Eric's Stuff

There, I tasked Codex with a wonderful project and guided it through the process of reverse engineering this absolute niche but nostalgia-loaded Argentinian Truco card game freeware for Windows 95. If you’ve never heard of Truco, it’s a loud, fast card game from Argentina where bluffing, trash talk, and acting confident matter just as much as the cards in your hand. It’s a huge part of Argentinian culture.

I found it a few years ago, I can’t tell you how happy I was to find it on some obscure, now abandonware website preserved through a Geocities archive, and be able to hear that tango MIDI background music again, along with the undoubtedly homemade player dialogs that cracked me up so much as a kid as me and my older siblings used to play all the time in my mom’s Compaq Presario 2200.

There was no truco PC game remotely close to it back then, especially not one supporting team play, even if obviously offline and with all CPU players besides you.

Running it natively was just not possible on a modern Windows setup. I had to do it through a Windows 98 VM, and it’s simply not straightforward to put it inside. Enabling networking to download is already painful, let alone making Internet Explorer 4 load anything even vaguely compatible with today’s standards. Fancier VM solutions let you drag and drop a zip file into the guest OS out of the box, but I was using free VirtualBox and getting that to work is also a hassle. Heck, even a zip file requires WinRAR to be installed first! But eventually I was able to run it, play it and be 10 years old again.

Fast forward to 2026, 30 years since it was originally released by its author, Rolando Herrera: here’s my tribute to my RETRUCO’s childhood days, now in pure JavaScript glory.

I naively tried contacting Rolando using the e-mail addresses found in the README and help files from 1996 (lol), but of course none of those exist anymore and you get a delivery rejection instantly. I was desperately trying to know who made the tango background music, which no state-of-the-art algorithm by Shazam could decrypt for me. Only much later, thanks to an actual tango expert that worked with my mom, I found out it was a lesser-known Carlos Gardel piece: A la luz de un candil.

Back to the game JavaScript reimplementation: some bits are still missing from the original, but it’s fully playable, supports the original voices and even the MIDI tango background music, using webaudio-tinysynth since no modern browsers support MIDI playback natively anymore.

Click here to play RETRUCO in your browser

Thank you, Rolando, for making such a bizarre, heart-warming little masterpiece. I hope someday you will stumble upon this post and let me know you saw it.

Hopefully it won’t be for a copyright infringement notice. (ಥ﹏ಥ)

By choosing a Windows 95 aesthetic for this site - fake Internet Explorer window, clunky UI, nostalgic 90s web design - I accidentally made it timeless. Hear me out.

Anyone landing here instantly understands this is deliberate. Although some actual 90s websites still exist, abandoned or maybe frozen in time by accident, in my case it’s not outdated, it’s anchored. It removes the expectation that the site should evolve with current design trends, frameworks, or whatever the industry decides what web design language should aim for nowadays.

I’ve seen the web evolve since the 90s. Fonts, frames layouts, GIFs, Java applets, Flash, gradients, flat design - it was so chaotic and beautiful, but they all expire. And then as a web developer you either keep up or start looking neglected. Call me a boomer, but I absolutely despise the Liquid Glass™ design language I certainly hope Apple will fail to impose everywhere as they did with previous design trends they decided primarily upon.

Here, I’ve unintentionally opted out of all of it, hoping most people won’t question it.

The moment you frame something as retro, you freeze it in a way that stays legible over time. It becomes a reference rather than a failed attempt at staying relevant. No redesign pressure, no need to chase whatever comes next.

Ironically, by going backwards, it stays understandable forever… or that’s the idea.

Although when I think about it, it’s funny because some of my peers are from the generation after mine and may have never even used a computer running windows 95 - so unless they were curious about what computing looked like in my time as a kid, they probably have no idea of what I’m trying to evoke here lol.

Every time I thought of putting together some sort of personal landing page for myself under my cast.ro domain, something made it fail miserably. Most of the time it was my laziness, because let’s be honest: motivating yourself to keep a personal website updated is quite the challenge when the only people interested are maybe some colleague aside from your mom and your dog (I don’t have a dog).

Part of that laziness came from never fully adopting the static website approach, plus never being able to come up with some cool design that made my website truly reflect who I am at the moment.

But then I gave Codex a try for the first time. This is what resulted from it after a few good prompts.

I like the irony of myself constantly struggling against retro computing nostalgia yet using AI to build a website that looks and feels like Windows 95. Which I believe reflects very much my current mood.

Pretty satisfied.