Set Side B

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!!

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 a little risky to post this, because it’s a joke video game page on Tripod from 2001 that still somehow persists on the internet in 2024. I have to imagine that Phred is in his mid-to-late 40s by now. There’s several long pages here from that site, and there’s always the chance that a racist or neo-nazi joke, from an age when kids thought lightly of such things, could be lurking somewhere in there. Please understand it as a product of its time. It’s an amateurish site, but it has a lot of energy behind it.

I think it’s still worth looking at as a reminder of that age of the internet, which had many bad things about it, but also a lot of good things. I don’t know which this is. It contains a number of pretty dumb graphics hacks for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and/or its successor released after Nintendo’s licensing deal with Tyson ran out. Those hacks can be found here, although the background (the words “Master Phred” in fancy letters) makes the descriptions and download links really hard to read. (Try highlighting the text.) If you follow a few links, you can find actual NES Punch-Out rom downloads, which it’s even more amazing to find on a website in 2024.

Among the hacked characters are a robot, Doc Louis and Zelda, sure

The characters page includes, among other hacked characters like Rick and Nick Bruiser from the SNES Punch-Out, a character named after the Wii Punch-Out opponent Disco Kid, which indicates this page has to have been updated since 2009. There’s a links page where every outgoing link, other than GameFAQs, is broken, and a secrets page where most of the secrets are fake.

Well there it is, Phred’s Cool Punch-Out. You’ve survived 23 years. May you live a hundred more.

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!! (tripod.com)

rodneylives

Oldweb: Remembering ionpool.net

It used to be that the internet was full of thousands of tiny sites. Many of them might only have gotten a few visits a year, if that, but they were there, quietly and earnestly providing a resource for people who might be looking for it.

One of these sites was ionpool.net, which used to host a listing of classic gaming information. Here it is from its last archived version on the Wayback Machine from December 29, 2020. There’s a lot of links there, and the nature of the Wayback is, unless I check every one of those links, I can’t be sure if any of them will work. The few I’ve tried do, which is something at least.

ionpool.net in 2013, this is just the beginning of the list

There’s a lot of interesting documents there, presented in the classic List Of Tiny Links format. There’s far more there than I can summarize in a simple throwaway daily blog post like this one, but I particular point out to KLAX In Three Lessons, a series of Usenet posts written by Lyle Rains of Atari Games himself. In fact, those posts are so interesting that I might call them out in a later post….

Back to ionpool.net. The thing that saddens me is that the site still exists, but instead of providing the information that it helpfully offered back in 2013, now it’s just a black page with a graphic reading “END OF LINE.” This:

I can understand that even the slight resources necessary to preserve a website can, over time, become onerous. But I’d think it would be an equivalent cost to host an image like that, instead of leaving the old content up indefinitely. It was largely text files anyway.

Ah well. There is still the Wayback Machine, after all, slow and incomplete as it might be and difficult to sort through like it is. I can’t help but think that we should have more alternatives, though. The Internet Archive is not forever either.

rodneylives

Webdepths: Recipe for Meringue Mario Mushrooms

Post date: February 12, 2009
Archive date: July 6, 2012
Wayback Link
Original URL: http://www.annathered.com/2009/02/12/valentine-meringue-mario-mushrooms/
Found through: the archives of Everlasting Blort

Anna the Red, self-described as bento and plush designer, current whereabouts unknown but went on to work for gaming company The Behemoth, posted instructions on how to make these adorable edible Mario mushrooms for Valentine’s Day back in 2009.

While the page that hosted the recipe is now only on Wayback, the image gallery that it drew from is still alive on Flickr. (Remember Flickr?)

So go look! Look and cook!

rodneylives