TLS 1.2 is now required to access Game Graveyard. It won’t matter to most of you, but anyone still using Windows XP will need to use Firefox from now on. Not that you should still be using Windows XP to browse the internet anyway…

Whilst organizing my LastPass file and cleaning out old sites, I rediscovered the fact I have an active account here with the ability to make news posts, and since CoreDuo hasn’t posted anything since May 2011, I might as well. Hello thar!

That is all. Enjoy the games. Also enjoy this picture of a cat.

In celebration of the new site launch, here are 13 new games. I also noticed that the amount of DOS games greatly outnumbered the Windows ones. Time to change that!

Age of Empires: Gold Edition (1999)
Age of Empires II: Gold Edition (2001)
Bugdom (2000)
Deus Ex: GOTY Edition (2001)
Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999)
Half-Life (1998)
Homeworld (1999)
Homeworld: Cataclysm (2000)
Max Payne (2001)
Midtown Madness (1999)
Midtown Madness 2 (2000)
Rune (2000)
Rune: Halls of Valhalla (2001)
System Shock 2 (1999)

Not bad for less than a month of work, eh? Yes, that’s right, something with 2.0 tacked onto the end of it actually turns out not to be vaporware.

As previously mentioned, the Textpattern site got harder and harder to manage on my own. Anything to make that better with the existing software would have required me to get into writing things on my own. Me writing code on my own generally ends up not being very clean and not very standards compliant.

So here we are with WordPress, software that required a hell of a lot of effort to port the site over but would need less than 5 minutes of my time to add new games. What does this mean? More frequent updates and less of a drain of that ever disappearing free time that I have.

There are also new request and offer rules that are a little more lenient than before. Offers require registration to view the forum.

Here’s an outline of some of the new things implemented with this version of the site:

• Comments. Technically Textpattern had these but they did not work that well so I’d removed them completely from the template.
• New forums. The old ones worked fine but since I was redirecting to them anyway I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to run them locally.
• Much cleaner layout for the games. This took a lot of manual labor but worth it in the long run.
• IRC page with a web client that actually works. Mibbit was a quick and dirty solution, I admit.
• Proper use of mirrors. I might actually develop this further into using something like MirrorBrain, stay tuned.
• Site-wide view counters. With this I can also show the most popular games based on views.
• Search actually works now. I don’t know what happened before but Textpattern’s didn’t work
• More readable/modern UI. The all black thing got kind of old.
• Better use of horizontal space. This is increasingly important with the amount of widescreen monitors on the market.
• Pagination in the categories. Not much needs to be said here. 300+ links on one page gets messy.

Things i’ve been thinking about for the future:

• Genres. These can be implemented simply through WordPress’s tag system
• Like mentioned before, MirrorBrain for file management between servers.
• Game of the day or week post for popular games. I haven’t yet decided how to implement this.
• Whatever other suggestions that people post here.
• Possible indexing of WinWorld’s applications for detailed descriptions
• Screenshot gallery with user submitted screenshots

That’s all for now, enjoy the new site!