tacked on here and there until the server was crashing often, which is why I was hired to work on it. After some clean-up and increasing the capacity of some data structures it is running smoothly again. Being paid for this gave me the excuse I needed to finally buy a Sun workstation, a used Sun Blade 150 I got for 100 € fully expanded to 2 GB of RAM, and I love it. Had to replace a couple of fans after cleaning up ancient dust blocks. I also put an IDE to SATA adapter with an Intel SSD, but that did not improve compile times: I guess the whole source code fits in RAM so once it’s buffered the disk speed does not matter. It does speed up a lot though when rsync’ing the source tree from my main workstation.

grafelic 5y ago
That sounds like an absolute dream job. Good for you! Niches are good. I think one of the most memorable points in my career was when as a junior was tasked to revive a highly critical production system dependent on a very sick DEC Alpha server in dire need of healing through many different partial backups. Only tangential to what you describe, but I can certainly relate to the joy you felt revivifying an aging piece of software on an old system and succeeding. Yes, I do still dabble in retro computing. :)

grafelic 5y ago

That sounds like an absolute dream job. Good for you! Niches are good. I think one of the most memorable points in my career was when as a junior was tasked to revive a highly critical production system dependent on a very sick DEC Alpha server in dire need of healing through many different partial backups. Only tangential to what you describe, but I can certainly relate to the joy you felt revivifying an aging piece of software on an old system and succeeding. Yes, I do still dabble in retro computing. :)