Resurrecting kyro.st.com

What

The website for the Kyro series was found at kyro.st.com, however this was just a redirect to http://us.st.⁠com/stonline/prodpres/graphic/kyro/

Trigger warning for web developers The 1990's called... they want their website back! The structure of the website is very typical of the time, mainly abusing the table element to control layout and is not in the slightest bit responsive. It also used images for navigation elements, with rollover images for highlighting the element when hovered over, making it even less accessible.

Why

Although the site has been captured by the Internet Archive it is not complete and missing many images. Further investigation revealed that between the us.st.com and eu.st.com captures across time much of the website, but not all, was actually there. However it failed to display correctly regardless of which snapshot was being viewed.

How

Initial attempts to capture the site via wget failed to produce useable results, so I decided to build on the work done for Resurrecting www.alexstjohn.com and try grabbing the site myself. Naturally this time I would be cloning an actual website rather than extracting from a warc file.

Using C# and HttpClient and starting with the default page I used largely the same regular expressions as previously developed to scan the page for links, which then added them to a queue of files to be obtained. The links were rewritten to map to the expected site structure on the local file system.

To avoid archive.org's throttling triggering HTTP status code 429 responses if the page being requested was a html file then I added a random delay of a few seconds to simulate someone browsing the site, which seemed to prevent this arising.

Results

As mentioned much of the website was captured between the two regions of st.com, but there is still content missing:

Downloads

The missing executables were easy enough to locate online and in my own file cache and put back into the site.

The AVI videos are lost, but alternative links to MP4 videos added to the site.

Site map

The sitemap page itself was up to date, but the only captured background image was from before the Kyro II SE additions to the site. As the original page used the map element with areas defined it was easy to identify where the the Kyro II SE pages were added, and where the previous site map areas had been moved to.

As it turned out the original graphic was simply expanded and shifted down 100 pixels, and three new areas defined above. It was easy to replicate and clone existing elements to recreate what the graphic would have looked like in 2002.

Internal True Color Graphic

The Internal True Color product overview page has 4 screenshots showing the difference in dithered output between GeForce2 MX and Kyro with two almost identical full screens and then close ups of the same area. The thumbnails link to the same itcg.htm page which contained a single 640x480 image.

The images came from a review on http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/articles/kyro_in-depth/4.shtml however neither of the site captures for st.com nor sharkyextreme.com on the Internet Archive had captured these images.

I was able to locate copies of them in a Kyro vs GeForce2 MX shootout on a Slovenian website called slo-tech.com who had obviously taken them from the sharkyextreme.com article. Despite having a slotech watermark applied (!) I was happy to use them as-is to recreate the missing graphic.

Missing Temple demo screenshot

This is lost to the mists of time... however it was possible to rebuild the temple demo (v1.0.6) including command line options excluded from the final general release that captured every frame to an image file. By comparing with the thumbnail it was possible to identify the closet frame match and restore the linked image, albeit from a version three releases later (v1.0.6 vs v1.0.3 for the original) and not running on the original Kyro hardware.

Final result

kyro.st.com

Best viewed on a desktop or laptop sized screen