Hardlimit Museum

[vreyes1981]

Good evening, @cobito, and thank you for your quick response. Well, you see, I have all the CDs from Micromania from February 2000 until they changed their publishing house. Since you already have the 2000/2001 period uploaded, I can contribute from 2002 onwards. Many of them are already uploaded on archive.org and on AbandonSocios. The bad thing is that since I am on temporary assignment, I don't have all of them with me. If you want, I can upload to your server the ones I already have uploaded and saved in my private cloud. You tell me. Oh! And thank you very much for enabling the museum again. It's a good shot of nostalgia.
Best regards.

[cobito]

@vreyes1981 I'm glad you like the museum

I have sent you a private message.

[cobito]

After more than 3 years without news, today we bring an update to the v86 virtual machine. A lot of things have changed and the frontend had to be completely rewritten.

This new version is much faster and more stable than before, although there are still some issues to be resolved with the beta version of Windows 95.

Thanks to zstd compression, loading is now almost instantaneous and the sound has improved a lot. You can try it in the Windows 95 Emulations section.

Next stop: Windows 98 virtualized in your browser.

[cobito]

This time, the work has focused on improving the maintainability of the code. Until now, the museum's database used an RDBMS created by me based on CSV files. This was fine as a programming exercise, but doing anything was absurdly complex while with MariaDB it is ridiculously simple (it seems I had an insulting amount of free time to maintain something so infernal). Leaving aside the hyperbole, I have started to migrate everything to MariaDB (MySQL), which is considerably reducing the complexity of the code. With this "small" investment of time, I hope to be able to focus on more interesting things for the content and presentation.

You won't notice this change when it's finished, beyond the fact that the paths of the different sites are going to change (not to mention making a permanent redirect).

I had planned to put this new version into production for the software section this weekend, but more fun things have come up like assembling a cucumber. Let's see if I can do it next weekend.

Apart from this internal change (which will last for several weeks in parallel with things more visible to the public), the first virtualizations of Windows 98 have been added. In addition, the people at v86 have had the infinite kindness to prepare a patch that allows modifying the RTC date, which extends the possibilities to use beta versions with "time bombs". In any case, there are still a few things to solve with the beta versions of both Windows 95 and 98.

[cobito]

The software and hardware section has been migrated to MariaDB and put into production. The process has been faster than initially planned. With this, we jump to version 3 although the library is still missing.
For the library, there are big plans that will be executed when the second phase of hardware renovation is completed. So for now, the museum is slowing down.

Apart from the internal restructuring of the code and the database, it has also been decided to abandon the use of JS-DOS for emulation and everything will be centralized in v86. This is done because the people behind JS-DOS are starting to take a commercial approach to their project that forces, under certain circumstances, to use their cloud services, which look very good, but go against having a completely independent service from third parties, that requires little maintenance and works in all circumstances even if they decide to abandon their project. In addition, I have seen that v86 performs much better than JS-DOS, so the decision was clear. The only drawback is that doing certain things that were simple with JS-DOS, will have to be figured out with v86, but that's part of the fun. With this, there are now emulations (like those of Windows 3.x) that are not working, but they will be coming.

So, leaving the museum running at a slower pace (not stopped), I want to focus on starting to get the most out of the new machine that helps to power Hardlimit since this weekend.

[cobito]

All final executable versions in v86 of MS-DOS and a good number of Windows 95 betas and versions are now available.

In addition, thumbnails have been added to each version.

[vreyes1981]

Good afternoon. I have noticed that in the "library" section, both in the "files" and "magazines" sections, the links are broken. Is this due to the migration to the new server?

Thank you very much.

[cobito]

Good @vreyes1981

It's because of the migration to version 3 of the museum. The library will be out of service until it migrates to the new version, hopefully before Christmas when, in addition, the Micromanía discs you sent me will be available.

[vreyes1981]

Vale @cobito, no pasa nada, creí que había pasado como la última, que te hackearon la página.

¡Muchas gracias!

[cobito]

We are recovering old spaces: The magazine library is back online (NOTE: Publications and issues are still being added; it is an automated process that will be completed in a few days).

With the magazine library, we started making functional and visual changes:

• The loading of magazine pages has been improved to the point that they are practically instantaneous.
• Thanks to the loading speed, it has been possible to create a new simple, fast, and much more practical magazine viewer than the previous one:
  · Now the entire magazine is displayed on a single page, avoiding the need to turn pages.
  · Pages are displayed in pairs at full width of the browser window.
  · It is still possible to zoom in to full screen.
• A new format has also been applied in the presentation of magazine lists, years, and issues with wider tables with screens starting at 1080p in mind and mobile devices.

At the moment, the new file browser where the CD-ROMs will go is being projected. I have a sketch although I still have to make several decisions before starting it. I want to try to make this the definitive one.

On another note, a new universal header has been launched, which changes buttons for tabs and includes the turn menu. That is, the tabs will be the same for all pages but the bottom menu will change depending on the needs of each space. At the moment, this new header is only in the museum but will spread to all pages over time.

[vreyes1981]

Olé!! little by little, si señor.

And I like the new design, with the magazine covers really big. What a blast of nostalgia.

[cobito]

The first feature of the year has arrived, and it's for the museum.

We're debuting a new disc browser, which will serve as the foundation for a future file browser that will build upon it. The new front-end has been implemented, so the views are optimized for both large screens and mobile devices.

As designed, it should be possible to comfortably and intuitively browse all kinds of media: in addition to magazine discs, you'll also be able to access operating systems, drivers, demos, compilations, and more. Content will start being added gradually.

The entire database table structure is already in place, and in the next iteration, we'll put the concept into action with a couple of discs, maybe three.

Due to storage limitations, only the PCManía CD-ROMs are available for now. I'm looking into temporary solutions. I have a 2TB drive lying around that I might be able to use as a temporary storage medium.

Meanwhile, the disc details page (medio.php), with an example here, displays the cover art alongside information about the medium. The following information is shown (when available):

• Publication name.
• Medium size.
• Medium format.
• Original creation system.
• Volume
• Publisher
• Entity that prepared the data
• Originally used creation software
• MD5 checksum
• SHA-256 checksum

Download links are also provided for the single file (.iso, .zip) or split files (.cue/.bin) of whichever medium you wish to download, and downloads are currently enabled without any limits.

What comes next will mainly depend on how much storage space I can recover by digging out some old drives I have stored away.

[_Neptunno_]

@cobito I really love the hard work you're putting into the Museum and the new disk browser interface. As a digital preservation professional, I can only take my hat off to you.

Let me tell you, because you'll like this: my company is dedicated precisely to digital preservation on a global scale. We work with clients ranging from the National Library of Spain (BNE) to other international ones like Harvard University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or HILA (Stanford University), among many other top-tier museums and universities, setting up systems that cost hundreds of thousands of euros. And let me tell you something: seeing what you're achieving with limited resources is incredibly impressive; the structure with MD5 and SHA-256 checksums and metadata cataloging is at a level of rigor that many institutions would envy.

That's why I'm so excited about it. In my humble opinion (bear in mind I'm just a technician, but after so many projects, especially the BNE one where I saw how millions of pages were published thanks in part to my years of work to allow people to access them from home), your work strikes me as professional and necessary. I know how much it takes to digitize and bring visibility to these archives, and what you're doing is truly something to take your hat off for.

It's crucial to make this content visible and accessible before it's lost forever. In fact, if you'd like, I can reach out to my company so you can negotiate a safebox deal with them, and we can take the Museum to the big leagues, haha.

All jokes aside, you're doing a great job and the community will always be grateful. Once I get around to tinkering with the 486 or Pentium 166 I have lying around, I'll definitely be making full use of this material!

Cheers!!

[cobito]

@_Neptunno_ You're going to make me blush

You have no idea how much your words make me happy and motivated. On the technical side of things, I don't have that many doubts. It's the kind of thing that can be done well in many different ways, and I'm probably not doing it perfectly, but not badly either. However, when it comes to structure and organization, I rely more on intuition than on "technical" benchmarks. My references are Archive.org and WinWorldPC. And well, this being the third time I'm trying it out (let's see if it's true that the third time's the charm).

@_Neptunno_ said in Museo Hardlimit:

We work with clients ranging from the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) to other international ones like Harvard University, the Holocaust Museum in the U.S., or HILA (Stanford University), among many other top museums and universities, building systems that cost hundreds of thousands of euros.

Having someone with this kind of track record tell you that you're on the right track is highly motivating. Since you're likely the biggest Hardlimit expert (at least, you're the foremost expert on the subject that I know), please share any criticism or suggestions you might have, whatever they may be.

This is something I want to do well, and since the financial cost (as opposed to time) of development is zero, and hardware resources can be scavenged here and there, it would be great if the formal presentation were handled with rigor.

It's still very much in its early stages, both in terms of functionality and content. So as it continues to evolve, you'll likely spot things that could be improved (if you haven't already).

Thanks!

[_Neptunno_]

@cobito you know it's always a pleasure to help you with anything, but don't get the wrong idea, I'm not at the level of a preservation engineer!

I think you'd really enjoy learning from my development colleagues; to program the software that manages not just terabytes, but petabytes of information, there's a tremendous amount of hard work behind it (not to mention a thousand things I didn't know or hadn't heard of, like the "Transfer Connector": (transfer connector) a critical function that acts as a bridge for secure and structured data ingestion). On that front, I have less to say, since my role is more on the system support side, but I've also worked on many digitization projects of all scales and I can't help but view your museum through professional eyes. I find it admirable and, above all, incredibly useful for the community!!

To give you an idea of the scale, the systems we set up are designed to preserve "digital knowledge" for the next 200 years (or so I heard in a meeting a while ago hahaha). We always say that if this had existed in the time of the Library of Alexandria, nothing would have been lost by now. The data is stored in redundant systems that constantly audit files to ensure they're healthy and that the disks maintain their integrity. If something fails, there are several extra copies in the pools ready to step in while the damaged or "heavily used" disks are replaced.

Measures are even taken in case of catastrophes or wars. With the Ukraine conflict, for example, critical copies have already started being moved to secure locations (for example, from the UK to Ireland) to prevent information loss in case of direct confrontation.

That said, just so you know, I'm just the "lowest-ranking employee" at my company! But these things are cool, and I'm sharing them as some industry insider scoop

Cheers!!

[cobito]

@_Neptunno_ That's incredible. A while back, I read about a new Rosetta Stone (in the sense that it was recently created) where information was stored in a spiral, reducing the character size from visible to the naked eye down to microscopic, with a goal similar to the original Rosetta Stone (having a translation table). And then, reproduce and distribute it worldwide to ensure that kind of redundancy.

After a quick search, I found it. It's called The Rosetta Project, and what they've done is create a disk that stores 13,000 pages of information in 1,500 languages so that the text can be read with a microscope (no digital information involved).

You probably already know about it, since, looking at the website, it's run by Stanford University, which your company has worked with. You might have even been involved in some related development!

Anyway, my point was that this was the only example I knew of an attempt to preserve knowledge on that scale. I never would have imagined there were so many resources dedicated to preserving knowledge at the level you describe.

Really fascinating, to be honest.

[_Neptunno_]

@cobito The most important part of my company is preservation, which is where the most resources are invested and is the "soul" of the company. Then there's the digitization department, which was the one that started it all.

At first, we were fully involved in mass digitization, a quite "mechanical" process (scanning material and generating metadata and bibliographic records for the images). We worked with specific scanners to obtain TIF files (300dpi, though over time they increased to 400 and 600 using very specific cameras for this) and then generated the derivatives (JPG, PDF). Depending on the project, some were straightforward while others required mass renaming and complex structuring, such as periodicals (newspapers and magazines). Just to give you an idea, we've digitized everything from the AS newspaper to early 20th-century press for the BNE, including projects with the Prado Museum or the University of Granada (some projects for the Real Hospital de Granada), among others.
We also carried out smaller projects for town councils and urban planning files, just to give another example. But anyway, I want you to see that it's been many years of doing a bit of everything.

For a long time, my role was precisely that image processing, although I also handled system support. In parallel, the company grew exponentially by developing digital preservation software. That software is what manages everything now. We don't just digitize documents anymore; we ensure they remain intact and accessible.

If you visit the BNE Digital Library, you can see millions of pages to which I've contributed in a small way through my work. As a curious anecdote: I worked with collections of Civil War photos that weren't open to the public due to copyright, but which the BNE had to preserve to release them in the future. Seeing those images was quite impactful

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that Stanford Rosetta Project is something they develop on their own. That said, as a client, we work with their infrastructure, and well... you'd laugh if I told you we've had to complain about them being so stingy. They gave us virtual machines with 127GB system disks (the default size for Hyper-V), and we had to protest to get them to add "more juice," because they constantly filled up with logs

Best regards!!

[cobito]

I've finally managed to organize all the content in the museum. I dug out a 2TB drive from the storage room that should give me plenty of room to keep going with this. I've also managed to free up some space on the backup drive, which solves the part that bothered me most about using a drive in this way.

For now, all the magazine discs are already available. @vreyes1981, your Micromanía discs are already up, specifically from 2002 (full year) and 2003 (up to April), which is exactly what you had uploaded for me. If you have any more material lying around, feel free to share it (just let me know so I can keep adding it).

I've also finished defining the database structure to move on to the next step: the file explorer. The initial phase will allow browsing the directory tree of all available discs, and it should be fully operational by the next Museum update. I'll decide next time whether to dedicate my time to the test bench or to the museum.

[cobito]

This week, we released the first phase of the file browser. All files from almost all discs are now indexed and browsable. We had to leave a couple of MDF/MDS files from Micromanía aside, as there's no way to extract them, even though most MDF/MDS files can be extracted successfully.

Here is a disc that, in addition to the previously announced information, now includes a browsable list of files and folders.

In addition to the file browser, you can view detailed information for each file, including duplicates—files that may have different names, dates, and other attributes but share the same content. The information displayed is as follows:

• Current file name on the medium and path.
• Original creation date on the medium.
• Size in ISO/IEC 80000-13 binary format.
• Descriptive content type (for most files, this information is not yet available; it will be added over time).
• MIME type (not 100% accurate, but close).
• A more detailed description of the file's contents (e.g., if it's a self-extracting executable, details about the encapsulated content are provided).
• An MD5 hash
• A SHA256 hash

Here is an example of pkunzip.exe, which is a fairly popular file.

In this first phase, determining the file system's character set has been a challenge. Sometimes UTF-8 is used, other times CP850, and there are a couple of disc images that appear to have been corrupted at the source due to bugs in the creation software (which apparently wasn't uncommon in the 90s). In any case, file names are displayed correctly, complete with ñs, accents, and other special characters, regardless of the original format.

We currently have 570,000 files. These come from the media of the five publications we have so far, which are being used as a reference for all development before we add more.

We have also begun work on the second phase of the browser, which involves extracting all extractable files. For those extracted files, the process is repeated recursively. We currently support over 70 archive formats from various eras. These are identified using heuristics rather than file extensions or magic numbers, ensuring that no compatible files are missed. Once this first version of the extractor is polished, it will be deployed to production. More formats will be added over time, but for now we're sticking with these 70-80 to prioritize other aspects.

On another note, we've updated the v86 configuration, making the virtual machines respond much faster now (example). I hadn't noticed this while running it locally, but now that all traffic routes through a VPS, I've become aware of latency-dependent performance bottlenecks that can be improved.

Finally, we've fixed the algorithm behind the new page translation system, allowing pages to render much faster now (this applies to both the museum and the test bank). This change also fixed certain broken features, such as the magnifying glass in magazines and mouse pointer capture in virtual machines.

[cobito]

It is now possible to view the contents of extractable files. These can include any file type, and their contents may consist of other files or binary sections. While these sections often contain irrelevant binary data, they sometimes embed relevant content such as images, sounds, animations, cursors, plain text, and more (primarily in DLLs).

Here is an example of a .zip file that, in turn, contains another zip. The description shows the format and algorithm used for each one.

70% has been indexed. I assume the process will be completed over the weekend. At this point, that adds 1.3 million files/sections to what we already had.

With this, phase 2 is essentially complete (pending the finalization of indexing, which is an automated process), and the most tedious part of the project is wrapped up until new formats are added (a list is already prepared for the next iteration).

Phase 3 will likely begin soon, which involves enabling file viewing directly from the browser. This covers images, videos, audio, MIDI files, MOD files, documents, etc., etc., etc. It’s one of the coolest features of the explorer, but it required all the groundwork we’ve done so far. Thanks to this, the project can truly become a powerful digital archaeology tool.

Additionally, the frontend has been deployed across the entire museum (except for the hardware pages): the new version is now active in all sections, improving the desktop appearance and fixing numerous issues that were broken in the mobile version.

Furthermore, the videos covering each hardware and software item that I originally uploaded to Peertube have been added: example.