| Arcade Version 1.00d |
when the community comes together, great things happen. after almost 24 years, the original, pre-update release build of hydro thunder arcade(1.00d) has finally been saved!!!a bit of story behind this, since this whole thing is so little known aboutwhen hydro thunder was first released to arcades in february 1999, the machines came loaded with game version 1.00d. very shortly after release, in march 1999, an update was released on a pair of floppy disks, bringing the game to version 1.01b. as the machines got updated, 1.01b became the version readily available, so that's the one you can find easily these days. but 1.00d wasn't so fortunate, a backup could not be found anywhere. and by now, the overwhelming majority of them were updated to 1.01b. and even if they werent, the hard drives, especially when running so often as they are/were, die out eventually. and most locations/owners would just buy a replacement drive when this happened, and all of those have, you guessed it, 1.01b. the only way to know for sure that it's running 1.00d is to see the version display on the boot sequence, which sellers are unlikely to take pictures ofyou can imagine, then, the chances of finding 1.00d. ontop of all of that, the clock is ticking on these old hard drives. who knows how much time they have left. truly, on the brink of being lost foreveron jan. 10th, jbfcrasher found the white whale, a listing for just the computer+boards, and the computer is running 1.00d(it looks to also be the original hard drive too! that's insane it's still alive!). it was hundreds of miles away from us. knowing the gravity of the situation, i called out for help, and jason scott from the internet archive reached out to me. one of his people who lives near to the stuff, teophanea, picked it up for us, and imaged the hard drive, after i put down the money and made the arrangements with the selleranother piece of this game's history, saved. i am eternally grateful to jason and teophanea, without those two, this wouldn't have been possible-AxlThunder's announcement on Discord
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