2022 Week 43 to 45 in Review
planted on in: Week In Review.
~575 words, about a 3 min read.
"When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning , they distract themselves with pleasure."
— Viktor Frankl
I spent a large portion of this week going down memory lane and revisiting Visual Basic 6.0. This was prompted by watching a video where someone recreated a 1988 April fools game called Advanced Lawnmower Simulator, in which there is a short clip of a recreation I had made in 2000 using Visual Basic.I no longer have the source code to this version, but I had shared it on a website called Planet Source Code.
Unfortunately a few years ago Planet Source Code went down and now no longer exists. In the thread Planet Source Code is gone for good on r/DataHoarder, it's confirmed that Planet Source Code is officially offline and quotes an explanation from Ian Ippolito himself:
"Hey thanks Richard that's really nice of you to say. Well you will not envy the situation with Planet Source Code. It has been unprofitable for many years so I have been subsidizing it and paying about $500 a month to keep it running. But, recently the extremely old version of Windows server that is running on had an update which removed a now obsolete version of TLS. But the extremely old version of IIS doesn't support the change. I could probably debug it if I could figure out what some of that software is on there, but I have lost the documentation years ago. And at this point it would cost way too much to try to get back up (for something that is a money loser anyway). So unfortunately it is shutting down. Sorry about that."
I haven't visited Planet Source Code in at least three years; I should have backed up my content on there, but it was one of those solid domains that you never think will go away (MySpace? Bebo? Anyone?) In any case the VB community and r/DataHoarders have worked on restoring at least a portion of what was hosted at Planet Source Code.
During its heyday, Planet Source Code released a series of CDs containing the most popular projects on the website, all in all there were seven volumes (2002-2012) and a copy of their ISO images is available at the Internet Archive. Chris Hultberg seems to have done a great deal of work in order to publish the projects on those CDs to a Planet Source Code organisation on GitHub, it's not a complete archive but at least it's something.
I had a quick gander to see if I could find any of my projects, but alas they never made it to the CDs. What did make it however is City Simulator by Dave Katrowski. I strongly remember eagerly downloading this the day it was published and spending weeks figuring out how it worked in order to extend the gameplay.
Joke of the week
There’s a band called 1023MB. They haven’t had any gigs yet.