I got a 1998 CD-ROM world atlas running on Windows 11

Thu * Aug 6 * ()

My Son Found a World Atlas in a Thrift Store, So I Had to Make It Work

My son found a copy of Compton’s 3D World Atlas Deluxe in a thrift store in Port Townsend, WA. I have no idea what he paid for it. Probably not enough to justify what happened next.

This is a Windows 95 era educational CD-ROM. You know the kind. It has a globe, a lot of blue and orange graphics, a giant list of countries, some games, some videos, and an Online button. The Online button is a very confident little button for software that was made when the Internet was still mostly telephone noises.

We put the disc in. I clicked things. It ran, sort of. Then it wanted to connect to an online service that has not existed for a very long time. The program was not broken exactly. It was just looking for 1998 and getting Windows 11 instead.

I thought, OK, I can probably make this work.

Famous last words.

THE FIRST PROBLEM WAS THE WHOLE CENTURY

The original Atlas expects a physical CD, old video codecs, old Windows behavior, and a website that went away before my son was born. Windows 11 is not interested in pretending that any of these things are still normal.

The old shortcut was also not helping. It launched the copy that still expected the retired online connection. This was like giving somebody a map to a restaurant and then being surprised when the restaurant was not there anymore.

So I made a new user-local compatibility layer. It does not replace the CD. It does not put the commercial Atlas program in the repository. It does not download a DLL from some random website and hope that it is not haunted.

It uses the original lawful 3DATLAS disc and makes the parts around it behave on Windows 11.

Then I made a list.

First, the movies needed help. They used Indeo, which is a codec from the time when installing a video codec was an adventure. We convert those movies to Microsoft Video 1 and keep the original PCM audio. The narration works. The music works. The old movies work. Woot!

Second, the Online button needed to do something useful. I built a local mirror from Internet Archive captures of the old Atlas and Compton’s sites. The pages stay local. Dead forms do not send anything anywhere. Historical sign-in pages are treated like museum exhibits, which is probably for the best.

Third, the program needed its old x86 WonderLink component. We built a small compatibility shim for that. This was more fun than downloading a mysterious file from the Internet and putting it next to ATLAS.EXE. Also safer. I like safer.

Finally, there are two shortcuts. One opens the regular window. The other uses Atlas’s own Superplay fullscreen mode. It keeps the original 4:3 artwork instead of stretching the globe until it looks like it has been through a taffy machine.

AT SOME POINT THE INSTALLER GOT IDEAS

The installer started out as a script. Then it became an installer. Then it became an installer with logs, archive downloads, video conversion, shortcuts, checksums, rollback behavior, and a very strong opinion about whether a disc is actually the right disc.

There was one particularly annoying bug. The new configuration could end up beside the original 1998 DLL. The program quite reasonably objected. It gave us an error about the verified Windows 11 Online Archive component being missing or changed.

That was not the kind of error message I wanted somebody else to see after clicking Install.

So now the installer stages the work first. It checks the replacement component by SHA-256. It only publishes a complete result. If something fails, it leaves the previous working installation alone. This is a lot of ceremony for a thrift-store CD, but it is good ceremony. Nobody wants a failed installer to turn into a second problem.

THE ACTUAL PROGRAM IS STILL GREAT

Once it is running, Compton’s 3D World Atlas is exactly the weird little time machine we hoped it would be. You can browse countries, look at the globe, read old statistics, click through the local archive, watch the converted videos, and play the flag quiz.

The data is old. Some of it is very old. The interface is extremely 1998. None of this makes it less fun.

FROM A PORT TOWNSEND THRIFT STORE TO GITHUB ACTIONS

The final part of this got a little ridiculous. I added Pester tests for the installer helpers. I added Node.js tests for the archive synchronizer. I added PowerShell parsing checks. Then GitHub Actions built the x86 shim, built the Windows installer, checked the hash, and published a release with a checksum.

So the path was:

thrift store, Windows 95 CD, dead online service, obsolete codecs, Internet Archive archaeology, x86 compatibility shim, rollback-safe installer, automated release.

That is not a normal amount of work for a piece of educational software my son found in a thrift store. I am aware of this.

But now the globe works. The old movies work. The games work. The Online button opens a local archive instead of yelling at the future. The original disc stays mounted, as it should.

My son found the CD. I got to build the time machine around it. Everybody wins.

Project: https://github.com/trevmex/Comptons-3D-World-Atlas-Windows11 Release: https://github.com/trevmex/Comptons-3D-World-Atlas-Windows11/releases/tag/v1.2.2

The compatibility toolkit does not contain the commercial Atlas program or CD data. Installation requires your own lawful original 3DATLAS disc, and the disc must remain mounted while the program runs.

This is the part where I said, “OK, this is pretty cool.”

Andorra is in there. Of course it is.

Statistics! This is where the 1990s really let their freak flag fly.

The computer asks which flag belongs to Andorra. I think the computer has the advantage.