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Ask HN: What old or deprecated software do you wish was still updated?

24 points by assemblylang ↗ HN
Recently I was thinking about older software that is either no longer maintained, deprecated, or effectively in maintenance mode, and it got me wondering: if I was able to revive an old piece of software or something that was deprecated, what would I pick?

Could be interesting to see what Amiga OS would look like if it was still maintained to this day. There are some systems that are binary compatible with Amiga OS that still see a bit of development, but they are mostly niche projects (still very cool projects though).

67 comments

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mattl
Looks like Amiga OS gets updated still just very slowly. Have you tried MorphOS?
assemblylang
I looked into MorphOS before, but IIRC you need PowerPC hardware to run it. Is there an x86 or ARM version I'm not aware of?
mattl
I don’t believe so.
version_five
The short lived BlackBerry playbook

It runs QNX and you could get a terminal emulator for it, through which you had a functional unix like environment with a text editor, compiler, python, etc. It's not updated and all the root certs (I think I'm using that correctly, not my area) are expired, so it doesn't connect with anything that needs https. Otherwise I think it could be an awesome terminal tablet (it needs a better keyboard too)

jesterson
I'd add BlackBerry phones as well. Would exchange my iphone in a jiffy to 9900 or Q10 if it would work with latest apps.
anthk
Two roguelikes:

- Avanor

https://libregamewiki.org/Avanor

- Abura Tan

http://aburatan.sourceforge.net/

More abandoned games:

- Fanwor. The sprite should pallete-swap/blink when it's hit.

https://github.com/gsantner/mirror__fanwor

Now, software.

ROX filer + rox desktop. Fluxbox may work as an Oroborox replacement, but Rox-Lib is tied to Python2. It works under Slackware 15 because we have Python2 and 3 for sure, but other distros are screwed.

This runs circles over XFCE and even LXDE on speed.

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/

ROX related repos:

https://repo.or.cz/?a=project_list;t=rox

josephcsible
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. It was nice to be able to use pf on systems without having to use unfamiliar variants of the rest of the tools.
trinovantes
YNAB4

Still works but performance is starting to slow down with almost 10 years of data

elviejo
Google cloud print. To share physical printers on the cloud.

Google reader. For RSS with blazing speed.

Xenixo
I discovered that my Android phone can now print directly without Google cloud print when in the same wifi.
elviejo
Yes but what I used to was to print, online receipts, invoices, etc. In my mothers house. That way I could help her.

Or ask a friend for his color printer and send stuff there.

mechatrocity
Winamp
dijit
No joke. This is what I thought of before I clicked the thread.

I’m not sure if it was just a product of it’s time, but it feels like there’s nothing that quite captures the spirit of Winamp.

DougMellon
This was my exact thought as well. There was just something special about customizing it and using it as your digital media console.

I feel as if everyone was always excited to show off what skin they were using. https://skins.webamp.org

2143
Blast from the past.

Perhaps if it was open source and there was a Linux version (AFAIK there's no Linux version), then it might have lived on.

Or maybe not; with music streaming platforms such as Spotify, the world has moved on.

beamatronic
It's 2022 and I can't visualize my music like my friend did in 1997.
devoutsalsa
Any cool DOS game.
AnonHP
You can still play those using Dosbox (an emulator) and downloading the games from various archives. There are also browser ports for several games. One of the recent ones I saw, which was also shared here, was Prince of Persia (https://princejs.com/ ).
anthk
POP has a native source port for any platform, SDLPOP.

Also, https://osgameclones.com has zillions of source port and clones for everything.

Stack ScummVM on top and lots of DOS games can be replayable today without burning zillions of cycles at DOSBox.

BizarroLand
What would be ideal for me would be having everything set up and ready to go. It is a bit of a hassle to install dosbox, copy the files to the internal file structure of the dosbox, then install the software and configure.

I know I'm being picky but taking 25 minutes to set up a new game or an old program just isn't usually worth the hassle for me.

AnonHP
Media Rage, a Mac application that had a broad and rich set of features to manage metadata, find duplicates, and organize media files like music, photos, etc.

The developer’s site (Chaotic Software) doesn’t exist any longer, but here’s an old page elsewhere [1] with a description of what it could do.

[1]: http://mac.majorgeeks.com/files/details/media_rage.html

waste_monk
Space Empires 5 (a sequel would be ideal, but better support for current-gen OS's would be nice). Stellaris is good but doesn't quite stratch the itch the same way SEV did.
ycuser2
Google Cardboard
ge96
Somewhat related, I used to use this 360 photo sphere thing a while back, would load them up in Google Cardboard. Really cool feature
inglor_cz
Symbian OS was weird, but extremely efficient. It would run circles around Android, as far as performance goes. I miss it.
musicale
Python (before Python 3 decided to abandon backward compatibility and burn billions of dollars in code)

32-bit macOS and iOS (before Apple set fire to all the 32-bit games and other software)

Backward compatibility with older versions of macOS and iOS in general

Desktop software in general (before everything became a crappy web app)

Non-subscription software

Smartphone games without horrible monetization schemes

Web sites without adtech

nenadpantelic
Marcomedia (Adobe) Fireworks - simply the most intuitive bitmap and vector graphics editor.
antifarben
Internet Explorer but hear me out before you cry:

The current browser ecosystem has more or less two engines: WebKit based browsers and Firefox. We have basically WebKit monoculture. If you'd find a fundamental flaw in WebKit, you'd be able to break most browsers. If Internet Explorer would be open source we would have the chance to get a third engine running. Browser engines aren't trivial and IE also had some good sides after all these years.

I guess if IE would become FOSS this would bring some fresh air to the ecosystem.

dunefox
We already have Firefox and few people use it compared to chrome. A third engine does not matter.
zarzavat
WebKit and Blink are two different engines. They split off 9 years ago. There’s no such thing as a WebKit monoculture. There may be a Blink monoculture depending on how much you care about mobile browsers, mobile Safari is still very popular especially in the US.
vimy
iPad Safari is close enough to desktop Safari now that it switched to the same user agent as desktop Safari. That surely helps to bump Safari’s marketshare.
anthk
I would be happy enough if Dillo parsed the video and audio tags as <a> links.
rasz
Yes, but not the IE. Opera Presto! Source code even leaked after Opera switched to webkit, and some Russians tried patching new things, but legal status made unsustainable :(.
guessbest
Pocketpc 6.5 and similar handwriting builtin systems with slideout keyboards. There were gnu tools compiled to it, even emacs.
hbarka
VB6
mikewarot
Visual Basic 6 allowed almost anyone to automate things, and get on with their lives. The amount of labor saved by it could be staggering.
mikewarot
Picasa - the photo management program, it had really good facial recognition, and ran locally. Unfortunately, the last version has a bug that swaps face tags in an image with more than one face. 8(

Digikam is not an acceptable substitute, it's got lots of quirks, and tends to abend.

thijsvandien
So many people around me love using Picasa. It offers everything they need in a user friendly fashion, and no more. Such a shame it was abandoned.
shakna
WordPerfect.

Yes, technically it still exists in some form, but not really. The modern version shares little in common with the DOS port - apart from unicode incompatibility, and that's hardly desirable.

Corel have even acknowledged how good the DOS version was by attempting to have a "Classic Mode" with a similar interface. But the macro system is completely incompatible, and all the menus are different. It's a skin-deep facelift, nothing more.

ottod
For me, WordPerfect in Spanish. It was a very professional translation, and all the relevant associated tools worked too. Now, sometimes you get all the bells and whistles in English and a couple more languages, and then only core functionality in the rest.
mezentius
I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS regularly, particularly during the beginning of a writing project when I'm most prone to being distracted. If you emulate through DOSBox-X, you can use TTF fonts for screen output, and even print directly from the application.

(Happy to share information on how to set this up with anyone who might be interested.)

tgamma
Apple Aperture - still missing it‘s DAM and automatic library management capabilities which IMHO were lightyears ahead of what Lightroom is even today