rjay63 wrote:Looking good! Nice work..
Thank you ^_^
And can I just say you have been absolutely brilliant in giving me any and all remaining info to help me recreate this site as faithfully as possible considering how much was missing.
The "Win A Car" picture was probably an animated link that said "Win Your Dream Car On Dreamarena". That was a competition they had when the game was launched.
That seems to add up. The Win a Car text in the preview image seems to be showing the button in motion. I rebuilt it as a placeholder, the likelihood is that it'll be a space used to promote other DC online services such as Dreampipe, or maybe your blog for those who want more MSR info. It's easily swapped out when the time comes.
Those magazine screenshots were taken at a time when not all options were working. The Speed Challenge option was open soon after launch but the Kudos Ranking didn't appear for another two months. Here's a post from 2001 from the old Usenet archive on Google Groups: https://bit.ly/2rqmHlz
Worth noting. Someone is looking into reverse engineering the MSR upload files so we can get these active, however there's no timeframe on those currently. It's interesting to see how little of the site ended up functional after 3 months of release. My guess is the team was too busy fixing the bugs that the first two PAL releases wound up with.
I think the World Time Trials was eventually opened but I'm still not sure the New Time Trial board was ever finished. By this time, people had figured out how to hack the VMU and change their scores/times to whatever they liked. Another Usenet post from the same time period: https://bit.ly/2wg03B8
As above, we can likely get them working even if they weren't finished back in 2001. As for how to get around the cheating issue, I'm not sure. However now the leaderboards are in the hands of die hard fans, it's less likely for us to cheat. But either way, it'll be interesting to find a way to verify times.
Other than building a new icon in the top left for Speed Challenge (And completing the San Fran, Tokyo and Three Cities headers), all of the imagery for the Leaderboards is complete - including the yellow text art.
The Kudos icon is brand-new and custom built (though I grabbed the Kudos logo itself off of a 2001 MSR fansite), as is the Time Trial clock face.
The country icons are also new. I tried to incorporate as many nations as I could for the time being but I'm sure I missed a few out. Here's the countries done so far (If anyone on here comes from a different nation, let me know and I'll add it ASAP);
USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil
UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Denmark
Japan, China, South Korea, Russia
South Africa, Australia
Now the basic artwork is complete, I'm going to be building the other pages (Other cities and the Time Trials, Kudos Rankings, Ghost Attack etc) and make sure that all pages correctly lead into one another. Once that's done I'll be rebuilding the News page (msr_003) so that the Archives are up to date and we can add newer News updates as needed.