I guess I'll formally spill the beans on the poorly kept secret that what I've been working on is fully reverse engineering the avatar and background file formats for Microsoft Comic Chat. (Knowing the crowd here on cohost: you probably know about this program through the NSFW webcomic BoneQuest.)
(Look back through my #mscc tag for posts on this subject.)
I went to look up how the files work and was surprised to find that I couldn't find a good resource for it already.
This turned into me writing my own toolset for analyzing, extracting, editing and repairing these comic chat avatars. That project turned into me scraping the web trying to find as many files as I could to use as test data for perfecting my toolset.
For reasons I can't go into just yet, that project turned into me scraping archive.org itself attempting to recover and repair as many avatars as I possibly could that have otherwise been lost forever. This process requires me to at least know the domain to which an avatar may have been posted, and has led me to scraping the entirety of angelfire, xoom, tripod and geocities archives from the wayback machine.
There will be a longer writeup later accompanied by a full FOSS release of the library and toolkit. I was aiming for April Fool's Day originally, but now it's almost July...
...The good news is that I went from 3000 files (sourced mostly from mermeliz) to almost 16,000 avatars and background files. Only a scant few are irreparable, less than 20 at current count and I am still making frequent progress in uncorrupting files and finding replacements. There are unfortunately many more that are currently entirely lost to the sands of time, already 404 by the time archive.org got to them.
Of those 16,000 files, there's about 6,300 absolutely unique avatars. Many of these have very likely never seen the light of day, as the free web hosts they were stored on corrupted the files when they were first served back in the late 90s. I don't think anyone had the expertise or desire to fix them until... now.
That said, I have a request for you:
If any of you have MS Comic Chat avatars, backgrounds, or source files on your hard drives (.avb, .bgb or .avs files) or know of where you can find any, I am officially happy to receive literally any and all files for the sake of preservation of a very interesting piece of history. I will even take corrupt ones from dying hard drives. I have fixed worse.
I am also very happy to know about literally any website that has ever hosted any of these files. I have crawled and scraped a truly impressive number of them, but on the off chance you know of any (especially for non-English speaking audiences) I'd be delighted to hear about it.
Or, if you know anyone who might be interested in this project - please share this chost with them! I'm happy to chat about this at exhausting length with anyone who would listen. I'd be especially happy to connect with anyone at archive.org for more efficient searching of their archives. I know there's more to find there.
(Yes, I am already in contact with mermeliz, you don't need to share this post with her, thanks!)
Sincerely, with love and heartfelt affection;
--nago
When I worked on the Skype team I tried SO HARD to bring MS Comic Chat back for MS Teams but “The Man” wasn’t into it
thinking about the parallel timeline where microsoft didnt shutter their twitch competitor mixer unceremoniously after buying & rebranding beam, and instead integrated ms comic chat into a widget streamers could put onto their feed to display the viewer chat
