A new era

[Zyx]

Hello.

If you're reading this, then we have safely arrived to the new era of Curly's World of Freeware. You might notice that the forum's theme seems to have reverted to the phpBB default and things look a bit different.

The forum software has been updated to the latest and greatest, phpBB 3.1, which among other things mean that the old theme did not work anymore. Don't worry, we'll get a logo up there in the left top corner as soon as we can.

Your reading experience has also moved from the safe Copenhagen (just one big flood in 2011!) to much more flood-resistant Amsterdam! Oh, wait...

The games site will be closed soon. I feel that the work of preserving and curating the best games is better handled by organizations with actual resources to do that, like Archive.org which just opened up it's massive Classic PC games section.

[jayenkai]

Gotta love Archive.org, lately. God only knows how they're getting away with it all, but they preserve EVERYTHING, and nobody ever seems to complain about it!!

It's good to have permament archives, though. I hope that archive.org's stuff sticks around, and that all the silly "pruffeshunals" don't start whinging. .. But this is the internet, and whingers will whinge.

My own archive needs a bit of a redux. I was supposed to be recoding the entire thing during December, but I lazily didn't bother. I oughta get around to that, some time.

[Zyx]

Well, their collection consists of freeware, shareware and demos... and they ask copyright holders if anyone is interested in having their full game there. Wait, that sounds familiar... I probably should get in touch with the Internet Archive guys and ask if they're interested in our collection of DOS and Windows games mainly from 2000 - 2010.

[Tormuse]

Whoops, am I too late to download a few more games before you send them away?

Well, I haven't downloaded any games in ages anyway; I mostly come here for the people. (When I can be persuaded to come out of lurking, that is)

[Zyx]

The game downloads are now disabled, but if you need any, I can provide access to them if they're not available from other sources.

[Zyx]

OK, I sent an email to the maintainer of Internet Archive's PC Games collection. Let's see if we can donate our collection to them.

[Zyx]

...and it seems like CWF's collection will be from here on be hosted on the Internet Archive.

[jayenkai]

Awesome news

[eMTe]

Whoops, am I too late to download a few more games before you send them away?

I have all games we hosted during latest incarnation of CWF (as you may or may not know we ceased hosting some of the bigger [or well supported and updated by developers] files earlier), so if you want some just ask. I even consider making torrent file of the collection (to my surprise it's not that big - 11,8 Gb), but I don't know what interest people would have in such file. Maybe in 2050?

[Zyx]

Status update: the games are slowly making their way to the Internet Archive's index.

[jayenkai]

Started getting Google Alert emails for some of my really old games, based on the fact that they're popping up on the Internet Archive!!

\o/yeay\o/

[Tormuse]

Woo! That's pretty cool, Jayenkai!

[Zyx]

The Operation Deep-Six has been completed.

The main games site is no more, and it redirects to the forums now.

The games are available on the Internet Archive. We have our own "collection" there.

[jayenkai]

*cries*

We'll miss you, self-hosted archive!
Farewell!!

[eMTe]

The trick is to keep living.