The 1998 World Atlas on Windows 11: A Time Machine from the Thrift Store

It all started when the author's son found a disc at a thrift store in Port Townsend, Washington: Compton's 3D World Atlas Deluxe — a quintessential educational CD-ROM from the Windows 95 era, complete with a globe, an abundance of blue and orange graphics, a long list of countries, games, video clips, and a very self-assured “Online” button. The disc launched, but the program went looking for 1998 and found Windows 11 instead.

A problem the size of an entire era

The atlas was built around a physical CD, old video codecs, the behavior of an ancient Windows, and a website that had vanished before the son was even born. The author decided not to replace the disc or to drag a commercial program into the repository, but instead to build a user-side compatibility layer around the original, licensed disc.

The to-do list turned out to be formidable. The video clips used the Indeo codec — they had to be re-encoded into Microsoft Video 1 while preserving the original PCM audio: the narration, music, and old clips all work again. The “Online” button, which led to a long-dead service, was redirected by the author to a local mirror assembled from copies of the old Atlas and Compton's sites in the Internet Archive. The forms no longer submit anything anywhere, and the historical login pages exist as museum exhibits. For the old x86 component WonderLink, a small compatible shim was written — which, the author says, turned out to be both more fun and safer than downloading some mysterious file off the internet and dropping it next to ATLAS.EXE.

A script that developed ambitions

The installer began as a script and turned into a full-blown system with logs, archive downloads, video re-encoding, shortcuts, checksums, and a firm stance on whether the right disc is inserted. One particularly irritating error came up when a new configuration ended up next to a 1998-vintage DLL and the program justifiably protested. Now the installer first prepares everything in a temporary area, verifies the component being replaced against a SHA-256, and publishes the result only as a whole — if something fails, the previous working installation is left untouched. A lot of ceremony for a thrift-store disc, the author admits, but the right kind of ceremony.

From the thrift store to GitHub Actions

The finale came out slightly absurd: Pester tests for the installer, Node.js tests for the archive synchronizer, PowerShell parsing checks, and then GitHub Actions builds the x86 shim and the installer, verifies the hashes, and publishes a release with a checksum.

The app itself is still wonderful — exactly the strange time machine everyone had hoped for. You can page through countries, spin the globe, read outdated statistics, watch the re-encoded videos, and play a flag quiz (in which the computer, of course, knows what Andorra's flag looks like). The data is old, the interface is thoroughly “nineties” — and no less captivating for it. The son found the disc, the father built a time machine around it — everybody wins.

Source: Lobsters