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Table of Contents
ZZT Preservation Phonebook
This is a rough document listing information on services which have had valuable content related to ZZT preservation, and any potential notes useful for preserving them.
Bulletin Board Systems
Many games we have from the BBS-centric era of ZZT come from old shareware CDs incidentally including some, particularly the many revisions of Alexis Janson's games.
Misty Mountains BBS
The earliest ZZT bulletin board system, serving as the official point of contact from its launch until early 1992; however, it was kept online until 2000.
The SysOp was Chip Hageman (mythran42). No success in contacting so far - the Internet record ends with a dead end in mid-2018.
Others
- Da Warren BBS - preserved by the SysOp, Leonard Richardson, in 2008!
Pre-Internet Online Services
Prodigy
Home to The ZZT Club, the pioneer ZZT developers' group between 1991 and 1993.
No public information on any data from Prodigy still being around in any form.
Jim Carpenter, a Prodigy enthusiast, has focused on archiving existing Prodigy installations. He has made tools available to extract data from them - but where are you going to find a ZZT Club member with backups this old?
America On-Line
Based on Libraries.txt, there were three file libraries of interest:
- 5073 - ZZT Adventures
- 12703 - MegaZeux Adventures
- 12830 - MegaZeux
Unfortunately, the ArchiveTeam efforts from 2014 failed to capture the data from them:
- The file dump only goes up to library 5044,
- The description dump for libraries 12000-12999 omits either of the MegaZeux file libraries.
There are some unconfirmed rumors about the MegaZeux file libraries having been removed in the past, but I don't remember where I heard them.
Others
- CompuServe - Hard drive dumps and their owners exist, but it seems they are very fractional and don't cover the ZZT community on CompuServe.
- GEnie - No information.
- Exec-PC - bbs.execpc.com stopped responding sometime in the last few years. Unfortunately, we didn't get to it in time.
Forums
Epic MegaBoards
Used to have a ZZT section. No further information available.