Digging up the past with DiscMaster

DiscMaster is an alternative interface for collections of software that have been uploaded to Internet Archive. It allows you to drill into disk images at the file level and preview the contents in-place, download individual folders, zips, images, or whatever you like. It’s been around for a while but has become bigger and better with the introduction of DiscMaster 2, which is ingesting huge amounts of new files daily. But how to keep up with this firehose!?

Automated Searching

One of the great things about DiscMaster is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of any search result, which means you’ll be notified of new matches as they are indexed without the need to manually search on the website.

I have a bunch of searches including Hanafuda, various computer artists and developers (Thoru Yamamoto), particular apps, specific file types (PICT/SaMe for MaciGame tilesets), and for purely selfish reasons… searches for my own name. It’s fun to see where my early software was distributed up to 30 years after the fact.

Class of ’93

So far the oldest thing of mine is Chaos Calc 2, my fractal explorer, this version from May 1993 when I was 16 years young! I have a pretty good memory and can tell you that I received zero registrations for that shareware app, but I did get one call from somebody who wanted to be certain that their £5 GBP registration fee would absolutely definitely receive a floppy disk in return. I guess they were unconvinced because they never sent me any money!

There are references to programs (this is what apps were called on the Atari ST) that I had forgotten about but after reading their names can now recall completely (palette manager, boot tools), some I can recall partially (menu system), and others I have very little recollection of (a front end for a ray tracing program). Curiously I see no mention of the apps I was most fond of at that time: a text file viewer, kids paint program, and my take on Gorrilas. Perhaps they came later?

Chaos Calc 2

It’s been 32 years but it only took a moment for me to recall how to use the app and what all the different menu options did, even without consulting the readme. This is running at 32MHz with maths co-processor (compared to stock 8MHz with no co-processor) as your time is valuable!

Wire Hang Redux

Also fun to see my game Wire Hang Redux was featured in Retro Gamer magazine issues 7 & 13, which totally passed me by in 2004/2005! No surprise as that game was featured in dozens of magazines around the world: Japan, USA, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Germany. It being Big in Japan is extra fun because it is my remake of a Japanese game by “d2ac”, Masaki Kobayashi.