VOGONS

Announcing OldBeige.net - your retro gateway to the Internet Archive Software Collection

Topic actions

First post, by yestergearpc

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

I am proud to announce a new retro website for the community.

http://oldbeige.net

This site basically acts as a proxy between retro computers and the Internet Archive Software Collection. As long as your old machine has a network connection to the internet and a browser, you can download files, apps, games, etc directly from archive.org! Simple HTML 2.0 - no SSL. Simple Search box. Find what you're looking for and download directly onto your old machine.

This is still in Beta. If you find bugs, and would like to report them please join the oldbeige.net discord server and visit the bug report section (link can be found on the main page). Feature requests are also accepted.

Please don't waste the bandwidth downloading files from a modern PC. You can download directly from Internet Archive if your PC is new enough. Feel free to take a peek around, but it's really made for the old machines!

Hope you all find it useful!
-YesterGearPC

Reply 1 of 1, by st31276a

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

The site is very nice and much more convenient than suffering through the internet archive's slow interface.

With regards to the actual downloading of files:

I see you have a script that fetches and caches the file and then pretends to be the file once it arrived. Since you do no JS (which is great btw), it does a meta refresh after some seconds to see what happened in the mean while. So far so good.

However, upon refresh, I get an internal server error response.

If it were me, I would split the thing in two and let the cacher just serve HTML, reporting the status of the cache fetch if in progress, and if done, point to another script that pretends to be the file / download link (Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=... kinda thing) that serves either the file contents if the file is in the cache, or a 404 if not.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to Milliways
Close window
Close window