pc-883d-doc

Measurements of the multimedia session of the 883 CD Extra "Grazie mille" (Italy, October 1999) — a music album that opens a program when you put it in a computer, and the program contains a slot machine and an installer for 883D, a 3D avatar chat world.

The disc calls itself "Viaggio al centro del Mondo", which is track 6's title and not the album's, and it says so in two independent files.

What this repository measures, and what it does not

It measures one folder. 142 files, 222,271,591 bytes, copied off the data session of one CD. Every number below has a command in tools/ that reproduces it and a saved run in notes/.

It does not measure history. 883D is described by the person who supplied this material as one of the earliest — possibly the first — 3D avatar chat engines. That may well be true and this repository cannot check it: "883D was among the first X" is a census of everything else that existed in 1999, and a census needs an archive, not a directory listing. What is here is what shipped, what it was called, what it was built on, and where it pointed.

The three things worth knowing

1. The disc names the address of a place that is gone. The Activeworlds client in dati/install/883d.exe ships a pre-populated art cache, and the cache directory is named after the world's object-path server. Applying the naming rule that two other cache entries independently confirm:

http://vrml.moltimedia.it/aw — and a world called city

Plus fourteen custom Italian avatar animations, four objects, one avatar, four sounds and one sky, out of a world. The client is here and it works. The server is not. 13

2. There was no September 1998. The mtimes describe a product made in 1998 and finished in 1999. They are wrong: one workstation in the build chain had its system year set to 1998 while the year was 1999, and seven files prove it against three different internal clock formats — including a cabinet whose own build date is two seconds before the mtime it carries, once the year is fixed. The whole authored production is 18 September to 4 October 1999, seventeen days. 04

3. Twenty-four raw CD sectors survived a copy that was supposed to destroy all of them. Three files in PICTURES/ are RIFF/CDXA containers holding complete 2,352-byte sectors with their sync patterns and absolute MSF addresses — LBA 204,602 to 204,625, contiguous. It is the only physical geometry this repository has, and it puts a floor under the length of the audio session it does not have. 07

The documents

00 — Predictions	101 clauses, written before any measurement, never edited
01 — What this repository cannot see	there is no image. What that costs, item by item
02 — The tree	142 files, 25 extensions, and three files the copy destroyed
03 — Twenty days	the mtimes at face value: fifteen production waves
04 — The year that is one too early	why the face value is wrong, and by exactly how much
05 — The files that say what the disc thinks it is	LEGGIMI.TXT, two autoruns, the IEAK script
06 — Blue Book, and the Macintosh that wrote it	the album's track listing, in Mac Roman
07 — Twenty-four sectors that still know where they were	raw CD sectors, MPEG-1 stills, and a disc address
08 — Twenty-one binaries	two Director projectors, one Penworks Xtra, thirteen Microsofts
09 — Opening Director	the container, and the four wrong readers
10 — Three movies and a stub	the cast, the names, and who made it
11 — The slot machine	what it unlocks, and the twenty-one characters it writes down
12 — 883D, from the file	VISE, Activeworlds, RenderWare 2.1, quoted from the disc
13 — The world that is gone	the shipped cache, the address, and two files that should not be there
14 — Four kinds of 3D on one disc	RealVR, QuickTime VR, Microsoft's VRML viewer, Activeworlds
15 — Nineteen movies, and the 55 MB nobody names	eleven of them are the user interface
16 — Eleven Flash banners	one of them is 29 bytes and it is deliberate
17 — Other people's software	33.360 %, with the denominator on every line
18 — Against the other four	zero shared files, and where the comparison says nothing
19 — Is it a video game?	no, and the row in the index says so
20 — Open questions	thirteen, each with the measurement that failed
21 — Prediction scoring	44 hits, 20 mixed, 37 misses out of 101
22 — Tools	44 scripts, 14 new, and the twenty that do not apply
23 — Leftovers	measured, true, and too small for a chapter

Reproducing it

Python 3, standard library only. No dependencies, no network.

git clone https://github.com/vs-sr-dev/pc-883d-doc
cd pc-883d-doc
# put the disc's data-session tree in ./883/
python tools/census.py     883
python tools/mtimes.py     883 --waves --gap 86400
python tools/twoclocks.py  883
python tools/pecensus.py   883 --sort coff
python tools/thirdparty.py 883
python tools/director.py   883/dati/menuDir7.dxr --map --cast --names --scripts
python tools/vise.py       883/dati/install/883d.exe
python tools/cdxa.py       883/PICTURES/JACKET01.00A 883/PICTURES/JACKET01.00L 883/PICTURES/JACKET01.00P --map

The full list is in 22-tools.md. No asset from the disc is in this repository; .gitignore excludes the whole source tree by name and the asset extensions twice over.

The source material, and its limits

This is not a disc image. It is the data session copied file by file onto a filesystem. There is no ISO, BIN, CUE, CCD or SUB, therefore no volume descriptor, no directory records, no extent map, no padding, no unclaimed sectors, and no audio session — the ten tracks that make this object a CD Extra are not here.

Twenty of the thirty inherited tools do not apply, most of them for that reason, and each is listed with its verdict in 22-tools.md. A tool that does not apply is not a tool that returned nothing.

The original CD exists and was not found during this session; a deeper search is a future job. If it turns up and is dumped with both sessions preserved, 01 lists what changes, and several open questions close in one command.

---

External context, labelled as such

Everything above is measured from the folder. Everything in this section came from outside it and is not used to support any measurement.

Moltimedia

The studio is named nowhere in any human-readable document on the disc. It names itself three times inside binaries — twice in the Director VWFI author field as Alessandro ciao - Moltimedia, and once as the hostname vrml.moltimedia.it in the Activeworlds cache path (10, 13).

The company still exists. Its Vimeo page (vimeo.com/moltimedia), supplied by the person who provided this material, describes it as run by Paolo Valietti and Paolo De Francesco, working in "images, video, information design, virtual reality, animation and video games", and says:

MoltiMedia was the first company in Italy to develop a 3D online video game, custom-built for the MoltiMedia-designed Yamaha Motor Italian website. In 2000, the company also came up with the pioneering 883D, a 3D chat created for fans of the Italian band 883.

Two notes, and both are about the boundary rather than the claim.

One: that page says 2000 and the disc says 1999. The CD Extra's Blue Book directory — the last thing written to the disc — is timestamped 1999-10-04 21:13:54, and dati/install/883d.exe, which contains the Activeworlds client, carries an mtime of 1999-09-24 once 04's one-year correction is applied. So the client shipped in 1999.

That is not a contradiction of the company's account and this repository does not present it as one. A world can be built in 1999, pressed onto an album in October 1999, and open to the public in 2000; a retrospective written a decade later can also simply round. What the disc establishes is a floor: the software existed, was complete, and was manufactured by 4 October 1999.

Two: "the first company in Italy" and "pioneering" are the other half of the job. They are claims about what else existed, made by the people who were there, and they are exactly the kind of thing this repository is structurally unable to check. They are recorded here, attributed, and used for nothing.

The two other companies on the disc

Penworks Corporation wrote CDPRO.X32, the Xtra that lets the slot machine drive the album's own audio session, and its version resource is the only place that name appears (08).

Energybank has a clickable link (http://www.energybank.it) and three interface bitmaps in the main menu (10). What its role was is not stated on the disc.

The record label is not named anywhere on this disc at all.

The name that is not here

Tribumatta — the name 883D is said to have taken later — occurs zero times in 142 files and 1,569,177 printable runs. That is a measurement; that the succession happened is a historical claim this repository neither supports nor contradicts.