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Comment by barfoure | Hacker News Reader

Some additional stuff:

1) you can find the War 2 for PSX source on Archive. It has all the Windows stuff commented out. It might be possible to uncomment and compile with something like Borland C or Watcom C or whatever they used.

2) the modding scene was phenomenal. Not mentioned is StarDraft for obvious reasons but a counterpart to WarDraft. This is where our story takes a turn and the name Camelot Systems emerges, along with a King Arthur (Andy Bond) who shortly after finishing his comp sci degree went to work for Blizzard and has been with them since. This website is a homage to CamSys (JorSys).

3) War2Bne is a thing to behold. Diablo, Warcraft 2 et al being able to seamlessly chat and DM players across games was pure magic.

Many stories to tell, but we will never step into that river again. Legends never die.

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1. Wow, I did not know that. Thanks for sharing!

2. Indeed - I'm happy to hear someone know their Blizzard modding community history. To my knowledge, King Arthur never finished his studies as he got offered a job at Blizzard. He worked at Blizzard from around 2000 to 2020. He's now at Dreamhaven it seems, along with former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. And indeed - Jorsys is very much inspired by Camsys =)

3. I think my abuse of overplaying Diablo I on our old 56k modem is what made my parents invest in broadband. I'm happy they didn't make me pay the bills back then.

My long term goal with Jorsys is to put tutorials and mods and make the whole thing accessible for people today and tomorrow. It's all pretty arcane, with tools, mods and instructions barely accessible anymore. Time is limited though.

I don't anticipate creating a community, but if you have anecdotes or stories to share, or want to help out in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. My email is on Jorsys.

Here’s a few more:

1) in addition to Kali, people played War2 on MSN Gaming Zone. It was available under the TCP/IP section.

2) before war2bne, you could use a program to change the color of your in game name, and use non-ASCII characters. So people went wild in multiplayer games.

3) I think MPlayer also supported War2? I don’t think anyone played it there.

4) StarCraft modding community was tight knit. Lots of great maps with tools available only to friends of the modders. We see the tail end of this when mappers finally get so good their maps are used by KeSPA and are not possible with stock editor.

5) Warcraft 3 alpha comes around. Warforge server is the first and only private server. The first map editor is leaked, janky but works for alpha. the first tower defense map ever for Warcraft 3 is made by a fellow called Mr123 on Warforge. The rest is history.

Battle.net's simple system of just downloading maps you didn't have helped a lot.

I remember playing a "Use Map Settings" map where you started out as a lone marine and then had to 'upgrade' your character over time. It felt like a very early prototype of later hero-style games that came to exist in Warcraft 3 and beyond.

Fun times.

Seeing neurons fire in recognizing the homage in the site appearance that haven't fired in 20 years was wild. Thanks for that.

I guess the Archive copy of the War 2 PSX source would be this[1] link which seems dead. I don't suppose you are aware of any live links to it?

[1]: https://archive.org/details/warcraftIIsourcecodePSX

I have a copy of it I think I’ll find it and upload.

This one works: https://archive.thedatadungeon.com/warcraft_ii_the_dark_saga...

Thank you very much for that link!

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