Dispatches · 7 Essays
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Notes on the C-to-Go port, the recovered community archive, the original world files, and where Dark Pawns is going.
And You Wanna Know Why?
Mickey and Mallory Knox were in Dark Pawns. The source code that survived kept their speeches and lost their bodies, so I gave them new ones on the original server and let them kill a warrior named Wayne.
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6 entriesWelcome Back, Serapis
Room 8008 had a prayer that made three staff names immortal. We ported it to Go faithfully, then wrote a test proving it worked.
Free Ale
Eighteen Usenet posts from 1996 to 2002 are now in the archive. Most are ads for Dark Pawns, one of them is mine, and one turned into a four-day fight over the names on the login screen.
What the Wayback Machine Kept
A script walked 342 URLs from the old Dark Pawns sites one at a time. 77 pages came back, including the thread where the players argued about a portal and never settled it.
The Long Middle
Four and a half months and 122,000 lines of Go into porting a dead MUD, and the finish line keeps moving. A midway check-in on the difference between covering a codebase and actually proving it, told in the data.
The Resurrection
What started as a quick weeks-long project to port a 1994 CircleMUD turned into over 110,000 lines of Go, a rebuilt site, and a world that refuses to die.
Historical News Posts
Archived news posts from the original Dark Pawns website, preserved from Wayback Machine captures.