Jump Start World (JSW)

This was really one of my first big projects and it took about 3 months and this is how it went.

Discovery

So I was at school and then this memory of a game that seemed almost like a fever dream hit me. I consulted some friends about it and it seemed we all had the same hallucination. After a little bit of research we found JSW. This was it! But…. about 6 months before they shut down. This started a quest.

A bit of History

JSW was a k-5th educational game that was built in 2008 for windows vista. Like Neopets it slowly lost popularity as schools changed from it to other websites. Unlike Neopets the game was boring and didn’t become a NFT website. After the shutdown there was one last place to get the game, the Internet Archive also known as God's chosen website.

a image from jsw it is the main character in front of a hill

The Process

The first problem I had was downloading it onto my computer. I had to trick the iso file (yes like an os) to think it had an optical media drive. After this came a long line of failures. The version I downloaded was for Vista and I don't have a copy of Vista just lying around. So I first tried compatibility mode that let me get the game to at least open and get to the first cut scene, but then it would crash. This was because JSW is a mostly 3d game and it was trying to find a Direct X 7 to generate its graphics. When it couldn’t it just gave the data to DX 11. To fix this I used an application called DGvoodoo. This allowed me to render the 3d but a problem came with the arcade portion of JSW, which is a completely different exe. I got stumped so I did a 180 and tried making a virtual machine of vista… this didn’t work :( The solution to the arcade crash was to go into windows settings and change the screen to be the aspect ratio of a vista pc.

A screenshot of the dgvoodoo interface

Th Actual Game

My original goal was to complete the game, but for my mental sanity I didn’t. The game doesn’t have captions or any text on screen, so I can’t listen to music. The story line is like 5 min long and the arcade is so annoying. It is the same game over and over again and you're required to complete each of them for each SKILL :(