Background

Sometime during the year of 1998, two friends, Royalblood (whom is also the narrator and author of this blog) and Polishplaya, started playing a paintball mod for Quake and Quake2 known as Digital Paint, or DP for short. Much happened over the next few years - clans, matches, IRC, friends, etc - and most of it was documented. However, in the years since, much of this was lost, apparently forever. Over the past 10 years, much has changed - clanmates have moved on or lost touch with each other, different games are being played, computers have come and gone, hard drives that once held the valuable documents of this period in our gaming history failed or got corrupted, and webhosts have come and gone, along with the data on them.

Now, I have attempted to recover as much of this lost data as possible. I have majored in Information Assurance and Security Engineering and taken a course on Computer Forensics. Looking for a project to keep me busy over the summer and greatly wishing I could reminisce in the past glory of our clan(s) history, I have attempted to use my recently acquired computer forensics skills to thoroughly search through all my hard drives - old and new, working and barely working - in hopes of finding something, anything.

My reasons for this are entirely selfish. The primary motivation was to recover some mp3s and various videos and other stuff I had thought was safely stored on a hard drive. Apparently I accidentally used it for a new Linux installation on another computer. I was able to find and recover most of it though, which inspired me to check all my other hard drives, particularly the very oldest ones I own, to see what other things I could find.

There were (are... I'm still parsing everything and will be for a while) some very specific things that I was hoping I would find. I did not expect to find any of it, but they represented lost treasures that I wish I still had. The project was a success no matter what just for recovering those lost mp3s and videos, but if I were to find any of these other items, I would be extremely delighted. These items were, in no particular order:

• Website and match results or really anything that relates to my DP clans, RiP and DOM.
• Some noticeably missing mp3s of my friends' bands (Situation Down, Through Angel Eyes, and The Honour Killing) of which I was a part of and did much recording with.
• Old research papers or homework from my first attempt at college - particularly I wrote a paper about MP3's that was excellent and would be very interesting to read now, 10 years later, given all that has happened with filesharing, the RIAA lawsuits, "piracy", etc.
• Some Doom maps that I created but never released.

Like I said, I am still in the process of parsing all the data I recovered (and searching for more old hard drives to look through) but thus far I have only found one of those four items - old DOM stuff. I found some, but apparently not all, of one incarnation of our website. I have found many, but not all, old screenshots of match results. I also found bits and pieces of IRC chat logs. It's not everything I was hoping for, but it is a lot more than expected.

Now, I am presenting everything DOM, and DP, that I found so that others can reminisce with me.