iiotenki

The Tony Hawk of Tokimeki Memorial

A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.



gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

The long-running Japanese software portal vector.co.jp is ending their hp.vector homepage service and deleting all hosted sites on December 20—this service hosts a ton of turn-of-the-millennium doujin and homebrew pages, including a lot of pasocom-relevant material for PC98, MSX, etc by many authors who never moved and/or went MIA and aren't going to back up their pages of their own accord, so if there's anything you want to save, don't sleep on it. (IIRC they never expanded their 5MB hosting cap, so we're not talking unwieldy levels of data.)


gretchenleigh
@gretchenleigh

With the help of @dog and @asie, who were able to point me to the resources to build a pretty darn close to perfect list of seed URLs, we're expecting to get a full archive. It became a side project that I was able to successfully pitch as part of my work at Archive.

I'll have more updates soon as we make the material available, but the final product will be a collection with full-text search and potentially extended metadata, so more than just a bunch of unwieldy Wayback captures.


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

Turns out that as of at least 2016, Vector published a list of all homepages that existed. (There were around 5000.) So you can visit the full list of homepages manually, and there are also a couple attempts to archive the full set of pages before they go down. Given the very reasonable size of all of this, I think 100% is going to get backed up.

in reply to @gretchenleigh's post:

OK, good news: the URL format is 100% predictable. Usernames are in the format VAnnnnnn - user IDs are six-digit numbers left padded with zeroes. I don't think they were assigned sequentially because there are a lot of missing numbers, but it should be very easy to just enumerate every possible username in that range to see which ones exist.

in reply to @gretchenleigh's post: