Are you reading this story on your Sega Saturn? You could be, now that a member of the SHIRO! community has built a mirror that converts this website into a form simple enough for the console’s NetLink browser to display.
ReyeMe has worked all this week on a proxy hosted at his own server that converts the modern SHIRO! website into an HTML 3.0-compliant one. It can be found at http://shiro.reye.me.
“This is not a copy of the website, all the content is actually fetched from (SHIRO!) and converted on the fly,” ReyeMe said on SHIRO!’s Discord server.
The conversion is necessary because modern Internet sites are far too advanced for the NetLink browsers that were made to run on the Saturn in 1996 and 1997.
“There are no scripts, no styles, and div block is just a block, you can’t even set its width or color,” ReyeMe said, “so you just have to do with the few tags you have.”
The NetLink browser can’t even go to websites that use the newer, more secure HTTPS protocol now used widely across the Internet instead of the basic HTTP.
Not only that, but SHIRO!’s images are too large to fit more than one or two into the Saturn’s memory — not to mention how long they’d take to download with the modem’s 28,800 bits per second speed.
Thankfully, ReyeMe came up with a solution to that, too — his proxy converts the original images into much smaller ones and caches them to keep things as fast as possible.
Since the Saturn outputs a lower resolution on a TV than modern computers and cell phones, the menu at the top of SHIRO!’s site had to be changed, too, keeping only the categories necessary to fit it in a width of about 577 pixels. And with the Saturn’s browser unable to run scripts, the modern site’s drop-down menus were out.
ReyeMe was the right person for this job — he already maintains a website built to be viewed on ’90s-era browsers.
He was inspired to make an HTML 3.0 version of this website after SHIRO!’s SaturnDave in mid-January livestreamed himself going to various websites with his NetLink modem — and showing that it’s incompatible with most of the ones on the Internet, including SHIRO!’s.
While it was hours of work to accomplish, ReyeMe still had some fun with it.
“(It’s) like a puzzle you have to figure out to assemble something nice,” ReyeMe said.
And everyone at SHIRO! certainly appreciates all his hard work.
Above is a video of ReyeMe navigating an earlier prototype of the NetLink version of SHIRO! using a real Saturn. You can’t watch it on a Saturn, though, unfortunately.
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