Neat Finds #04: Old Machines, Small Rings and Terminal Weather

Issue four. My stars pulled in two directions this time. On one side, old machines and old games that now boot inside a browser tab. On the other, the small web's oldest social tools: webrings, finger, chat over SSH. There's some terminal weather in the middle and a couple of things that are just pretty to look at. As usual, no AI projects.

Same deal as always: I haven't tested everything here, and the last lines of each entry are what I'd be tempted to build, not promises.

01. lainTSX #

github.com/ad044/lainTSX

Serial Experiments Lain got a PlayStation game in Japan in 1998, and it never had a proper English release. lainTSX rebuilds it for the browser with three.js and adds a subtitle system, with the translations organized on Crowdin. The repo doesn't ship any of the game's files: you bring the two original discs, and an extraction script pulls out what it needs. A Portuguese subtitle track would be a nice thing to help with.

02. Infinite Mac #

github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac

Classic Macs from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s that load instantly in a browser, with a big software library already on the disk. Each era has its own shortcut, like system7.app and macos9.app, and the full collection lives at infinitemac.org. The emulated Macs can also be embedded in other websites and controlled from code. That part gives me ideas: a post about an old program where you can open the actual program right there, inside the page.

03. Encarta 95 on the web #

github.com/benwinding/encarta95web

Microsoft Encarta 95 running entirely in the browser through the v86 emulator, served as a static site. A Windows 95 snapshot loads already booted, straight into Encarta, and the hard disk and the CD are streamed as you need them. Mind Maze is in there. If you want to build it yourself you supply the CD image, but you can just play it here. The README's notes on making a touchscreen drive a Windows 95 mouse are worth reading on their own.

04. micropolisJS #

github.com/graememcc/micropolisJS

When the original SimCity code was released as open source under the name Micropolis, ports started showing up everywhere. This is the JavaScript and HTML5 one, and it plays at graememcc.co.uk/micropolisJS. Read the license notes before you reuse anything: the code is GPLv3 with extra terms, and the name Micropolis has its own license. OpenSC2K in issue two covered SimCity 2000. This one goes back to the first city.

05. wipEout Rewrite #

github.com/phoboslab/wipeout-rewrite

A re-implementation of wipEout, the 1995 PlayStation racer, in C. You can play it in the browser, and there's a long blog post about how it was done. It builds with SDL2 or Sokol on Linux, the BSDs, macOS, Windows and Emscripten. The repo doesn't include the game's textures and models, and the README has a short, honest section about the legal side. It's still marked as a work in progress.

06. smolnes #

github.com/binji/smolnes

A NES emulator in about 5,000 significant bytes of C. It handles mappers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7, which covers a lot of the library: the screenshots include Super Mario Bros. 3, Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man and Castlevania. To change the keys you edit line 20 of the source and look up SDL scancodes, and that tells you everything about the spirit of the thing. Printing the whole source on one sheet and pinning it next to the desk sounds like a good idea.

07. MBBSEmu #

github.com/mbbsemu/MBBSEmu

An emulator for MajorBBS and Worldgroup modules, the games and add-ons that ran on one of the big commercial BBS packages of the late 80s and 90s. It runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, on x86 and ARM, so a Raspberry Pi will do. There's a compatibility list for the modules and a wiki for the config files. One of those old multiplayer games on a Pi, with a telnet port open for friends, would make a fine weekend project.

08. Durdraw #

github.com/durdraw/durdraw

An ASCII, Unicode and ANSI art editor for Unix terminals. It does frame animation, 16 and 256 colors, mouse input, CP437 and Unicode conversion, and exports to HTML and mIRC colors. With ansilove installed, it also exports PNG and animated GIF. The README says it's inspired by TheDraw, AcidDraw and PabloDraw (no relation, I promise). With the Blocktronics artpacks from last issue, you have both the gallery and the pencil.

09. ssh-chat #

github.com/shazow/ssh-chat

A custom SSH server where you get a chat prompt instead of a shell. Try it with ssh ssh.chat, and check the host key fingerprint listed in the README first. Releases are single binaries for Linux, macOS and the Raspberry Pi. A private room for runv.club would be easy to set up with this.

10. Finger.Farm #

github.com/jonroig/finger.farm

Hosting for the finger protocol, RFC 742, from the late 70s. People used to keep .plan and .project files that anyone could read with finger user@host, and the client is still installed on most systems. This is a finger server in Node.js, with a REST API to update your status and SQLite by default. Type finger jroig@finger.farm in a terminal to see it answer. A .plan file is about the smallest blog there is.

11. Astrobotany #

github.com/michael-lazar/astrobotany

A community garden over the Gemini protocol, forked from botany. You get a plant drawn in ASCII art and keep it alive by watering it, and since it's a community garden, other people's plants are there too. It lives at gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us, with an HTTP proxy for anyone without a Gemini browser. The plant art was colored in playscii with a 240-color palette, and soil, flowers and background keep the same colors across every plant.

12. linecast #

github.com/ashuttl/linecast

Weather, tides, the sun, the moon, maps and a planetarium in your terminal. The tagline says it best: "The Old Farmer's Almanac meets Minitel." Seven small apps on free public data, with no accounts and no API keys. It takes its colors from your terminal theme and works over SSH and inside tmux. My startpage at pablo.ooo already shows the moon phase; this would put it in a tmux pane too. Try it without installing anything with uvx linecast moon.

13. Terrascope #

github.com/a-shygun/Terrascope

A world map drawn with Braille characters in the terminal, with countries, place names, live aircraft, city weather, radar, earthquakes and the line between day and night. Country and airport names ship with the package, and the bigger map data is downloaded once and cached. The author calls it early-stage software. Put it in a pane next to linecast and the terminal starts to look like a small weather station.

14. XXIIVV webring #

github.com/XXIIVV/webring

A webring for personal websites: diaries, wikis and portfolios. The rules are strict. You need at least ten content pages and an about page (blog posts don't count), your own domain, and a site that doesn't need JavaScript to be read. Single-page sites and business homepages are out, and since 2026 every member needs an 88x31 banner. The ring never goes past 256 sites, and new ones take the place of sites that go dark. You join by opening a pull request.

15. Lieu #

github.com/cblgh/lieu

A neighbourhood search engine. Instead of the whole internet, it crawls the sites in a webring and lets you search only those, to help personal sites make "serendipitous connexions". The commands are small and do one thing each: precrawl, crawl, ingest, host. A Lieu instance over the Weirdnet catalog, the same one behind rss.expert, is the first thing I'd try.

16. Fraidycat #

github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat

"Follow from afar." A tool for following people across blogs, wikis, YouTube, Reddit and other places, without an inbox. It shows you who has been active and a short summary of what they posted, sorted by recency, and you decide with tags and priorities how closely to follow each person. The main branch is the upcoming Fraidycat 2; the stable browser extension is on the v1.1 branch.

17. Postmarks #

github.com/ckolderup/postmarks

A bookmarking site you own that talks to the fediverse. People on Mastodon or any text-based ActivityPub platform can follow your bookmarks, and you can interact with other Postmarks sites. One owner, one password in a .env file, and Docker Compose if you want it. I'd follow it from my own account on murad.social and see what a link log feels like in a timeline.

18. 2133 Blinkie & Button Generator #

github.com/numbpill3d/2133-blinkie-button-forge

"still blinking in the ruins." A browser tool for blinkies, 88x31 buttons, microbanners and pixel tags, with fonts, borders and optional glitter, exported as GIF or PNG. It's plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no backend, so you can host your own copy. Try it here. Since the XXIIVV webring now asks for an 88x31 banner, the timing works out.

19. florilegium #

github.com/kevinraymond/florilegium

Procedurally generated Delft-blue floral margins for LaTeX. There are no images: every petal, leaf and stem is a curve computed while the page is being written, painted like watercolor and placed straight into the PDF. Each document has a seed, the plants are sampled from genomes of botanical traits, and the garden fills whatever space the text leaves free. It runs on LuaLaTeX, works on Overleaf, and there's a playground in the browser. The whole project started from a Reddit question about how to draw flowers like these in LaTeX.

20. poline #

github.com/meodai/poline

"An enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates." It draws lines between anchor colors in HSL space and samples points along them, so two anchors give you a full palette. The README is written like a spellbook from top to bottom ("Begin your journey with poline by following this simple incantation"). You can install it from npm or load it from unpkg. With pablo.space around, this one had to end up here.

Bonus tabs #

A few more I refuse to close:

REVENGE.CSS · A bookmarklet that marks bad HTML with pink error boxes in Comic Sans.

System.css · Interfaces that look like the Mac's System 6, without any JavaScript.

hotglue · A drag-and-drop web page builder that keeps everything in flat files and runs on plain PHP 8.

RetroBar · Swaps the Windows taskbar for the one from 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP or Vista.

greyline · Brings back the IBM ThinkPad World Time Active Desktop as a live wallpaper on Linux.

gitlogue · Replays your Git commits in the terminal as animated typing, with a screensaver mode.

jless · A JSON viewer for the command line, with vim-style movement.

ScummWEB · Point-and-click adventures in the browser, with freeware like Beneath a Steel Sky ready to play.

That's issue four. Half of it boots old machines and the other half keeps old habits of the web alive, and I'm not sure those are different things.

Found a strange repository, a forgotten tool or a small piece of software I should see? Send it my way. Reader suggestions are welcome for issue five. And if you make something with any of these, I'd like to see it.

Happy wandering!
Pablo