# Original artifact record

The original applet was recovered from the Internet Archive on August 2, 2026. Files under `original/` are preserved without modification.

## Recovered artifacts

| File | Wayback capture | Bytes | SHA-256 |
| --- | --- | ---: | --- |
| `original/tron.jar` | 2000-03-03 12:10:11 UTC | 29,364 | `00d4c6fd50ec2677f698a1057f5366115a45c8d70c2c97fe82dd40061bd1b37a` |
| `original/index-19991130.html` | 1999-11-30 01:38:30 UTC | 6,293 | `f60dac1daea98f7fab5d8904ec4a637c856f971a948c32e5fc3a09de38ab8cb4` |
| `original/tron10.html` | 2000-04-16 07:26:41 UTC | 5,559 | `b38a3b4c36712c7a7e56a54a85bba23e3e87855f623d3af850bdf15035e16aeb` |
| `original/troncapt.gif` | 2000-05-18 04:40:48 UTC | 7,335 | `a7c484fc0dd72f60c56fecc2eb147a184b99650d5c368deef0cee0f9bc1a166d` |

Sources:

- `https://web.archive.org/web/20000303121011/http://www.jafar.com/java/tron/tron.jar`
- `https://web.archive.org/web/19991130013830/http://www.jafar.com/java/tron/index.html`
- `https://web.archive.org/web/20000416072641/http://www.jafar.com/java/tron/tron10.html`
- `https://web.archive.org/web/20000518044048/http://www.jafar.com/img/tron/troncapt.gif`

## What the recovered files establish

- The recovered HTML's `<META NAME="Author">` tag credits **Ravi K. Damarla**. Per Jafar, this game is entirely Damarla's work — unlike blackjack (written by Jafar Shameem, later maintained by Damarla; see the sibling `blackjack` project), authorship here isn't split.
- Official page title: **T R O N**; display name **T R O N v2.0**.
- Description: "An Arcade game based on the LightCycle race from the movie Tron."
- Java version: 1.1, with a link to an older version (`tron10.html`) for browsers without 1.1 support — mirroring blackjack's `bjack10.html` pattern.
- Applet class: `com.jafar.games.tron.Tron.class`, archive `tron.jar`.
- Applet dimensions: 500 × 350.
- Rules per the recovered page: player controls the red LightCycle with arrow keys, space bar jumps over a trail, robots increase in number and get smarter each level, and clearing a level advances after a 3-second delay.
- The page displays the same `r750.gif` JARS.com badge seen on the blackjack page, suggesting a site-wide JARS membership rather than a per-game rating.
- The JAR contains five game classes (`Tron`, `TronPanel`, `LightCycle`, `Player`, `Robot`), a small shared UI toolkit (`com.jafar.ui.ImageButton`, `DisableImageFilter`), and four interface GIFs (`tronlogo.gif`, `score.gif`, `level.gif`, `restart.gif`). All internal ZIP timestamps read **1999-01-25**, i.e. a single build session — unlike blackjack's JAR, there's no multi-year timestamp spread here.

## Rebrand note

The live rebuild at the project root is titled **Wire Runner**, not the original name recorded above. The original title, wordmark, and box art were themed on a licensed 1982 film property; this archive preserves that fact and the unmodified original files, but the actively-distributed modern rebuild does not reuse the original name or logo. `tronlogo.gif` (the movie-styled wordmark) is preserved here inside the untouched `tron.jar` and is documented in this file, but is not copied into `original-assets/` or used anywhere in the live site — the intro screen draws a new "Wire Runner" wordmark instead. All other recovered interface art (`score.gif`, `level.gif`, `restart.gif`), which carries no film branding, is used as-is.

## Static inspection (bytecode, not execution)

The JAR's five game classes were decompiled with CFR 0.152 (github.com/leibnitz27/cfr) for **static inspection only** — the applet was never executed. This produced a complete, internally consistent picture of the original game logic, used to build the faithful modern rebuild in `../src/`:

- 80-column grid (`width / 80` = cell size), toroidal wraparound at all edges — there are no walls, only trails.
- Player moves via arrow keys or numpad-as-arrows (keycodes 98/100/102/104), Space sets a one-tick "jump" that advances 4 cells instead of 1, clearing a single row of trail.
- Robots wander with periodic random turns and react to imminent trail collisions via a level-bracketed probability table (`odds[]` in `Robot.class`) that shifts from "often does nothing" at low levels to "almost always dodges or jumps" at high levels — this is the literal mechanism behind "robots get smarter each level."
- Robot colors, in fixed order: blue, green, yellow, orange, magenta, cyan, gray, pink, white, lightGray. Player is red. Grid lines are RGB(85, 63, 100) on black.
- Progression: starts at 3 robots, +1 every even level; tick delay is `100 − level×5` ms, so play speeds up each level.

**A likely original bug, found and not reproduced:** the level-clear score table (`levelScores[]`) has exactly 12 entries, but scoring indexes it by the current level number starting at 1, with no bound past 12. Clearing level 12 in the original would index out of the array — the decompiled `run()` loop only catches `NullPointerException`, not an out-of-bounds error, so this almost certainly crashed the applet's thread before the "You Won the Game!" screen (reachable only at level 13) could ever display. The modern rebuild extends the scoring table gracefully instead of reproducing this; see the main project README for the note on that deviation.

## Inspection safety

The JAR was listed and extracted for static inspection only; the applet was not executed. The original is kept separately because current browsers do not support Java applets. `original-assets/` at the project root contains working copies of the non-branded interface GIFs used by the modern reconstruction; see the rebrand note above for what was deliberately left out.