The sysinfo pointer page was autogenerated though, you had to put a special tag in each sysinfo page. Similar to the driver list.

I suggest to update the chd conversion for Mac Harddisk images on the MESS Wiki

The new chdman version doesn´t support the old parameters anymore.

Here 3 examples:

chdman -extract macsehd.chd macsehd.dmg
to
chdman extracthd -i macsehd.chd -o macsehd.dmg

chdman -createuncomphd macsehd.dmg macsehd.chd
to
chdman createhd -c none -i macsehd.dmg -o macsehd.chd

chdman -createblankhd newmachd4gb.chd 8000 16 64
to
chdman createhd -c none -chs 8000,16,64 -o newmachd4gb.chd

Thanks for the fast update, Grégoire.

I've found and downloaded, on archive.org, a great number of early versions of MESS (binaries and source), mainly Windows and a few DOS, Mac and X from 0.36 to 0.129...

Is someone interested? (I can upload everything I have).

Okay kids.

Jason Scott brought to my attention (unintentionally)
http://web-beta.archive.org

So... Most recent before failure was that they have a partial backup from March 4th:
http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120304052046/http://mess.redump.net/
and before: http://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/http://mess.redump.net/
(but as you travel from page to page, you will see that date change)

and as for http://www.mess.org,
Most recent before failure was February 6th: http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120206215010/http://www.mess.org/
and before: http://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mess.org/
(but as you travel from page to page, you will see that date change)

Unless Justin has a correction for me.

It's a shame we hadn't known about this utility in March, might have made the recovery easier.
http://code.google.com/p/warrick/wiki/About_Warrick

So question is: where do we stand, and who's ready to work some more on recovering it?

Was Duke ever able to reinstall all the extensions it used?

And can people who archived the Google cache make them available again?

Problem now is some pages have been restored, but some have not, so people will have to intelligently determine if the backups contain newer info than the current pages.

Also: bugzilla was not archived due to robots.txt :-/

Duke pretty much ruled out re installing the extensions, so we simply can't recover all of the content as things stand.

I'm thinking that when mamedev.org gets rehosted we make sure it *does* have those extensions and move MESS there.

That's a good idea... hopefully this happens soon before my free time runs out.

We knew about Warrick in March but in practice it's less impressive than it sounds, basically only the Wayback Machine part of it seemed to be working.

I've pulled a few pages in from the new Wayback Machine backups but I basically don't have the time to do everything.

The easiest way to restore pages is to get the complete lists of archived pages with a wildcard search:
http://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mess.org/*
http://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/http://mess.redump.net/*
Then use the filter box on the upper right to filter on "_export/raw" to get the raw wiki markup data which can be pasted right in. Pages where the export version wasn't grabbed will need more manual work to reconstruct the markup.

There's no point in doing any of the sysinfo stuff manually because that was auto-generated from the dat file and kept in sync with it and so we just need somebody (Duke?) to re-run the scripts for that.

I'll take a look at fixing up the howto page now because I already did some work on that but otherwise you're welcome to jump right in.

All the extensions are installed except the data plugin, which was used only for the system pages and those were generated using a script which no longer works. I was never happy with the system pages anyway, if we really need them we need a better solution.

until you find one, we can always link to projectmess... I keep the db in sync with each release, so it's not going to disappear

list of all emulated systems: www.progettoemma.net/mess/sysset.php

specific system pages:
www.progettoemma.net/mess/system.php?machine=c64
www.progettoemma.net/mess/system.php?machine=nes

and so on...