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Obsolete Saves the Day
Jul. 15th, 2026 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](/%20https://www.npmjs.com/package/ocr-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeWe are working on [SECRET PROJECT], which involves looking at a bunch of really, really old back-up files of [REDACTED]. Said files included 361 mysterious, unopenable .art files, an extension we'd never even heard of.
Turns out it was a proprietary AOL image format that hasn't been supported in twenty years. Even BSOD was too new to open them.
But Obsolete, our doughty little Windows 98 laptop, could! Its version of Internet Explorer added .art support in June 2000, so it could open the files! ...and convert them to bitmaps, which is how I learned that it can't save as .PNGs, only color-indexed bitmaps of one form or other (256 colors max!), .JPEG, or .GIF. I also discovered that Windows 98 had a WAY better file search than Windows XP, holy crap, it was child's play to get all those .art files, though I had to walk away and give it a while to crunch through all that.
So what WERE those 361 files?
Well, 354 of them were pocket lint: what must've been hundreds of duplicate identical background image textures, plus a few dozen duplicate identical logos. Glad we dug through them all, though, because turns out there were 7 buried in all those folders that mattered: one photograph, and six crummy flowcharts/infographics that'd make Tufte cry. Still important to the files they belong to, though!
I converted all those files into .BMP, zipped 'em (and got an angry message about how I was still using the trial version of Winzip after TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LIKE A CHEAPSKATE), transferred them to the sci-fi library computer using THEIR floppy drive, then transferred them to my USB key, where I will work at fixing and replacing all those cursed HTML files so we don't NEED hundreds of duplicate textures cluttering up the files.
Three cheers for Obsolete!
EDIT: of COURSE some intrepid old dog made a version of the Windows 98 file search to be used elsewhere. Bless you, old nerd. YOINK! BSOD getting an upgrade!
Turns out it was a proprietary AOL image format that hasn't been supported in twenty years. Even BSOD was too new to open them.
But Obsolete, our doughty little Windows 98 laptop, could! Its version of Internet Explorer added .art support in June 2000, so it could open the files! ...and convert them to bitmaps, which is how I learned that it can't save as .PNGs, only color-indexed bitmaps of one form or other (256 colors max!), .JPEG, or .GIF. I also discovered that Windows 98 had a WAY better file search than Windows XP, holy crap, it was child's play to get all those .art files, though I had to walk away and give it a while to crunch through all that.
So what WERE those 361 files?
Well, 354 of them were pocket lint: what must've been hundreds of duplicate identical background image textures, plus a few dozen duplicate identical logos. Glad we dug through them all, though, because turns out there were 7 buried in all those folders that mattered: one photograph, and six crummy flowcharts/infographics that'd make Tufte cry. Still important to the files they belong to, though!
I converted all those files into .BMP, zipped 'em (and got an angry message about how I was still using the trial version of Winzip after TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LIKE A CHEAPSKATE), transferred them to the sci-fi library computer using THEIR floppy drive, then transferred them to my USB key, where I will work at fixing and replacing all those cursed HTML files so we don't NEED hundreds of duplicate textures cluttering up the files.
Three cheers for Obsolete!
EDIT: of COURSE some intrepid old dog made a version of the Windows 98 file search to be used elsewhere. Bless you, old nerd. YOINK! BSOD getting an upgrade!
