You can actually play Habitat today. Randy Farmer, one of the developers, has an open source project called Neohabitat that has preserved the game. http://neohabitat.org/
This was brought back to working order with the help of Randy, Chip, Mist64, StuBlad, McMartin, and some other folks who hacked away until it was brought back to working order. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (themade.org) undertook this work as the first ever institutional preservation of an MMO, and everything was accomplished for $0. The MADE is about to collaborate again with Randy and Chip on preserving Electric Communities, EC Habitat, and the Palace. The Museum has acquired legal waivers to begin this preservation project, and will undertake a hack-day on site January 13, 2024. Join us and help bring back history!
I had forgotten all about The Palace. Very cool. (I assume you mean the visual chat client by that name?)
Yes indeed. It's sources are already in a private GitHub repo, we just need to prune copyrighted things like fonts and libraries so we can open source it. That'll start in January.
Oh boy
I have ideas
Lol you were into the palace too? Rad
Oh, no way! The Palace was awesome. I spent many hours on there, so many years ago. Very stoked to hear about this!!