The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
It’s another ancient gaming site that, despite domain names and hosting being persistent charges that must be paid month after month until the site goes down, and not even being updated since the turn of the century, is somehow still on-line, due to the good graces, sheer orneriness, or forgotten bank withdrawals of the owner.
This time it’s this gaming emulation site, a subsite of cnspace.net by Ben Martin. Of all the pages linked from the main site, the game one is the only one with a broken link. The game link is the only one of them that goes to a subdomain, which never got fixed when the site structure was changed on February 13, 1999. Since they never repaired the front page link the site’s reach may be reduced, but considering the main page proudly lists a last update of only a couple of months later, I presume whoever is keeping the lights on doesn’t care much of reach.
Why do I point sites like this out? For one thing, there’s still some good info there. There’s a short essay on emulation in general, although I note that practically every hyperlink in it is dead or to a parked domain. The main site has pages on fractals, and some bespoke software for folk still running Windows 95 or 98. The philosophy, math and books pages are nearly empty. There’s a page of tributes to old games, with a guide to the Commodore 64 version of California Games.
Where has the time gone? Don’t answer, I already know. There used to be thousands of pages like this. Nowadays, who can even find the few survivors? Google will do everything in its power to direct you to Youtube or Reddit instead of this place. Speaking practically, it won’t be a huge informational loss when they finally stop paying the bills, but it will be one more victory for the forces of entropy that tear away at everything in our world.
