Quoting today's news:

"Monday 30th August 1999

It looks as if the MARP site is going to have to close soon. I'm sorry, but the people hosting the site are no longer willing to allow the CGI scripts to have the memory that they need to run. I'll try to make the scripts smaller, or find an alternative host, but I'm not very hopeful at the moment. I'll post more news here as and when I know what's happening. "

Men.....that's terrific !!!!! Personally, I will feel completely lost....anything that could be done to save MARP, or to help him finding a new host, I will do!

If we will have to give up to some "unnecessary" scipts features, ok....through them away, Zwaxy....we will support them even manually, but pls....don't leave us without MARP !!!

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), August 30, 1999

Answers

Thats not good news.

Anyway to make the data more static and do nightly updates of the scores?

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), August 30, 1999.

Loose the scripts man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And maybe loose the clones and start fresh!!!!!!!!! Or how about a site where u vote for 10 games each month, or a new competition when each new beta is released??????

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Don't go man!! :-(

-- GameGuru (games.guru@cableinet.co.uk), August 30, 1999.

It would sure be a sad day to see MARP go. Maybe it's time to streamline MARP a bit - does MARP really need to have scores for all those clones/different country releases (lots of games have 3+ US, Jap, World, etc) for so many games? Maybe there's a way we could decide on one "official version" for each game?

-- Octavian (sjh1@bigfoot.com), August 30, 1999.

Hi....

I don't think it is a matter of server disc space load, rather than of memory load, due to the heavy scripts.

The solution will be to make them as simpler as possible, just 2 or 3 features (serch a game, a player, show the leaderboard and stop!) For all other features, static pages could be posted somewhere periodically.

Ciao Cicca

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), August 30, 1999.

I love the heavy duty scripts, but if the choice is no scripts or no MARP I'd vote to ditch the scripts in a heartbeat. If we only get basic uploading & scoring scripts we'll live Zwaxy - the two alternatives are first place only or a black hole of email from which new games never resurface!

As much as I might like Sniper & Cubeman, MARP is the driving force in this universe...

Aqua

-- Aquatarkus (aquatarkus@digicron.com), August 30, 1999.

I am serious when I say this:

If MARP closes, I might be in a major state of depression. =(

I quit an internet basketball league just so I could spend more time here...and MARP is right now the only thing I really can do right now. No MARP = No Happiness for me. It sounds trite...but I'm serious...it took me almost 3 hours to swallow the news (in which I didn't crack a smile, or barely spoke, just made sounds of hopelessness)...until I was motivated again and then I started my push for 10,000. =) You can take out the complex leaderboard features I wanted, just keep the site up! You don't want to see a depressed Sports Dude. =) (Yeah, yeah, I know, I sound desperate, but if you knew me well, you'd know I was quite serious)

-- Sports Dude (shyboy820@aol.com), August 30, 1999.

I think not only a few will be depressed if marp closes, so be warned if it does close there will be people to find a way for it to exist at a later time somewhere else.

Zwaxy if you need to dump space before they kick you out, i'll give you an ftp site to dump to, or me recursivley grab stuff quickly.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), August 30, 1999.

Zwaxy, e-mail me ASAP, as I can possibly save your scripts and their resource needing. (I, like most, can't see MARP close, even though I am a relative newbie, (only 9 months))...

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), August 30, 1999.

Thanks for the support, guys. I don't want to see MARP close, either. I'd love for retrogames.com to allow the script to keep running, but I really don't think they're going to. Their server keeps crashing, and it's easier for them to blame my scripts that to find out the real cause of the problem.

If anyone knows of a site which can offer MARP the >100Mb of disk spaces needed to host the recordings, and the ~1s of CPU per hit which the script uses then that would be great. I've talked to Dave of davesclassics before, but his site is hosted on an NT box, which doesn't run Python, and he didn't seem very keen to host MARP. Maybe some other site has the resources needed, but I think that the 2-300 hits per day that MARP generates isn't enough to warrant the resouces it takes...

I hope in time that I, or someone else, will be able to re-code the scripts in a more efficient language, or maybe I'll find the time to cut down the memory/CPU requirements of the script, but for the immediate future, I'm not too hopeful.

There's no way that I would have time to manually update the page for every recording that's submitted - I used to do that in the early days when there were maybe 5 or 10 recordings per day, but now it's just too much. I'm sure that eventually we'll work out some way to keep MARP alive. If anyone has any suggestions/offers/prayers please let me know!

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@mail.com), August 30, 1999.

You know what I think you should do? You should go to emulation news sites and mention that you need a new home. Tell them what you require, and I bet they'll post this news on the web, because it IS emulation related(in the bounds of MAME recordings). With any luck, somebody who's willing to sacrifice the resources will pick off this news, and they will let you know about hosting your site.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a good idea?

Here's another thing... when our tournament started on July 1st, we were averaging about 200 hits / day. We are just about ready to start September, and now we're averaging about 300 hits / day. If my math is correct, that's a 50 % increase... which is HUGE over two months!

Therefore, I think anyone who wants to host this site will be making a good investment, because we've been increasing our visitors by quite a bit recently.

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), August 30, 1999.

I thought of something else - if by any chance you have to close because your script is too big, I bet you can narrow down the script to just include the tournament. The script would probably be at least 10 times less space than your regulation script. True, there would be only 10 games to play on, but it would be something to compete on while you're finding a new home.

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), August 30, 1999.

I hope not. After all this is the best site in net, a huge database to see how "classics" are played gathering nowadays some pretty good players all over the world. Zwaxy and us other players have done so much for this site, hope these efforts don't get wasted.

I don't really now much about any scripts but here are some suggestions anyway. If there is no other solutions, take these away: every score except top 3,clones,messages telling you that someone has scored something(simply look uploads),that daily board summary(it's anyway better to go to board and checkout new messages and new answers),scoring system could be much simpler (old 10-3-1 or first place only...), or get rid (I know many don't like this)of the whole leaderboard system(maybe temporarily)? ,tournament could move to gameboy totally, only link there?....

ps. thanks guys for noticing my Tron record :)

Tommi

-- Tommi Tiihonen (tiihoto@hotmail.com), August 31, 1999.

Here follows an e-mail I sent to some 30 major Emu Sites WebMasters:

"Hi there.... This is not an official mail from the MARP (MAME Action Replay Page) site Wabmaster (Zwaxy), but a private initiative from a user who loves retrogaming and hopes that great site stays alive. I sure I'm also interpretating all Marp users feelings. MARP is experiencing difficulties with its server, and is looking for a new home. What it needs is ">100Mb of disk spaces needed to host the recordings, and the ~1s of CPU per hit which the script uses", and it has to run an a Unix machine (Phyton scripts). We and all the retrogaming community will be very greateful if you can do anything for that, either hosting the site, or addressing him to a reliable provider, or, at least, posting this news on you sites.....anything will help. The guy to be contacted is Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com) . Thanx for your cooperation. Cicca"

Hope this will help, and Zwaxy would appreciate.

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), August 31, 1999.

Hopefully another retro gaming site will come through soon. I'm sure someone will host Marp.

I can put Marp on my machine *temporarily*, my provider does not allow us to run servers, so I could not leave it on there for very long. Its a P120 with 64Megs and about 8 megs of HD space left.

PS: I have also never set up Apache, so that could be a problem also. :)

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), August 31, 1999.

I may have forgot 2 zeroes after that 8. ;)

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), August 31, 1999.

I have a virtual domain. To the outside world, there is no difference, but it means that I don't own the server, but rather have bought/leased/rented (whatever you want to call it) the disk space etc. from the company that really owns the server. They offer unlimited traffic, but it does not say anything about CPU time. Traffic shouldn't be a problem anyway, because I have been getting 2000 hits a day or more for a long time, and nobody has complained.

I'll have to ask them about CPU time. I'll send them an e-mail tonight.

The only problem then is the disk space. I have 150 megs available on my site, part of which I am already using. Would it be possible to just run the scripts on my site, but offload the recordings/images to another (somebody else's) server?

I can't promise anything until I've talked to my host.

Another option might be to buy space/time from some host. If you shop around, this shouldn't be more than, say, $40/month, and if some of the MARP regulars are willing to chip in, then it would be really cheap for each individual. Of course, the only way for this to really work is to pay one year or so in advance, which, if we could get 40 MARP regulars to sponsor this, would be only $12/year per person...

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), August 31, 1999.

The other way could be for MARP to go the way that every other emu site is, advertising banners... (That could make the money to pay for it's place in cyberspace.)

Also, while I have ppl's attention, anyone know of a place to get Intellivision roms?

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), August 31, 1999.

I know I`m a complete new-boy here , but I do have an opinion. This MARP thing is just TOO good to die. Common sense says that MARP cannot die, and I believe and hope , won`t. I feel completely and utterly useless at the moment , but have seen from other message boards , the response from MARP-ERS to this dilemma. As a previous post said, if we have to pay for it , then there`s no probs. I dunno what the solution is ( non- techno head ), but the beloved Internet is the place to find one. This may be somewhat naive on my part , but a message on Daves VGC , says try here: http://www.onlinebusiness.com/OnlineBusiness/webHosts.shtml

MARP is the only site were EVERY game that ever was is played to such a level that it would be TOO much a loss to the gaming community.

Chris/Zwaxy, all I can do is offer you my hopes and prayers , and may your God be with you , and with the rest of the MARP players also. Remember , the Good guys always win in the end. ALEX

-- Alex Weir (alexweir@indigo.ie), August 31, 1999.

Sorry , forgot, Chris Parsley, have you tried looking around here ?:

http://www.webcom.com/~makingit/intellivision/download.shtml

Excuse the probable naiveity on my part , just doing my " best "

-- Alex Weir (alexweir@indigo.ie), August 31, 1999.