Desty

Probably my favourite game on the ST apart from maybe the Chaos Engine!

I'm excited about this, because the Neo Geo was always a mysterious alien technology that only existed in arcades when I was a kid. In a time of fibs and one-upmanship in the nerd's schoolyard, nobody I knew ever even claimed to know someone who had a Neo Geo. But I have to ask, why 4 years before releasing the first episode? I wonder if you're overplanning things up-front and perhaps committing the "big software project" sin, when it might be less risky and more fun to wing it a bit and just do an OK job on the first few episodes.

Yeah but it's not trivial to do that, since the backup seems to be only a partial one. The restoration process sounds a lot more messy and complicated than the hopeful possibility of co-operating with the new guy buying out 250host. 10USD is a pittance really, I'm sure most of the AF members would gladly pay more than that. Added to the balance is that Dal has discovered that the Wiki is missing from the backup - to me that's a very valuable resource, although it could conceivably be recovered at a later date.

Seems like you're making a leap of faith to assume that Motorola's docs would clearly outline which instructions were futureproof or not - you'd have to check really. In any case, maybe the compiler version, or the build flags to the compiler happened to use instructions or alignments that turned out to be incompatible with the later chips. The source code to TOS was IIRC about 60%-70% C and the rest assembly. This was apparently one reason why the VDI/AES routines were so slow in GEM applications, leading to third-party improvements like QuickST (or maybe it was TurboST) and NVDI which used optimised assembly for the bottleneck operations. Also IIRC from the superb Dadhacker blog and other articles, wasn't TOS a port of CP/M, with DR's GEM thrown on top? Note that GEM was released standalone for PC DOS as well, and was eventually crippled by a nonsensical Apple lawsuit, although its modern descendants look nice today

That's a bit of a mess. I'd expect that nobody really wants to take on that business, and since hosting services are mostly interchangeable, what people want is just access to their hosted data so they can quickly make backups and move to greener pastures. With that thread in mind, could we maybe open up another dialogue with Liquid Web and try to strike a deal just to get access to Brian's VMs and recover/archive/return each customer's data? It sounds a bit like extortion, so maybe LW will be more flexible given the situation. Or maybe they'll ask for the 4 months' backlog of Brian's fees before doing anything at all.

Good digging! Maybe Liquid Web would be willing to provide a backup image if they have one (which they almost certainly do), on the grounds that the courts ruled in favour of them to shut down that tosser's operation? They're obviously aware that there are many people whose sites have been destroyed by this, through no fault of their own whatsoever, and that it's their data and not Brian's, who no longer has access to it in any case. I'm sure if we could get one of them on the phone they'd be decent about it. You've got to feel for the people with business sites who lost domain names (and worse, their own customers) because of all this. Sucks. My Macbook's hard disk died last year and took out some non-backed-up baby photos and videos. I knew one day I'd learn the hard way that backing up regularly is a good idea