Masters of the Elements (or Meister Zufall und die Herrscher der Elemente in Germany) is an educational adventure video game developed by the Dutch studio IJsfontein Interactive Media, initially released in late 1997 for Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.

I don’t remember when I got the game; it was most likely Christmas 1999 or 2000. What I do remember, though, is that I spent many hours wandering around the game and trying to solve the puzzles.

And I remember the day the game would stop working forever: The day I updated my PC to Windows 2000.

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One part of my work for the ScummVM project is helping to keep the server infrastructure up and running, including our primary server, which hosts our website, wiki, forums, and some internal applications.

About three weeks ago, I started receiving monitoring notifications indicating an increased load on the MariaDB server. This in itself is nothing too unusual. It usually means nothing but a sudden influx of new visitors, and in most cases, it is just a link being shared somewhere or a single IP trying to annoy us.

The notifications popped up and disappeared as quickly as they appeared. I started to look into the log files of our web server, and I didn’t notice anything too unusual, maybe a bit more background noise. This went on for a couple of days without seriously impacting our server or accessibility–it was a tad slower than usual.

And then the website went down.

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In June 2022, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be phased out. In February 2023, they deactivated it with a Windows 10 updated and encouraged users to switch to their Edge browser.

If you ever tried to start Internet Explorer through iexplore.exe after this date or on a fresh Windows 11 installation, Windows opens the Edge browser instead. If you want to use a web application that only supports Internet Explorer, Microsoft recommends using the compatibility mode in the Edge browser.

But what if I tell you that to this date, Internet Explorer is deeply embedded in Windows 11 and can be used without even having the Edge browser installed?

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For my previous article, I added Syntax highlighting to my Hugo installation.

Reviewing the page on my iPhone, I noticed something weird—the font rendering for the code blocks was entirely off.

Time to fix it!

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This is the first episode of a new series: BTS, short for “Behind the Scenes”. In this series, I’m going through some scripts and techniques I use to build and maintain fabulous.systems.

Over the weekend, I wrote a script that parses my entire website and submits all URLs to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, including all outgoing links.

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On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the public, and the community managed to provide MS-DOS 4.01 as well.

While the original release was available as a set of six 5,25" floppy disks (and optionally three 3,5" disks for version 4.01), this open-source release does not have official installation media.

Recreating the original media would theoretically be possible, but I want to focus on the 720k images for this project. Having to swap around six floppies multiple times isn’t practical. Furthermore, we can build images for 1.44 MB floppy disks for increased compatibility: The SELECT utility used for the installation process doesn’t like it if you install it on floppies with a different format than the source disks are written in.

The open-source release is missing a few program files and the entire DOSSHELL environment, so that’s something we also have to deal with.

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March 1995. Although PCs had been around for many years at this point, less than 40% of households in the US owned one. Back then, people mostly associated PCs with being a machine used at work, not a thing you’d even need at home. They were complicated and… unfriendly.

Just a few months before the launch of the all-new Windows 95, Microsoft Bob was an attempt to create a user-friendly interface that runs on top of Windows to increase the popularity of PCs at home and show how valuable a PC might be for purposes other than business.

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Today, I’m excited to finally announce a new side project I’ve been working on for quite a while.

To be more precise, this will be our new side project that we’ll be working on in the future.

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Introduction

Have you ever noticed that a pixel-perfect screenshot from a virtual machine running MS-DOS in the default VGA text mode looks slightly off? The characters are too wide, and the whole image seems stretched.

At the very least, it doesn’t evoke the same nostalgic feeling as the old CRT days, does it?

But did you know that what you’re seeing is a perfect representation of the actual image, while your monitor from 1995 was deceiving you? Let’s have a closer look.

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Do you know what computer games and the Voyager space probes have in common? Clever engineering can extend their missions way beyond their intended lifetime.

3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, the iconic game bundled with the Microsoft Plus! packs and included in Windows NT4 up to Windows XP, is preserved for decades to come thanks to a reverse engineering project by Andrey Muzychenko.

Andrey’s work involved decompiling the executable that shipped with Windows XP and creating a modern reimplementation using SDL2. This means you can now enjoy both the bundled version and the ‘Full Tilt! Pinball’ version on Windows, Linux and macOS.

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