Ron Balewski and his legacy

[DOSGuy]

Starting on 23 August 2005, I began a dialog with Ron Balewski and received 11 emails from him. Despite many attempts to contact him for more than 4 years since then, I have not heard from Ron since 8 November 2005. When his gaming and commercial websites expired last year, I finally accepted that Ron must have passed away. I have not given up hope, and I am calling on the gaming community to help me contact him or confirm his passing, and to archive his legacy of games.

All of the files below were available on Ron's website until last year. I never bothered to download Mah Jongg '97 because the site didn't host Win9x games at the time, and I thought that the site would always be there. Even after losing contact with Ron, I was convinced that he was still alive, so I didn't think there was any urgency to download the files. I have been absolutely kicking myself ever since the website disappeared. I can't find a single copy of Mah Jongg '97 on the internet, and it was sitting right there for me to download for 5 years!

I've used archive.org to download everything that I could, but some of the files are not archived because they were never hosted on his website. More details about that are below. Search engines find no record of the files that I was unable to find. Please help me find all of the files in the Don't Have list.

Have

Combine 'Em
combnm10.zip (1.0 shareware)
cmbnm10.zip (1.02 shareware)

Registered version 2.0 was never online

Laser!
laser100.zip (shareware)

Mah Jongg for Windows
mjwin.zip (1.0 shareware)
mjwin31.zip (registered 3.1, password protected)

Mah Jongg '97
mj97v10.exe (1.0b shareware)

Perfect Fit
perft100.zip (1.0 shareware)

Spyro Art
spyro100.zip (1.0 shareware)

Times Tables
tmstbl10.zip (1.0 shareware)

TrainSIM
trnsm100.zip (1.0 shareware)


Don't have

Mah Jongg '97
mj97.zip (DirectInput version)

Red Green
redgn100.zip

Tiles 32
t32v100.zip (1.0)
t32v12.zip (registered 1.2)

Registered 1.1 was never online


Below is a list of Ron's web sites and email addresses to help you find the files and attempt to make contact with Ron. The "Dates" represent the earliest and latest dates that archive.org and waybackmachine.org have copies of the site with actual content (as opposed to a link to the new site).

Ron's home pages and email addresses:

1st website

URL: http://www.microserve.com/~ronb/
Dates: 1 June 2000-6 February 2002
Email: ronb@paradox.microserve.com

2nd website

URL: http://home.epix.net/~rbalewski
Dates: 13 February 2002-30 November 2004
Email: ronb@paradox.microserve.com

As of 11 February 2005, this site links to http://www.mahjongg.ws/

3rd website

URL: http://www.mahjongg.ws/
Dates: 2005?
Email: ron@mahjongg.ws

Archive.org has no copies of this site. Ron spoke poorly of his .WS experience on his next website.

4th website

URL: http://www.ronsshareware.com
Dates: 26 March 2004-14 June 2009
Email: ron@ronsshareware.com, ron@ronswebsites.com

5th website

URL: http://www.ronsmahjongg.biz
Dates: 14 March 2011-13 March 2013
Email: ron@ronsmahjongg.com

External hosting of some games:

Many of the games on the Don't Have list were hosted from Ron's AOL accounts at ftp://members.aol.com/rbalewski/, ftp://members.aol.com/rbalewski2/, ftp://members.aol.com/rbalewski3/, and were not crawled by archive.org as a result.

Commercial website

URL: http://www.ronswebsites.com (re-registered after expiry by another man named Ron Stauffer, Jr.)
Dates: 3 August 2003-13 May 2008
Email: ron@ronswebsites.com

The site listed Ron's contact information:

Ron Balewski
412 E Ridge St.
Nanticoke, PA 18634
Phone: 570-735-3736
Nextel: 196*53*48794

Online telephone listings continue to link this address and phone number to Ronald A. Balewski, but the phone number is not in service. There are no other Balewskis listed in Nanticoke, PA. I have searched online obituaries without success.

Ron's last known email address is rbalewski@epix.net. I would never publish an unpublished email address under any other circumstances.

Edit: Updated with Ron's new website discovered in 2011.
Edit: Updated to show that Ron's fifth domain name has expired again, in 2012 or 2013.

[deathshadow]

I know a number of his games were included on the gigagames CD's (the ones you list as having are on disk 5)... but apart from that I couldn't say.

You might have some luck going through a site like http://cd.textfiles.com by hand -- though that's a LOT of files to sift through.

[DOSGuy]

Google, Bing, and Clusty searches of cd.textfiles.com (and the entire internet) found nothing. Those shovelware CDs mostly had DOS and Win16 games and stop around 1996, whereas I'm mostly missing Win9x games from 1997 and later.

[leilei]

whereas I'm mostly missing Win9x games from 1997 and later.

Welcome to the club! Even post-97 shovelware still has nothing but pre-97 stuff, or in rarer cases, Jan 2000+ trash (when the sudden big casual games boom began). 97-99 is a big gap. The only casual games promoted in those years were Solitaire Setty and Burning Monkey Solitaire lol

[DOSGuy]

I've just gotten word that Ron Balewski is alive! After five years of failed attempts to contact him, I located a person Ron thanked for his assistance with one of his games, who advises that Ron is still alive, though perhaps not well. I'm still not able to send a message to Ron, but he will let me know if he finds a way. I will continue to search for a way of contacting him as well.

Also, I have the password for mjwin31.zip, so that game will not be lost to history no matter what.

[MrFlibble]

Glad to hear that

[DOSGuy]

Ron's friend has informed me that he has a new website at http://www.ronsmahjongg.biz/. All of his games, except for Red Green and Tiles 32 (which still link to his old AOL account), are downloadable again. I grabbed everything I could to be safe.

I've just sent emails to 7 people who contacted me while looking for Ron since 2009.

[DOSGuy]

In 2011, a friend of Ron Balewski's gave me the URL for Ron's new website, which gave me a new email address to contact him through. For some reason, I found it psychologically impossible to send him an email. I just didn't know what to say after searching for him for six years, and responding to so many emails from people who thought I was him. I finally sent him a short email on 18 January 2013, which he didn't reply to. His new website apparently expired on 13 March 2013 (2 years after it was registered on 14 March 2011) -- with the last page archived by Archive.org dated 16 February 2013 -- and was acquired by cybersquatters after its expiry. This means that I no longer have an email address for him, and I blew my chance to re-establish contact.

Ron apparently created four articles for Examiner.com between 6 and 10 June 2011, and his user page (http://www.examiner.com/user-rbalewski) has a photo of him. It's weird seeing a picture of him after so many years of searching. This, in turn, led me to his Facebook page, which I know is his because the photo matches. I have sent him a friend request and a short friendly message. His last public post was on 15 June 2014.

[Duranu]

I've just gotten word that Ron Balewski is alive! After five years of failed attempts to contact him, I located a person Ron thanked for his assistance with one of his games, who advises that Ron is still alive, though perhaps not well. I'm still not able to send a message to Ron, but he will let me know if he finds a way. I will continue to search for a way of contacting him as well.

Also, I have the password for mjwin31.zip, so that game will not be lost to history no matter what.

Hello, It's 14 years later and I was really hoping that you could post the full version of MJWIN before it truly gets lost to time, assuming you are even still around since your Profile says you were last online January 1st, 2024 so things are already looking like it is too late to save this game, but I hope that you are doing well, and are out there enjoying life still.

I know your Contact Page on the main site says that you won't post Full Versions unless they can be verified as Abandonware which at this point I think it is safe to do so.
You managed to last email him in 2013, though he never replied, which was 12 years ago. In your main post of this thread in 2011, you mention you looked for Obituaries for him in his town and didn't find any, Sadly though, that appears to no longer be the case.

If you Google 'Ronald A. Balewski Obituary Nanticoke PA', it will give you this link to Legacy.com which states:

Ronald Balewski Obituary
Memorial services for Ronald A. Balewski, who passed away Wednesday, March 31, 2021, will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday in PLAID Community Church, 1575 River Road, Jenkins Twp.

To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

Published by Citizens Voice from May 13 to May 14, 2021.

Jenkins Township is 17 miles away from Nanticoke which makes it probable that this is in reference to him as sad as that is, this game was a big part of my childhood and I remember my mother playing the fullversion all the time as that was really the only computer game that she would play but since the fullversion was on a floppy disk that becomes increasingly harder to preserve since computers have long since abandoned them and most peoples copy has been lost to time and you appear to be the last hope in truly persevering as much of his game legacy as possible and I would highly urge you to post the files if you are still around to do so and add a copy to the Internet Archive as well

After countless searching on the internet the only website I can find that mentions the full version was ClassicReload on the Mah Jongg for Windows 3.1 page, which using the info they provided there that the full version is called v3.1 I managed to find your website

According to ClassicReload, and Ron's own website using the links in the Wayback Machine, if players registered a copy with Ron Balewski they:

receive v.3.1 with: .wav sound support, magnify mode, new hi-res 256-color/true-color tile format (.TBH), easy tile set design (save bitmap files), floating customizable ToolCube, tile magnify window shows enlarged view of current tile, and cheats.

As it stands now, unless someone else happens to have a copy of the full game which at this point I very much doubt, you are potentially the last person with a copy of it in modern times. The Shareware version can be found in countless places online, but not a single copy of the Fullversion can be found online

Please upload the game so that others can enjoy it using Dosbox or other various VMs or even on Original Hardware, and Please don't let this game, or any others you have managed to get the full version for, die.

[DOSGuy]

Thanks for letting me know. It would be nice if it was a full obituary mentioning his relations. We know that Ron's dad was named Ed because of the dedication in MJWIN.DOC. We know from Ed's obituary that Ron's mother was named Elizabeth. There can't be that many Ron Balewskis, so it's probably him. RIP.

I know your Contact Page on the main site says that you won't post Full Versions unless they can be verified as Abandonware which at this point I think it is safe to do so.

It will never be abandonware now, as RGB Classic Games defines it, because Ron is no longer around to declare it so. It will enter the public domain in most countries 70 years after Ron's death, in 2091.

As it stands now, unless someone else happens to have a copy of the full game which at this point I very much doubt, you are potentially the last person with a copy of it in modern times. The Shareware version can be found in countless places online, but not a single copy of the Fullversion can be found online

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, that will never be true! I listed Ron's known websites in the first post. Using Archive.org's Wayback Machine, you can easily find the download for mjwin31.zip. The procedure is as follows:

First, download the password protected zip file containing Mah Jongg/Windows v3.1 by clicking on the link below.

Then, click on the Buy Now PayPal button to pay the $20 registration fee. Once your payment is processed, you should immediately go to a web page containing the password for the ZIP file.

Ron put the page with the password on his website... and the page got archived! Anyone who knows their way around the Wayback Machine can find the page that had the password on it.

I will put mjwin31.zip on the site. This should be 100% legal because the author himself made the file publicly available, and you can't access the copyrighted content inside without the password. I can't stop anyone from going to the archived page with the password on it, but that's on Ron, not me.

[MrFlibble]

Ron put the page with the password on his website... and the page got archived! Anyone who knows their way around the Wayback Machine can find the page that had the password on it.

Since I know nothing about Ron or his games (apart from those declared freeware that are available here), I was initially confused, and thought that this game was also liberated, but still required a password (like Super Breakout for example -- the password is listed on the download page).

Turns out this was not the case. The password for the registered version of Mah Jongg for Windows would be shown to the user after purchasing the game -- but it was simply a page on Ron's website, which wasn't even excluded from web crawlers, apparently, if the Wayback Machine did make a snapshot. Kinda careless it seems, but it could be beneficial for the preservation of the game for future generations. I'm not sure how ethical it is to use this loophole to obtain the full game, considering that the author passed away and the game is no longer sold, but I guess there will be no harm if people use it if they really want to.

BTW, @DOSGuy, I noticed that the various Wayback Machine snapshot from Ron's website are in different states of preservation: some lack certain image files like the page background tiles, others have no files etc. Perhaps you' want to put together a full version of the site from these separate sources and host it here at RGB Classic Games? A while ago I did the same for Mark Jones' website (Mark as one of the lead artists for Daggerfall), which was later put up online by the developer of Daggerfall Unity.

I'm really thinking of doing this for other websites of interest that are not fully preserved through any of the Wayback Machine instances, but currently I'm a bit shot on free time for that.