Hi all,
This is just going to be a brief update because naturally I don't really have any newly recovered files or anything like that to show just yet (working on it!)
What I
am attempting to do, however, is spread some awareness about how some of these files may be recovered. I think, potentially, there's a lot of people out there that could put their old PCs to use and recover some of the lost files, but I think every time I mention this it slips by most people with few attempting it themselves. Casting a wider net and informing more people of what is lost (and also that the site is lost at all, as many old users may not know this!) seemed like the best approach.
I should probably state in advance that this is yet to have led to any new findings, and I don't think many people have really taken any of my spread awareness as an opportunity to try out any of the methods I proposed themselves, but maybe it's just a matter of time and continual raising awareness that will get us there. I've considered making a YouTube video on the topic too, which would hopefully spread awareness further, but that'll take longer to prepare.
Anyway - I've taken two steps to help better document the history of Tamatown and give it some more attention, and I'll start with the latter:
The Twitter thread
When I first joined Twitter about 10 years ago, a tweet getting about 50 favourites was usually a fairly big deal. Nowadays you can tweet just about anything and within moments it'll be at 10 likes and 2 retweets - and if you tweet about something people actually care about - or better yet, a whole thread about something people care about - then you're bound to cause quite a wide range of people to see your content.
A few days back, I wrote a long long loooong thread on Twitter about the current state of Tamatown with the hope that it would end up with the right people or motivate more people to check their old PC caches. As of yet, no luck, but the thread did get roughly 150 retweets before slowing down. As for how many people saw it, if the analytics are to be believed...
Apparently, quite a few. I can never remember what the link policy is here, but if you want to read the thread and learn a bit of Tamatown history (and perhaps help spread awareness), I've embedded the thread below:
At the end of the thread I announced something I've been working on for a month or so:
MameMame Library
The documentation surrounding what Tamatown files are lost has always been a little bit rubbish - I even made mistakes in my initial post in this thread. The spreadsheet I was maintaining is perhaps not the friendliest or easiest to access source of documentation, so I decided to make a website to keep up-to-date info about the preserved (and lost) Tamatown files, as well as what each file did:
https://mamemamelibrary.crd.co/
There's still a lot to fill in (eventually I'll get around to those Music City files!), but as it is this really helps illustrate just how much is left to find. I've tried to spend time getting feedback from people to make sure it's as accessible as possible, and there's FAQ and help pages for anyone that wants to learn more about Tamatown or how we can attempt to recover some of the lost files.
Looking forward to seeing what people think of the site, but the most important thing is that this will help keep a much more public-facing form of documentation for Tamatown's lost files!
Until next time!
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Off topic: apparently I've been on this site 14 years now, that definitely doesn't make me feel old at all