Sunday, August 16, 2009

Game Boy Remakes moves home

Geocities has been around in one form or another since about 1995, but Yahoo has recently announced that the web hosting service will close this October. With this in mind, I've moved all my Game Boy Advance remakes and BBC emulation to a new home on Google Sites.

Do you remember when people said "don't forget to update your bookmarks!" when they changed their website address? Now nobody does that because everyone uses a search engine to find what they need. That means that when Geocities closes, all the search-juice for the old site will be lost. So here I'm sowing a little search seed, which will hopefully grow and let people find these remakes when Yahoo finally pulls the plug. BTW, closing down Geocities seems a really odd thing to do. The limits on bandwidth were tiny (4MB per hour!), the sites are full to the brim with adverts. It must have been costing Yahoo nothing to host all of them.

Anyway the migration was completely manual, but hopefully I haven't missed anything and the new web site should have all of the old content on it.

As I moved all of the content over, I was reading through a lot of the stuff I had up on the old site. I really miss remaking these old games, I'd love to get back into that again one more time. Reading through old assembly code figuring out the algorithms used and rewriting them in C is pretty good fun. And at the end you get a game to play too. I have a few ideas for a remake, but I don't want to promise anything. I know from experience that announcing something that is a work in progress, or even less than that, can suck the life out of the effort.