The KAISERNET Message Board

I've been out of the loop on pretty much everything lately, but while updating my More Links page I noticed that the great Hobbes archive at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ is shutting down this April.

OS/2 has been one of my great loves in software for quite a long time, and Hobbes never failed to amaze me with how extensive and still-updated it is. They offer a TAR of the entire thing you can download, and people are talking about taking it over, but still nothing can compare to an archive dating back to around 1990 that you could STILL add software to. Getting a port of ONScripter-EN added to Hobbes always was one of my goals that I never managed to achieve in time.

I clicked a few more links on my links page and noticed several totally gone now. The decline of all things good on the internet is stifling.

On Ars Technica's article about the shutdown, this comment was posted by "JnyJny":

> For some historical perspective, calvin.nmsu.edu and hobbes.nmsu.edu were originally a pair of NeXT machines hosted in the NMSU Small Systems Graduate Computer Lab in Jacobs Hall. The machines had 8Mb of memory, a small amount of storage and the 256Mb magneto-optical drives. The earliest they would have been available was likely spring of 1990 but probably that summer or fall. The NeXT machines were in counter-point to an early IBM POWER 320, some SPARC shoe boxes, and an IBM RT we referred to as "boatanchor". I worked in the Small Systems lab for most of my time at NMSU which started in the fall of 1998 1989 while studying computer science. I named them Calvin & Hobbes since they were a pair and I was a casual fan of the comic. Other names in the running were names of various igneous rock which were generally shouted down as being too hard to spell or remember. Sorry Dave.

> We noodled around a lot with those machines, mostly playing with Mathematica and Interface Builder. On Calvin we ran various MUDs that were sort of popular but in general caused a lot of drama. I wasn't much involved with the OS/2 Warp archive other than setting up anonymous FTP and keeping an eye on it to make sure it didn't consume too much storage. I goofed up permissions for the chroot jail once which resulted in a large amount of porn magically appearing on the machine. I had some explaining to do when that came to light. At some point we put some bigger hard drives in both of them, upgraded the main board and added more memory but to be honest I'm foggy on those details. I lost track of those machines when I left NMSU and suspect the hardware retiring in April isn't the hardware it started on. But it'd be nice to think those machines lived this long.

"_fluffy" replied:

> I ran the Hobbes archive for several years in the late 90s, as a student working for ICT (then called CANTO) when stewardship of Hobbes had been taken over by Dave Rocks.

> By that time it had been moved over to a repurposed/otherwise-decommissioned AIX server (an RS/6000, as I recall). I was the person behind completely reorganizing the file structure, which was controversial at the time, and I also redesigned the site and wrote the original search engine. As far as I can tell the code I wrote is no longer powering the site but the design is still pretty much the same as how I'd designed it (although with the HTML cleaned up somewhat and converted to CSS for layout).

> I think that the original NeXT that Hobbes ran on was in a pile in the hallway. I remember booting it up once and the monitor was very dim and the hardware just limped along. It felt sad.
> January 30, 2024 at 4:20 am

Hello, how are you doing? Your website is lovely, full of personality and passion!
What is that attracts you in When They Cry?

Thank you for the kind words. I'm doing better than I have in a long time, getting up before sunrise rather than staying up until sunrise; will give me energy to do more than ever before, hopefully.

I can't say I care for WTC as a whole, but Higurashi is very special to me. I grew up in the forested and mountainous southeast US, so its setting is just like home to me, and the concept of a secluded village resisting modernisation makes for more interesting character dynamics than in, say, Umineko. There's a distinct bygone way of life that the village natives live by, and in the slice of life scenes you get to see the group play together mostly innocently without intrusive modern concepts. It's a snapshot of natural living, curious insular culture, and a great opportunity for articulate character writing (which I believe Ryuukishi07 best excels at).
I also adore the music that was in the Question Arcs, which is why I can't stand that people read it without ever knowing it's been completely replaced.

So there's one weird AIO pack on cdromance that features about 40 VNs ported from PC onto PSP with ONscripter, I'm talking about this one https://cdromance.com/psp/english-patched-visual-novels-ported-to/ (found out about it thanks to Clair looking for games to install on hers, I think Kaiser knows her)... And among those games was, you guessed it, Saya no Uta, right there, in the flesh! https://i.imgur.com/n6iqqZV.png

I hurried myself over, extracted the saya no uta folder from the ISO, and threw the latest ONscripter-EN executable in the same spot. The text and the images aren't really centered, the menus are broken (QUIT button doesn't do anything), not the most promising start but still something. https://i.imgur.com/3WblKBK.png

When you launch a new game it displays the text the way it should. https://i.imgur.com/C3itBru.png

...At least, it's what you'd think if you were to not read any following line, which ends up displaying itself on top of the previous one https://i.imgur.com/zN59WSV.png

Until it ultimately crashes by not finding a certain voicefile https://i.imgur.com/6U95OW7.png

That's crazy, funny place for it to turn up. The ONScripter PSP port was a pretty big thing, I'm sure this VN and others had a convertor run on them.

The English script for this port was always just the regular fan translation; if we were to want to reconstruct Saya for ONScripter we could just insert the English lines into the Russian game. It's a janky port that requires a lot of rewriting to be functional (I've already delved into the script when helping with a French translation that used it). I thought it would be an interesting curiosity to have it on ONS in English, without having to reconstruct it, which is why it was on the Wanted page.

Come to think of it, the English version of the ONS port may have been thrown together just for the sake of porting the game to PSP...

how do you even make a site like this? where users and the guy can easily make posts that all just work? i do not comprendo

Thanks! This board runs on a fork of Kareha, which is a clone of 2channel written in Perl; most boards like this run on PHP. Although it's very easy to make your own website now with services like Neocities, generally for "user-generated" content like our posts, you need the server running scripts on its end, which just about no one allows for free. I've got my whole site running on a cheap VPS, and a friend who's posted here a couple times helped me set it up (I'm not actually good with this stuff)

>>2
kareha!?!?!?!
&a

well im not sure now

not joking check my useragent☆ god i hope this catchpa works now!! this is my 20th try and i had to clear cookies reinstlal hebrew channel clear wads and install ios69 for tyhis to work

we did it kaisernet☆

Doesn't this work? I don't have a Wii to test, and it's very outdated, obviously. https://wiibrew.org/wiki/ONScripter

It's neat that this board works on Wii. I loaded up my site on my Dreamcast recently, and none of the CSS worked on the main site, and this board didn't load at all, sadly.

Can you also add in a regular psued0ch theme?

I've been playing Phantasy Star Online on my Dreamcast on sylverant.net lately (do join me there, you can play with me on the PC port) and finally researched what "Internet Time" in the menu was. I learned it was an attempt by the Swiss watchmaker Swatch to standardize a new time format for the Internet, with no time zones so that people could co-ordinate globally.
The campaign started in 1998 and had utterly faded out by the mid-2000s, but this Y2K relic is not wholly forgotten, and for the web 1.0 underground flourishing today, I think it's a great thing to adopt. Especially if you play PSO. Which you should.

See about it:
https://www.swatch.com/en-en/internet-time.html
https://wiki.melonland.net/swatch_time

Is PSO easy to get into? MMORPGs were never a big part of my gaming life but it looks like it might be fun. And that such an old game works cross-platform is pretty amazing.

Internet Time came up in a discussion I had about alternate timekeeping schemes once, there's really a whole world of em if you look into it; it's interesting stuff. Maybe I could come up with a hack that displays timestamps here in Internet Time?

Levelling is very slow in vanilla PSO but it helps to party up with someone higher level and take on strong enemies given that they won't one-hit you; as long as you get one shot in you'll get the full EXP reward on vanilla. The night I first connected I met someone who was level 3 and took him through the first boss, then someone level 124 joined and took us through all four bosses of the game and gave us a ton of items. I chose a kind of disadvantaged class so that helped a lot. I'm not sure PSO fully counts as an MMO because only four can play in any given game, but that makes it comfortable to join up with a random stranger or get two or three friends together for some quests.
Ultima PSOBB is a PC server for Blue Burst that multiplies EXP and from what I remember feeds you the EXP of whomever you're in a game with, so you can just stand around while someone wins the game for you. Since it has a whole Episode 2 I've never touched, I'll probably run through it on Ultima once I've totally finished the Dreamcast version.
All in all PSO is actually very calming to grind in, the visuals are great, the music loops smoothly and transitions procedurally into battle music, so you can play for dozens of hours before you know it.

As for Internet Time, I actually opened an issue requesting it to be added to Kiramoji, since in the config file you can see there are multiple options for time display on here. If you can make it work yourself maybe you could submit it to be added. It would be pretty nice because I have this board on localtime and no one knows what that is, and Americans don't read 24-hour time anyway, so 1000 beats almost aligned with UTC would ironically be easier to interpret as far as post times go.

Flameborn has added Internet Time to Kiramoji! It should show up on this post.