Proggies.uk website

[Hated Moron]

Now that, sadly, we must assume David Williams is no longer with us, his proggies.uk website is on borrowed time. The domain name itself expires on 14th March 2023 so it will definitely disappear shortly after that, but if he paid for the hosting annually it may go even sooner.

This will obviously be a huge loss, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it; Copyright law means we cannot (legitimately) take a snapshot. I believe some years ago David gave permission for somebody to host a copy, but I can't remember the details.

The Wayback Machine does have some captures, of which I think this is the latest, but it's a poor substitute because the crucial downloads appear not to have been archived.

[DDRM]

I note that the BBCSDL Games page on the proggies site was last updated on August 23rd 2022, apparently to highlight the most recent version of BBCSDL, so maybe all is not lost.

Best wishes,

D

[Richard Russell]

Now that, sadly, we must assume David Williams is no longer with us, his proggies.uk website is on borrowed time. The domain name itself expires on 14th March 2023 so it will definitely disappear shortly after that, but if he paid for the hosting annually it may go even sooner.

Despite surviving rather longer than I anticipated (the final Wayback Machine capture seems to have been on June 21st 2024) it does now appear to have gone . The DNS doesn't resolve proggies.uk, although whois suggests the domain is still registered until March next year.

This represents the end of an era, since David Williams was by far the most prolific programmer of games (of all sorts) in BBC BASIC, some of which even won prestigious prizes in programming competitions, such as Forces of Darkness.

I am extremely saddened that so many of the top BBC BASIC games programmers are, as far as I can ascertain, no longer around, including Jeroen Groenendaal and Simon Mathiassen in addition to David. We may never see their like again.

I still think BBC BASIC is a good platform for developing games, especially when targetting both desktop and mobile (and web) platforms. David seemed very enthusiastic about the gfxlib games graphics library I developed for BBCSDL, but it was only a short while later that he dropped off the radar.