p.enthalabs

Show HN: Encarta 95 Web

87 points · 24 visible top comments · 2026-10-24 07:18:37 UTC

benwinding.github.io · Read Story HN original

Encarta is super nostalgic, and I was surprised it wasn't available to use online. So I embarked on the difficult task of making it so.

The way this works is the most convoluted, nonsense and brittle system ever... but it works as a statically hosted gh-pages site!

Please note: All the material on this site is freely available through the internet archive (see github readme)

Github repo -> https://github.com/benwinding/encarta_95_web

Comments

neronuser · 2026-10-24 09:21:30 UTC
Oh, that's very nostalgic, even though I only got acquainted with Encarta in the 2000s
sucrose · 2026-10-24 13:25:06 UTC
I got carried away and started playing the Age of Empires Demo from the desktop after I exited Encarta
pixel_popping · 2026-10-24 15:00:26 UTC
Back to prompting now.
nether1 · 2026-10-27 10:27:13 UTC
Me too
OuterVale · 2026-10-27 10:28:13 UTC
Glad to see I'm not the only one who immediately ditched an opportunity to learn for AoE. It lures like a siren's song.
usern20260720 · 2026-10-27 10:46:30 UTC
it is amazing that you can emulate win 95 on a browser tab and play win 95 video games like it's 1998.
mysterydip · 2026-10-27 11:14:05 UTC
It goes to show how actually powerful modern hardware is, and how much of it is squandered by modern software.
karim79 · 2026-10-24 15:58:07 UTC
Oh God I remember running this on my dad's computer which had the first CD-ROM drive I had seen. I felt like I was in a spaceship
bombcar · 2026-10-27 11:11:53 UTC
I remember the CD drive on the school computer took CDs in a big case with a floppy like opening.
BorisMelnik · 2026-10-24 18:58:18 UTC
wow blast from the past. I do beleive this exact version prob in exactly 95 was the first CD I ever inserted into a CD rom. lots of fun!
tadfisher · 2026-10-24 22:57:54 UTC
Just checked, the Soundgarden clip is in its proper place on the Rock Music article. Fantastic work.
alexwrich · 2026-10-25 07:30:15 UTC
NICE - thank u
Cilvic · 2026-10-27 10:31:38 UTC
isn't that how it looked at the time?
ale42 · 2026-10-27 11:54:34 UTC
Yes and no. It was pixelated, not irregular and ugly. Here is bad quality rescaling at work.
netsharc · 2026-10-27 12:14:46 UTC
Fuck me, OP's a moron... the VM's "monitor" is set to 1024x768.

The output canvas has width="1024" height="768", but the CSS:

#screen_container canvas, #screen_container > div {

  width: 100% !important; 

  height: 100% !important;

  display: block;
}

overwrites it, making everything be upscaled...

It would look fine upscaled if only no one added the CSS rule "image-rendering: pixelated"

ale42 · 2026-10-27 12:45:10 UTC
Tried it removing the pixelated in the Dev tools. It looks like an old Win32 app running on 150% or 200% HiDPI scaled Windows with slightly blurry text. In any case much better than irregular pixelated scaling.
purerandomness · 2026-10-27 11:55:08 UTC
No, of course not.
otagekki · 2026-10-27 10:13:45 UTC
Wait, it even features a windows 95? nice easter egg
notpushkin · 2026-10-27 10:52:56 UTC
It is loading a Windows 95 VM (using https://copy.sh/v86/) and runs an actual copy of Encarta 95 there, yeah.
p_l · 2026-10-27 11:10:52 UTC
and includes AoE 2 :D
ale42 · 2026-10-27 11:55:32 UTC
And PovRay, Super Pi and some other stuff...

Actually, I didn't know that one could ship a pre-booted OS inside the emulator.

netsharc · 2026-10-27 12:08:38 UTC
OP wrote: "difficult task"...

It's just a crappy render of a Windows VM's display, in all it's upscaled pixelated glory, it's not even doing anything webby like a Javascript engine that decodes whatever database Encarta used and rendered the data in crisp HTML.

If they had asked AI to do all the above, I'd be more impressed than this (I'm guessing) human-made slop...

est · 2026-10-27 10:39:55 UTC
The mouse hijack feels really weird
ale42 · 2026-10-27 11:59:22 UTC
It's because it's basically a fully emulated PC running Windows 95. It's not a recreation of Encarta for the web, which would me much nicer IMHO.
Brendinooo · 2026-10-27 10:39:55 UTC
Straight to Mind Maze for me!

(Mouse is VERY touchy though)

rahidz · 2026-10-27 10:39:58 UTC
Immediately jumped straight to MindMaze.
hmhrex · 2026-10-27 11:55:49 UTC
The first thing I looked for as well. The nostalgia.
wafflez · 2026-10-27 10:43:14 UTC
What a throwback. Right back to writing "book reports" in middle school.
0x10ca1h0st · 2026-10-27 10:59:32 UTC
The very first program I ever used on my father's PC, and would constantly get stuck playing Mind Maze for hours.
xacky · 2026-10-27 11:03:44 UTC
CD ROM encyclopedias were only really viable when dial up speeds limited the amount of multimedia content on the internet. Both Microsoft and Britannica were victims of internet encyclopedias. And now static internet based encyclopedias are themselves under threat of personalised AI content as well. The pursuit of knowledge keeps changing what knowledge itself looks like.
roryirvine · 2026-10-27 14:01:15 UTC
Britannica actually had a great website during the dot com era - hyperlinked, very browsable, and definitely had that semi-addictive "rabbithole" quality.

The hurt themselves badly by imposing a really annoying paywall just as Wikipedia was beginning to take off. A hybrid model with tiered access (maybe even a limited ad-supported free tier) might well have kept them on top - instead, they offered only a single expensive annual plan priced to compete with the paper or CD editions.

phantomathkg · 2026-10-27 11:09:58 UTC
the problem i have is the mouse control is weird.
seszett · 2026-10-27 11:24:34 UTC
It does not work at all for me (touchpad/Firefox/Linux).
haunter · 2026-10-27 11:12:41 UTC
I still have my boxed copy of Encarta 2001. The interactive world atlas was the best feature! Miles ahead of everything at the time. Multiple layers of stats from population to weather to languages etc https://youtu.be/zsbShjlh6xk?si=4U47LILUmKPfXgPY&t=320
rustyhancock · 2026-10-27 11:40:59 UTC
I kind of wish these fixed large encyclopedia were still going in 2019 to capture a pre AI corpus.

But I suppose that would pre-COVID too.

Still I'd quite have liked something like that.

Some have suggested a Wikipedia snapshot which can be browsed locally - not bad but not the same vibe as curated professionally written Encarta or Britannica.

I_am_tiberius · 2026-10-27 11:17:53 UTC
This makes me raise the question whether it's possible to view wikipedia as per ...? I know i can go back per article - but can I browse wikipidea as it was in 2005?
ButlerianJihad · 2026-10-27 11:39:18 UTC
No. This is technically insurmountable. The main obstacles involve the fact that templates and their formatting has changed drastically, and also the media that is stored on Commons has also changed commensurately.

It is not nearly enough to simply view an old revision from 21 years ago. It would be replete with broken templates, broken formatting, redlinks, and missing images, at the very least. And that applies to every single article, across the board, no matter what its content. The more comprehensive the article, the more broken it would look.

sevenseacat · 2026-10-27 11:20:21 UTC
Mind Maze yesssssssssssss
ionwake · 2026-10-27 11:24:45 UTC
did civilisation peak with encarta
mzmzmzm · 2026-10-27 11:40:25 UTC
I wish there were an option to keep the native cursor, the captured cursor doesn't work with my browser.
alex-moon · 2026-10-27 12:04:43 UTC
Ahh AoK is such an amazing game! I kind of want to download it now. I was never very good at it as a kid, spent _way_ too much time building my own campaigns with triggers (this was in the early days before I had discovered programming languages) - obviously no-one ever actually played these.
topherjaynes · 2026-10-27 12:17:36 UTC
Holy memories of the family computer in the living room batman!
mberlove · 2026-10-27 15:30:37 UTC
I don't know what it is that creates this feeling, but I am so drawn to read the text when I click into the site. Much more so than on Wikipedia or other online sources. Is it just nostalgia? I don't have any concrete memories of Encarta, other than a general awareness. Is it written better? Maybe slightly, if at all - I wouldn't say that Wikipedia content is not written well, on average.

So what is it? I genuinely wonder. Maybe just the style of the visuals, a throwback to when a written piece of content online "mattered" more, as it represented something more, too.

It may not matter, but distinguishing what captivates and what naturally glosses seems like it may matter greatly in a space suffused by content.