RAMSOFT archive

Preservation mirror of www.ramsoft.bbk.org, the site of RAMSOFT (World Wide Ramsoft / WWR), an Italian ZX Spectrum demogroup. The site is offline; the domain now resolves to an unrelated parking page.

192 files, recovered from the Internet Archive as the bytes the origin server sent, plus one later release found elsewhere. Notable contents: the TZX, CSW and RZX format specifications, MakeTZX (tape-audio to .tzx converter), RealSpectrum (RAMSOFT's Spectrum emulator), demoscene productions and hardware notes.

Layout

mirror/www.ramsoft.bbk.org/   the site as captured, 192 files
extra/                        RAMSOFT material from a different source
MANIFEST.timestamps           origin-server mtimes (git does not keep them)
PROVENANCE.tsv                per file: sha256, dates, origin headers
NOTICE.md                     copyright and distribution terms, quoted
VERIFY.md                     commands to re-derive every claim made here
.provenance/                  the CDX index and selection list used to rebuild

Nothing under mirror/ has been added, renamed, reformatted or corrected. Its faults are preserved too: of the 192 internal references in the mirrored pages, 12 point at files no Internet Archive capture contains. A further 3 point at the RZX recordings, which were captured but are deliberately not hosted here — NOTICE.md gives their Internet Archive URLs. Commentary lives outside it.

Contents of mirror/

28 HTML pages	including the format specifications
software/ (13)	MakeTZX and CSW releases
emul/ (25)	RealSpectrum builds, ROMs, utilities
demos/ (66)	demoscene productions and party releases
images/ (47)	site graphics and screenshots
tech/ (9)	hardware and format notes

Releases, labelled as the site's own download table labels them

File	Site label	Dated
software/mtzx233.zip	MakeTZX v2.33, MSDOS	01/08/03
software/mtzx233w.zip	MakeTZX v2.33, Windows	01/08/03
software/mtzx231.tgz	MakeTZX v2.31, Linux x86	02/07/01
software/ami-mtzx231.zip	MakeTZX v2.31, Amiga (68000)	04/07/01
software/mtzx1021b.tgz	"OLD MakeTZX" v1.02.1, Linux	18/03/98
software/mtzx1021s.zip	Source code v1.02.1	10/12/98
software/mtzxwgui050beta.zip	WinGUI v0.50 beta	04/07/01
software/gui012.zip	DOS GUI v0.12	23/01/99
software/csw200.zip	CSW v2.00	01/08/03
software/csw130.tgz	CSW v1.30	05/07/99
software/ami-csw130.zip	CSW v1.30, Amiga	13/07/99
emul/csdpmi5b.zip	cwsdpmi r5	undated

Source is present for v1.02.1 only. The manual (mtzxman.htm) records v2.00 as a "totally rewritten C++ engine"; no v2.xx source appears in this archive.

software/mtzx230.tgz and software/csdpmi4b.zip are present in the mirror but not linked from maketzx.html — superseded files still sitting on the server when it was crawled. Their version numbers are inferred from their filenames; unlike the table above, nothing on the site labels them.

emul/ holds RealSpectrum builds r14b, b13, b10 and b6 across CPU-specific variants (AMD, i686, Pentium) in both DOS and Win32 lines, plus rspec-roms.zip, HDF and network utilities.

Format specifications

Page	Specifies
tzxform.html	TZX, the standard ZX Spectrum tape-image format
csw.html	CSW (Compressed Square Wave) tape audio
rzxform.html	RZX input-recording format
tech.html	"Tech notebook" — hardware findings

extra/

mtzx240b1w.zip — MakeTZX v2.40 beta 1 for Windows. Its maketzx.exe contains the string 2.40-B1 and is dated 2010-02-20.

No mtzx240* URL appears in any of the 2,214 captures the mirror was built from, so it was not reachable on the site during the period the Internet Archive sampled it. That is not the same as never having been published there. This copy came from a Spectrum Computing forum thread; it is kept outside mirror/ because it did not come from the site.

How the mirror was built

Fetched with the Wayback Machine's id_ replay modifier, which returns the archived response body unaltered. Ordinary replay URLs return a processed copy with Wayback's JavaScript injected into every page and all links rewritten; an earlier version of this archive was built that way and was discarded.

2,214 captures were enumerated through the CDX API and one chosen per URL by grouping captures into runs of identical content digest, which separates a file being replaced from a file decaying at the end of the site's life. A second, independent selection algorithm chose the same capture for every URL.

Two dates per file

• origin_mtime — Last-Modified from RAMSOFT's server: when the file was written. Range 2000-07-28 to 2007-04-07.
• wayback_capture — when the Internet Archive crawled it: an upper bound on existence, driven by crawl scheduling. Range 2000-08-18 to 2008-10-28.

The mtimes carry the site's editorial history — the MakeTZX v2.33 release of 1 August 2003:

12:17:31Z  software/mtzx233.zip     DOS build
12:17:44Z  software/mtzx233w.zip    Windows build, 13 seconds later
12:18:46Z  mtzxman.htm              manual
12:36:55Z  maketzx.html             download page updated

Git does not preserve mtimes, so MANIFEST.timestamps records them. Dates inside the .zip and .tgz archives survive regardless.

To restore them:

awk '$1!~/^#/{print $1, $2}' MANIFEST.timestamps |
  while read -r t p; do touch -d "$t" "mirror/$p"; done

Licensing

See NOTICE.md. This is third-party material and no licence is granted over it here; the absence of a LICENSE file is intentional. MakeTZX and RealSpectrum both permit redistribution of unmodified archives, which is what this repository does. The CSW specification carries no terms at all. NOTICE.md quotes each statement from its primary source and marks where the reasoning rests on RAMSOFT's own characterisation rather than an independent grant.

This archive's own files — this README, NOTICE.md, PROVENANCE.tsv, MANIFEST.timestamps — are offered under CC BY 4.0.

Takedown

If you hold rights in any material here and want it removed, open an issue. Requests are honoured without argument.