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Comment by akx | Hacker News Reader

I managed to extract the animation from the winworldpc.com download of Netscape Communicator with an easy ritual of:

    binwalk -e cc32d48.exe
    cd _cc32d48.exe.extracted
    unshieldv3 extract comm.z comm
    python extract_images.py --ico --png -d ns/ ~/Downloads/Netscape/_cc32d48.exe.extracted/comm/program/*.dll --continue-on-errors

where `extract_images.py` is from my https://github.com/akx/res-extract project (once upon a time someone needed the Excel 95 icons, and I obliged).

However, they're just 32x32 frames, not the glorious 60x60 from the article:

https://i.imgur.com/sXcEEDU.png

View on HN

The actual image is almost impossible to see on the imgur page on mobile. Not a complaint against you in anyway, it just looks absurd. Massive Futurama add on top, some other promoted content below, and about 3% of the screen is the specific image for that page. Obviously because the picture height is only 30px.

The actual image is almost impossible to see on the imgur page on mobile.

It's only 13K. I wonder how many HN comments it would take to post the image as BASE64 USENET-style.

Use a pastebin instead.

Mobile imgur is really bad. It doesn't allow hotlinking, has a lot of annoying ads and other content, sometimes automatic quality degradation, and at one point they even hijacked the back button. We should just use something like abload.de or similar.

Firefox Mobile allows you to use addons, so you can Ublock Origin your way to an ad-free mobile experience.

You're still going to get redirected from the image to a javascript-heavy page. Better to get people to stop using imgur - if them showing they don't care about preservation by deleting all images not associated with an account recently wasn't reason enough.

> once upon a time someone needed the Excel 95 icons, and I obliged

May I introduce you to reshacker.exe: http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/

Spent a lot of time as a teen using it to change windows graphics. (E.g. the image shown when loading windows or shutting down the PC). Fun times

Sure, I think I used a version of it back in the day too - but I wanted something cross-platform and batch capable ;)

There's https://www.nongnu.org/icoutils/

Also MinGW's windres might be able to do it (it can add and copy resources from .exe files at least).

wow I forgot about this. I used this to "break" the cyber-patrol filtering app on my pc so that I could get my parents to uninstall it lol.

You do mention it, but to draw it out for those who might not notice the naming: this is a later, fancier, more colorful version from Netscape _Communicator_ (‘Netscape 4’), which had a more golden hued, more ‘detailed’ UI.

The article discusses the animation from Netscape _Navigator_, probably version 3 (‘Netscape 3’).

Navigator: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=netscape+navigator&t=h_&iar=images...

Communicator: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=netscape+communicator&t=h_&iar=ima...

Yeah, probably need to track down a Netscape 3 download and do the same ritual to it.

http://ftp.vim.org/pub/netscape/communicator/english/3.04/wi...

Well, `binwalk` is no dice on either of those EXEs, so that's already a bit tougher...

Well now I want to know how many versions of the meteor animation there were.

Here's the animation of just the loop (frame 1 excluded) https://i.ibb.co/DMDBR7L/Netscape-Communicator-Meteor-Loop.g...

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