The future was then: The Palace

Feeling: experimental

Palace Chat is a visual chat software and protocol that launched in 1995. Basically an early experiment in metaverse development, it offered a unique creative medium to especially-online teens like my friends and me. Palace users edit and wear pixel art props comprising an avatar. From this 132x132px canvas, microtrends emerged that continue to influence pixel art decades later.

Remarkably, there are still a handful of Palace servers online - and you can see them for yourself. Theres nothing like browsing the technocutie old web wasteland hosted on servers still running after 20 years. There are a few spinoffs of Palace software kept alive over the years, but I found it easiest to boot up a Windows XP virtual machine and run the original application.

Summary:

Installation

Download UTM free from the Github link on their site.
Install Windows XP on UTM per instructions at this link. When you’re ready to select a Windows XP installation ISO, you can use an image made available by the Internet Archive.
Once you have XP booted up, open IE and navigate to palaceaholic.com. From the Downloads page, click and install Client User Software v3.5 for Windows 95/98/ME/NT.
Install the downloaded .exe and then launch Palace! You’re ready to connect to a Palace server.

Live servers are limited in number, and those online only have a handful of mostly idle users. I chatted w a few people who were nice and most certainly real humans, which is rare on the internet in 2022. If nobody is online, you can still ~~steal dollz for your neocities~~ click around some cool old art projects and giggle at the weird adult servers. You can even create, find and edit avis the same way.

Some servers I found that still work include KoRn Korner (which itself has an interesting story behind it) and Avatar Palace. There are a few directories out there on the world wide web too, like The Palace Portal.

Have fun!