Gaming Alexandria is “a group of game preservationists that post scans, articles, interviews, and even dumps of prototypes to be shared with the world before they are potentially lost”. Founded by Dan Hubbard in 2015, the site is regularly updated with discoveries and artifacts from all facets of gaming history and culture.
Their latest project has been preserving type-in programs from Japanese magazines. Like Nibble or even MAD Magazine in the United States, Japanese publications often printed the source code for BASIC programs that users could type into their computers — a low-cost means of early software distribution.
Among the games thus far recovered from the pages of Micom BASIC (マイコンBASIC), a monthly magazine that published from July 1982 to June 1999, are nine Apple II programs:
- Apple Voice (Kida Kazushige)
- Combat Fighter (Yasushi Souda)
- Duel of Thunder Planet (Apple Bear)
- Forbidden Games (RINGO)
- Graphic Maze (Kida Kazushige)
- LORES RUNNER (Mitsuo Takahashi)
- Red Water (ROR)
- The Active Balls (Shinji Minamiyama)
- The Octopus (Shinji Minamiyama)
Each game is available for download as an individual ZIP file that contains a 140K DOS 3.3 .DSK image for use in emulators. Each program’s website listing also include links to high-resolution scans of the original pages that the code was recovered from.
The project is ongoing, with many more magazines still to be scanned. On the Internet Archive, you’ll find a single 251MB ZIP file that contains all the Windows emulators and utilities that Gaming Alexandria uses, enabling anyone to contribute to the effort. A 25-minute video by Gaming Alexandria founder Dustin Hubbard describes his process and workflow.
Hat tip to Jack Yarwood at Time Extension.