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Uncle at Nintendo posted:Through lots of effort and trickery, I am getting some AOL keywords to work (though just typing a keyword name in and going to it does not work; I have to do this strange method of going to keyword aol:\\9349 for example to find stuff) Awesome post. I remember Steve Case. Man the early internet was so weird...
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Apr 9, 2016 13:36
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Casimir Radon posted:Checked into a forum I used to post on compulsively 10 years ago. The places is incredibly dead compared to what it was like way back when. The I guy I thought was an awful sadsack 10 years ago is still posting, and still a sadsack. He started there in 1999, and is still at it. 20 years isn't all that far away at that point. Don't hate on GamemasterAnthony.
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Apr 9, 2016 14:44
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:Through lots of effort and trickery, I am getting some AOL keywords to work (though just typing a keyword name in and going to it does not work; I have to do this strange method of going to keyword aol:\\9349 for example to find stuff) Can you still get to Gamestorm?
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Apr 9, 2016 16:30
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I just remembered an internet encounter I had sometime in the mid 90s, when I was 8 or 9 years old. I was staying at a family friend's house for the evening, and she had the internet on her computer. I asked if I could look up scary stories on it, she helped me find some, but one of the first results was a page of user stories and instructions for how to craft pipe bombs, napalm, among other things. She had me go watch Star Wars instead.
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Apr 9, 2016 17:27
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Skoll posted:Can you still get to Gamestorm? Was that simply a keyword? If so, was it keyword Gamestorm? I will see if I can find a workaround to get to it. Also I was able to find a keyword that is all AOL press releases and it goes back to 1993
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Apr 9, 2016 20:01
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:Was that simply a keyword? If so, was it keyword Gamestorm? I will see if I can find a workaround to get to it. I think it was either Gamestorm or Games. I know some of the Gamestorm games had their own keywords like Legends or MPBT. Im trying to remember what the gently caress their Comics keyword was.
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Apr 9, 2016 20:20
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Skoll posted:I think it was either Gamestorm or Games. I know some of the Gamestorm games had their own keywords like Legends or MPBT. Im trying to remember what the gently caress their Comics keyword was. OK. I will keep trying. Though I have to use AOL 6.0 which is hindering me a bit. Believe it or not, AOL just stopped allowing people to sign on with 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0. When I try to log in with them it automatically signs me off saying that the version is no longer supported. I am wondering if there is some way to edit the exe so it thinks it's a newer version.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:17
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A guy I work with racked up an $800 bill on AOL back in the early 90s on some game. Luckily his tax return showed up and he was able to pay it off.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:23
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Skoll posted:I think it was either Gamestorm or Games. I know some of the Gamestorm games had their own keywords like Legends or MPBT. Im trying to remember what the gently caress their Comics keyword was. Gamestorm/Kesmai was shut down a long time ago, another victim of EA.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:36
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:OK. I will keep trying. Though I have to use AOL 6.0 which is hindering me a bit. Someone was watching the logs and noticed your activities, didn't they?
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Apr 9, 2016 21:52
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Casimir Radon posted:A guy I work with racked up an $800 bill on AOL back in the early 90s on some game. Luckily his tax return showed up and he was able to pay it off. My guess it was World of Warcraft 1. My friend used to phish AOL accounts so he could play it for free. It was really hosed up of him, but we were 13. It also is insane to think they charged hourly to play a video game. Skoll posted:I think it was either Gamestorm or Games. I know some of the Gamestorm games had their own keywords like Legends or MPBT. Im trying to remember what the gently caress their Comics keyword was. OK I am still trying to work on this for you. Data Graham posted:Someone was watching the logs and noticed your activities, didn't they? I don't think so. It rejects you as soon as you click "Sign On". It doesn't even let you get to the screen where you put your username and password in. If you even click "Guest" and then sign on, it immediately boots you off and says "Version no longer supported". It really is strange that they started blocking 3.0 to 5.0 just this past year. I wonder why now? How many users could still possibly be on a version from the 90s? I tried editing the EXE with a hex editing program but there was no mention of the version number in there. I am not sure what it checks. I was trying to see if I could spoof it to think 3.0 is version 6.0 so I could access a lot more keywords. Here's the message AOL was sending out last year to people using 3.0 through 5.0: 
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Apr 10, 2016 00:47
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It's absolutely ridiculous that AOL 3.0 was even compatible with their backend network in 2016. I mean holy gently caress, 3.0 wasn't long after 2.5, which IIRC was when AOL first supported the "world wide web". My neighbor had Prodigy, which had web browsing a bit earlier. At first I thought "browsing" was some lesser form of "shopping" in that we could look but not touch. Once I forgot about that I ended up downloading WAV files of television show theme songs and editing them with a friend. Internet, gently caress yeah. Oh and Mortal Kombat 2 fatality inputs to take to the local pizza place to bust out on some greasy older nerds.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:18
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 gonna get that sweet Blockbuster Video card!  AOL still got your Babylon 5 episode guides, nerds!!! I had to switch to a "newer" version of AOL (thank god for oldversion.com). I kept getting an error about byte size or something; probably an issue with running it in Windows XP and it thinks a 1TB hard drive is like -400MB or something. Keywords don't work at all in this version. Any keyword you type in forces you to go to a website so I still have to get around it by editing "favorite places" links which were direct links to keywords. I am finding some by opening old old personal file cabinet file (basically a file with no extension that is just your screen name) and finding the favorite places in there.  Chat rooms still exist, and there's people in them! Don't get me wrong, 99% are completely empty but there's still a few hundred or so people scattered around. I actually don't know how people are getting into the chat. They must still all be on 6.0 on Windows ME or something because if you go to keyword "chatroom listing" it tries to get you to some website that doesn't even have chatrooms.  When was there a Kurt Cobain movie?  Whenever I try one of the keyword contact forms  I get this error:  This photo popped up when I clicked for a "virtual tour of the CSPAN offices".  It's great what warranted using the word "virtual" back then I had to go back to 6.0 because way too much stuff wasn't working in ones newer than that.  I can't believe I got lucky enough to find that. For anyone who cares (no one) the keyword to access it is aol://4344:1519.slparent.11404124.522707342 Unfortunately when I click "Play Game" it just loads indefinitely   Just to show you how broken everything is, when I clicked on "feedback" for Slingo it gave me this:   NARC!! Remember when you could literally get banned from the internet for cursing?  *calls AOL with deep voice* "Uh yeah, I am the father of XxGokuLuvrxX, I have punished him accordingly and would like to reinstate our internet, please" *voice creaks* Unfortunately clicking on "games channel" brings up infinite loading. I wish I could get AOL 3.0 to allow me to sign on. I am still working on finding that Gamestorm keyword and seeing if it's still there.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:48
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This AOL necromancy is probably good enough for its own thread, it's like digging into a time capsule. It's such a shame that the contact emails no longer work, would be the funniest thing if it actually let you submit the email somehow. I used to go into Hecklers Online and Antagonist Inc. all the time when I was younger, if you could find those keywords it would be amazing.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:26
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Oh man, I actually remember playing Slingo on 3.0...
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Apr 10, 2016 03:32
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Any old Usenet denizens ever go back and look for your post history? I posted quite a bit to a bunch of different Usenet groups back in the late 80s early 90s, and had fun a few weeks back querying groups.google. com for all my old posts. I was pleasantly surprised to see my entire post history from more than 25 years ago lovingly archived within the bowels of Google. It was kind of like looking at an old scrap book.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:34
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Original_Z posted:It's such a shame that the contact emails no longer work, would be the funniest thing if it actually let you submit the email somehow.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:38
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Original_Z posted:This AOL necromancy is probably good enough for its own thread, it's like digging into a time capsule. Thanks man. Glad you are enjoying it. As a matter of fact, I was able to submit a complaint that AOL member profiles weren't working. I forgot to take a screen shot, though. How great would it be if I sent someone's pager off? Anyway, I was hoping this will lead me to the old games channel:  Here's the weirdest thing if you click on "games chatroom":  I don't even know how it could get so wonky that that happens. aol://4344:1106.storyx.2553418.516237200 got me this:  aol://4344:152.AATNew.1932606.576957188 got me this:  haha it's literally "Let me google that for you" in 1996 terms. I randomly clicked on the empty spots and got this:  loving hell, AOL was charging $10 a month for that? This had to be before websites were a thing. This favorite place/keyword: aol://4344:2553.Q4whrW47.26805777.566838727 helped me find this (after lots of random rooting around):  Unfortunately nothing loads up when I click it I am 92% sure that if I could somehow be "allowed" to sign on with the 3.0 or 4.0 software, I'd be able to get in there and download stuff. Anybody have any idea on what I can mess with in the software so that it thinks it's a newer version?
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Apr 10, 2016 03:39
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:I had to switch to a "newer" version of AOL (thank god for oldversion.com). I kept getting an error about byte size or something; probably an issue with running it in Windows XP and it thinks a 1TB hard drive is like -400MB or something. quote:They must still all be on 6.0 on Windows ME or something Yeah I noticed you have Windows XP from the Fisher Price theme, I never used AOL but I assumed that wasn't really contemporary, and from searching the web it looks like AOL 6 came out in 2000. You should totally install Windows 9x/ME in VirtualBox for the full experience. Actually I'm wondering if AOL would have used Internet Explorer for any rendering, i.e. embedded IE into the AOL app, in which case running on XP may well break things. There's probably a web page with some pro AOL archaeologists somewhere. Whatever you can think doing briefly for a little bit of fun, someone else on the Internet has already dedicated their entire life to.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:46
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So, speaking as a non-US goon who's never used or had to use AOL, you need a special program to access this stuff, right? Kind of like an AOL-specific browser? Firefox et al won't work? Forgive me if that's a stupid question.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:48
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You really need to archive all those AOL screens.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:51
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:So, speaking as a non-US goon who's never used or had to use AOL, you need a special program to access this stuff, right? Kind of like an AOL-specific browser? Firefox et al won't work? Yes, you need the AOL software. Back in the day there were several providers that offered 'Walled Garden' type services with curated content that you needed special software to access. Then later on things moved towards online access as a service that connected to the internet. This is really neat stuff, I'm surprised so much of that poo poo still exists on their network.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:58
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Seeing that poo poo makes me depressed. Early internet owned in so many ways.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:07
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Cool, thanks for the info. Either I'm too young to have been around for that kind of thing, or it never existed in my country in the first place.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:07
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reagan posted:Seeing that poo poo makes me depressed. Early internet owned in so many ways. Remember fuckin web rings and poo poo?
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Apr 10, 2016 04:12
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reagan posted:Seeing that poo poo makes me depressed. Early internet owned in so many ways. It really did. I think because we had access to an infinite amount of information, yet it was still limited enough that it could keep your attention. Now I can barely open a tab without loading up a different tab for a different site and switch around them all like a crazy person. Back then it was more like reading a newspaper. 1000 Brown M and Ms posted:So, speaking as a non-US goon who's never used or had to use AOL, you need a special program to access this stuff, right? Kind of like an AOL-specific browser? Firefox et al won't work? A lot of these things were from "before" there were really websites. I was using AOL back in like 1993 and all it was were bulletin boards and keywords. Don't get me wrong, websites existed, but you literally could not visit them on certain internet providers. Hell, I remember AOL wouldn't even let you sign on from two different computers if you were at a friend's house, and your dad was using AOL. Two completely different screen names in two different locations, and you would not be allowed to sign on. It was crazy times.  jm20 posted:You really need to archive all those AOL screens. I am trying my best. I really want to get to the file download area. There's gotta be some people's stuff still in there that they thought was lost forever. This is what it looked like when I was able to sign on with AOL 4.0 about 2 years back:  Unfortunately that was when I was still allowed to sign on with 3.0 through 5.0. I think being on 6.0 is what's screwing me here. Buttcoin purse posted:Yeah I noticed you have Windows XP from the Fisher Price theme, I never used AOL but I assumed that wasn't really contemporary, and from searching the web it looks like AOL 6 came out in 2000. You should totally install Windows 9x/ME in VirtualBox for the full experience. Actually I'm wondering if AOL would have used Internet Explorer for any rendering, i.e. embedded IE into the AOL app, in which case running on XP may well break things. OK, I installed XP just for this (honestly I thought a 32 bit OS would be enough) but I will download VirtualBox and try to get Win98 running. I have never done it before so I hope I get it going and it recognizes my internet connection from within it or whatever. Oh and I just found this keyword two minutes ago: http://imgur.com/LZbbh6f (slightly  )
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Apr 10, 2016 04:14
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:It really did. I think because you had access to a ridiculous and infinite amount of information, yet it was still limited enough that it kept your attention. Now I can barely open a tab without loading up a different tab for a different site. Jesus gently caress you are making me nostalgia hard with these screenshots. As for the not letting you sign on twice in one location, it was probably because you only had one access number.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:16
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Skoll posted:
Nope! It had nothing to do with access numbers. You could have been using TCP/IP in a different country; it didn't matter. It was just a weird restriction I guess because maybe it would confuse their billing for the few people who didn't have unlimited.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:17
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reagan posted:Seeing that poo poo makes me depressed. Early internet owned in so many ways. It's very weird thinking about the days when spam didn't exist and people didn't really do business or sell things on the internet.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:18
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I remember when AOL screen names were limted to like seven characters, then AOL 4.0 came out and they doubled it as well as let you use color in chatrooms and IMs.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:19
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Skoll posted:I remember when AOL screen names were limted to like seven characters, then AOL 4.0 came out and they doubled it as well as let you use color in chatrooms and IMs. Yep, I literally sat in front of my computer, counting down when they announced you could have longer screen names because I wanted to get in on all the ones that I knew others would take. I got some really good ones out of that. I believe the limit was 10 and they increased it to 15. I even remember buddy lists had a limit of 102 buddies or something stupid. That was changed in 5.0 or so. edit: this actually worked: 
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Apr 10, 2016 04:22
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OK I downloaded windows98SE.vdi and I downloaded Virtual Box. I can't seem to get Windows 98 to have anything better than 16 bit graphics, making it impossible to do anything, and it keeps asking me for drivers and to put in the Windows 98 CD.  edit: also the mouse is slow as hell Chumbawumba4ever97 has a new favorite as of 04:51 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 04:47
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Wikireaders sound like a cool idea. I'd get one if they still have individual pages for every pokemon from before when Wikipedia decided they're not "relevant" and deleted them.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:53
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Okay, so apparently the AOL protocol is somewhat understood, I found documentation of it here, and Wireshark understands it. Maybe that means you could work out how to hack the packets to fake the version number. Maybe though different versions have slightly different protocols. http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=AOL - lots of words about how to archive AOL, which links to: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22AOL+Files%22 - which includes items like: https://archive.org/details/aol-file-protocol-4400-4901-to-5000 "This is a panic download of aol://4400:4901-to-5000 as of 2014-12-11." - which has a 300M .zip file, and the accompanying list of files just looks like.. well just everything, which I guess is what AOL was: pre:Archive: aol-file-protocol-4400-4901-to-5000.zip
Length Date Time Name
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0 12-12-2014 01:21 AOLDLs/BBS Corner Software/1STBBS_ V1.17 BBS Host/
106726 12-12-2014 01:22 AOLDLs/BBS Corner Software/1STBBS_ V1.17 BBS Host/1stBBS Demo.sea
1693 12-12-2014 01:21 AOLDLs/BBS Corner Software/1STBBS_ V1.17 BBS Host/info.txt
0 12-12-2014 01:20 AOLDLs/BBS Corner Software/APP_ Hermes II v3.5.2/
400558 12-12-2014 01:20 AOLDLs/BBS Corner Software/APP_ Hermes II v3.5.2/HermesIIv3.5.2.sit
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20253 12-12-2014 01:35 AOLDLs/Books Archives/Online Book Group CHAT 10-4-9/BOOKCHAT.log
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324036 12-12-2014 04:01 AOLDLs/CDRom Utilities/3DCD_ Windows CD Player v2.0/3DCD20.zip
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48442 12-12-2014 01:27 AOLDLs/Home Theater Archives/STAR WARS_ Princess Leia/LEIA.jpg
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65536 12-12-2014 02:20 AOLDLs/Transcripts Library II/Military graphics - HYPERCARD/Military Graphics
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290812 12-12-2014 05:17 AOLDLs/TV Clips - Vintage/WAV_ Welcome Back Kotter Theme/WBKOTTER.wav
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111384 12-12-2014 01:56 AOLDLs/Video Games Archives/WAV_ MK3's KABAL fatality/KABSCREM.wav
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7723 12-12-2014 02:36 AOLDLs/Magick and Philosophy/Online Ritual for Chat Rooms_IRC/CYBERRIT.txt
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9666 12-12-2014 06:01 AOLDLs/Pets Photos -- Edited/200_Guinnea Pig in Santa Hat/SantaHolly200x150.jpg
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Apr 10, 2016 04:56
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:OK I downloaded windows98SE.vdi and I downloaded Virtual Box. I can't seem to get Windows 98 to have anything better than 16 bit graphics, making it impossible to do anything, and it keeps asking me for drivers and to put in the Windows 98 CD. The problem is not 16-bit color, but 16 colors, right?  I forgot it's actually kind of hard to get that stuff working well.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:59
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Buttcoin purse posted:The problem is not 16-bit color, but 16 colors, right? By default Windows 98 will run only in 640x480 resolution, 16-colors. Performance Note: VirtualBox is not optimized for 16-colors (4-bit) emulation. It works very slow this way. Having 32-bit True Color driver makes Win98 VMs run on VirtualBox *much* faster. If you want True color or high resolution, you need to download special drivers. 3.1. bearwindows driver (unstable) http://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/ NOTE: You must install "Universal version" (2nd link), as the "VirtualBox" version is known to have problems. WARNING: This driver is buggy, and many Windows fonts do not render correctly with it. Not recommended. 3.2. SciTech Display Doctor (recommended) The second option is to get the SciTech Display Doctor version 7 beta driver (12 MB) - (contributed by Richard_S) https://www.dropbox.com/s/226caou8x0jf8 ... ctor-7.iso -or- https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BycgkM ... UhnWGRycVE The driver is a high quality commercial grade video driver (even includes some software emulated Open GL 3D support), and it does include an exe installer program. Despite having an installer, the SciTech Display Doctor is a little tricky to get going. After the program launches, you have to find the little round radio button link to click to 'enable' the new driver (otherwise you still have VGA). Even then, you can't select any higher resolution modes until you ditch the 'default monitor' and select one of the 'Super VGA' types. After fiddling around with the above changes and rebooting several times you should be able to select 800x600 or 1024x768 (or higher) resolutions with 32 bit color depth. (setting 32 bit color mode optimizes the interface with Virtualbox and really speeds things up)
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Apr 10, 2016 05:11
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:OK I downloaded windows98SE.vdi and I downloaded Virtual Box. I can't seem to get Windows 98 to have anything better than 16 bit graphics, making it impossible to do anything, and it keeps asking me for drivers and to put in the Windows 98 CD. This is the tutorial I used to get Win98SE working properly in VB: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9918 It's actually pretty straightforward if you're patient and follow the instructions e:fb
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Apr 10, 2016 05:15
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theultimo posted:By default Windows 98 will run only in 640x480 resolution, 16-colors. 1000 Brown M and Ms posted:This is the tutorial I used to get Win98SE working properly in VB: OK, thanks to both of you. I will give this a try and will probably have much better luck on Win98! I appreciate it and I will post whatever I find. Buttcoin purse posted:Okay, so apparently the AOL protocol is somewhat understood, I found documentation of it here, and Wireshark understands it. Maybe that means you could work out how to hack the packets to fake the version number. Maybe though different versions have slightly different protocols. Holy crap, that would be amazing! Though I highly doubt keywords would have been saved (in what format would they be in?) Anyway I am download it right now and will report back. If anyone gets any ideas on how to fake the version number via packets, let me know what to do and I will give it a shot.
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Apr 10, 2016 05:18
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I messed around looking in the archive.org stuff, and it's a shitload of .sit files. Other stuff like Jeopardy demo for Windows 3.1, stuff like that. Nothing really AOL related it seems. Lots of .sit files and stuff I can't open.  Still working on getting 3.0 to let me on. edit: holy moly!  http://www.aciddr0p.net/aolunorgd/ Chumbawumba4ever97 has a new favorite as of 06:13 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 05:59
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OK I got windows 98 in VirtualBox to give me a good, clean image (thank you Display Doctor), and I managed to get Firefox installed (it seemed like the only way I could transfer it from my PC to the Virtual Machine was by creating a CD ISO of firefox  ) but when I run the web browser, it says no connection. I get this when I try to see if the modem is working OK: edit: never mind, I had to find some obscure AMD network driver that wasn't installed. Boy do I not miss this stuff. Chumbawumba4ever97 has a new favorite as of 07:20 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 07:03
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