Welcome to Igloo Cafe!
Igloo Cafe is a tiny retro-Internet and retro-gaming community project, inspired in the ideals of the Tildeverse, SDF and on the old Internet ambience. Originally started in September 2020 as an experimental server for hosting tiny personal homepages for some friends, today seeks to be a place to make projects and services based on our main purpose and to continue being a small community of people who seek to create or share the same interests as ours.
Members here can create and modify their homepages (called here as "personal igloos"), share images in our gallery, while any of our visitors can participate in our message board or having fun in some of our classic multiplayer gameservers. We also have a variety of other misc websites, services and random weird projects that you can find at the middle of the sidebar.
The design of this website is highly inspired on VectorStar Networks, an old free shell account provider created sometime in 1995 that sadly closed in 2007.
If you are visiting this website from an older computer/browser that doesn't have support for modern CSS, please check our minimal version of this website written in HTML4 (works nice on RetroZilla) or better yet, our gopherhole.
Latest news
Closure of the Igloo Cafe Wiki
Posted by ~rails on August 30, 2024
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As some of you may have known (even if I have not made any announcement), the Igloo Cafe Wiki was finally re-hosted with the MediaWiki software, which allowed users to easily manage their accounts, among other features.
Because the wiki never received contributions from other users (which I don't force them to do obviously) and because I feel that running something like MediaWiki in this space is too overwhelming with the amount of features it has for only me to use, I have opted to finally close the wiki.
All important articles will be moved to a new website called "Igloo Cafe Help Pages", where I will be editing the articles myself (and without user contributions). It will once again use the "Wiki.php" script from Ubergeek/Thunix because of how simple it is and also so that older browsers can read the pages without HTML distortions.
And no, this is not the "big annoucement" I wanted to post either, there are still a lot of things to finish, sorry.
High latency issues
Posted by ~rails on July 18, 2024
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Hello. This is still not the "big announcement" I wanted to make and I have not yet finished moving the igloos over to the other server.
Due to recent maintenance work at Crunchbits' Pennsylvania networking (yes, our new host), I had to temporarily disconnect several services (such as the Igloo Arena gameservers) until this problem is fixed due to the high ping.
Just that, sorry for the issues.
EDIT: Issue solved, all services are now active again.
Server host migration
Posted by ~rails on July 07, 2024
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A host migration from Sparked to a new VPS located in Pennsylvania will take place in a few hours, keeping almost the same hardware features. All services running during this period of time (as well as this website) will temporarily stop working until the migration has been successfully completed.
More information about this update in a few hours.
25 Years of Counter-Strike: A new Retro-CS 2.6 server!
Posted by ~rails on June 20, 2024
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On a day like today but in 1999, Minh Le would officially launch the first beta version 1.0 of Counter-Strike on the project's official website, at the time as a Half-Life mod of tactical combat between counter-terrorists and terrorists. Announced under a Planet Half-Life hosted website, which was once one of the largest Half-Life web portals until some stupid company took over GameSpy and destroyed all related projects & services like such website (although it was already dead around 2012 thanks to IGN).
taken from the README files cuz the original website @ Planet Half-Life wasn't archived by Wayback Machine sadly
And without thinking about it, it would become both one of the Half-Life mods (or for the normies, GoldSrc games) as well as one of the most played multiplayer FPS games worldwide, with around millions of players online even today with CS2.
As we at Arena Igloo Cafe are looking for a more classic experience (because there are already hundreds of CS 1.6 servers running on the Internet and I honestly don't like CS and "competitive games" enough (too much toxicity) to leave one there), I have decided to host a Retro-CS server instead. If you've never heard of it, it's a Half-Life mod that recreates beta versions 5.2 and 6.1 of Counter-Strike in modern versions of the Half-Life engine. It's currently running with some removed beta maps and older versions of popular maps such as de_dust, but I will probably add some popular classic custom maps made around 1999 and early 2000s in the future.
And yes, if you ask "Why don't you host a CS Beta server instead of using this mod?", the answer is that I could do that but that requires having a 32-bit machine or a QEMU VM (because those old HLDS WON/Sierra versions require it or else it will crash on 64-bit) and I don't have the resources or time to do that.
You can download Retro-CS from this link from archive.org (a patched version made by me for Steam players). As with other mods, just move the "retrocs" directory to your Half-Life installation and DONE!
Server IP is "igl01.igloocafe.xyz:27018". If you have HL on Steam you can find it on the Internet list. Other server details are on GameTracker.
Have fun and enjoy!
Issues with the wiki
Posted by ~rails on June 17, 2024
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For some reason the wiki authentication system broke and I can't figure out why. Because of this, I had to leave the wiki in maintenance for a few days.
Most likely I will have to reinstall PmWiki from scratch and that will be a headache for me. I don't have any ideas about what to do at this point. I was thinking about whether to use MediaWiki with the Monobook template since I've been making wikis under that software lately but I don't know if it would be practical to maintain something like that here (considering how heavy it is).
Want to see more? Check the Newsletter on the Igloo Cafe BBS.
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Old hand-written HTML news are now archived and can be found here.
