MSN Community archive viewing instructions.

MSN is no more, but what happens to the hundreds of posts that were made there during its six month life? The posts made to MSN represent a substantial portion of the history of the fruit machine emulation scene, and archiving them out so that past, present and future participants in the scene can understand its history is an important exercise; not least because the MSN Community was established as part of the inception of the scene.

To that end, I have kept every single daily e-mail digest of posts to MSN since day one, and now that MPU Forums have taken over, I've put all those e-mail digests into a single file that you can download and browse at your leisure.

Every post ever made to MSN is included in the archive, including posts and threads that were deleted from the community itself. (So if you have a bit of a rummage you'll discover a few skeletons in the closet, it's ever so exciting.....).

To view the messages, you'll need to have Outlook Express 5 or higher installed on your PC. Download this file, and unzip the contents (a single file called "Fruit Machine Emulation.dbx") to your Windows desktop or some equally convenient location. The instructions are as follows.....

1) Open OE and create a new local folder called "Fruit Machine Emulation" - OE will create an empty Fruit Machine Emulation folder in "local folders" and a "Fruit Machine Emulation.dbx" file in your OE folder.
1a) Depending on which version of OE you're using, you might have to do the following before proceeding to step 2. (As far as I can tell this isn't necessary with OE5 but is with OE6). After you have created the "Fruit Machine Emulation" folder in step 1, copy a message into it from another folder, it seems that the folder isn't "valid" until it has at least one message in it.
2) Close OE.
3) Copy the unzipped "Fruit Machine Emulation.dbx" archive file to the OE folder on your PC overwriting the file that OE has just created. If you don't know where your OE folder is, do a search for a file called "inbox.dbx" on your PC, the folder that it's in is your OE folder.
4) Restart OE, the Fruit Machine Emulation folder will now contain all the archived messages.

It's not particularly elegant, but it works.

Have fun.

6th January 2002.

NOTE : The Outlook Express folder can usually be found in a location similar to this;
C:\Windows\Application Data\Identities\{64631TA2-40KE-12EC-97ST-00AS8029Y795}\Microsoft\Outlook Express