There’s a couple things to report, actually. Obviously, the first is that every download of Akalabeth has in fact been restored to working order — feel free to check thou them out.

(Note: for some reason, the download link for the Nokia smartphone port of Aklabeth (which is stored as a GZIP file) doesn’t work properly in Firefox, but right-clicking and using “Save target as…” seems to work just fine.)

The second is to note that I’m adjusting the way I do categories on the sidebar; whereas before there was a big solid block of categories, I intend to use the advance category management plugin that the site already has installed to separate the category lists based on the series into which the listed titles fall — e.g. the Age of Darkness, Age of Enlightenment, Worlds of Ultima, etc.

Akalabeth, being something of an “odd man out” (and then not the only one) gets its own sidebar element. Expect this categorization to expand as changes progress.

Produced by: A New Breed of Dragon
Website: The Dark Core
Releases:
* Dark Core v1.02 for Netscape (6.3 MiB, 13 hits)
* Dark Core v1.0 for Internet Explorer (6.3 MiB, 7 hits)
* Internet Explorer 4.0 (13.3 MiB, 5 hits)
* Netscape Navigator 4.08 (9.7 MiB, 8 hits)
* Dark Core v1.0 for Internet Explorer 8 (6.3 MiB, 14 hits)

Mere seconds after the Avatar arrives back in Britannia, freshly escaped from Pagan, he finds himself standing before a huge statue of the Guardian. Suddenly, he is granted a vision of the Dark Core of Exodus, and finds that he is being drawn into the core. Complicating matters, it seems that the Guardian is also being drawn in…

…or is he using this vision to deceive the Avatar?

An interactive game in the style of Myst, this web-based remake is a truly amazing Ultima spin-off!

Note: You must have a version of Netscape less than 4.3 in order to play this game! It will also work with Internet Explorer 4.0 or 5.0. It is known that the game will NOT work with more recent versions of Netscape, and I have no idea how well it will behave in later versions of Explorer. I have provided downloads of Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.08 (both for Windows only) above in order to help people get this thing running on their home system.

One further note: Given the tight integration of Internet Explorer with Windows, it might be best to try installing Netscape first. Most extant Windows installations likely sport at least version 5 of Internet Explorer, and rolling said program back to an earlier version is a trying task.

And a warning: Both Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.08 are at least 13 years old, and were built for an era of computing and Internet browsing that was not nearly so perilous as is the case today. Both browsers contain numerous vulnerabilities which modern malware can and will exploit almost as a matter of course. If you install one of these browsers on your system, make sure you never run it while your connection to the Internet is live. Better still: create a Windows 98 (or whichever version is your preference) VirtualBox with networking specifically disabled, and install and run The Dark Core therein.

Or: you could just try out Infinitron Dragon’s Internet Explorer 8-compatible update for the game. Whether or not said update will work with other browsers (e.g. Firefox, Chrome) is uncertain at present, nor is it known whether said update will work on non-Windows platforms.

See Also: A New Breed of Dragon’s System Optimization Guide.