The SONIC TEAM/SEGA Visual BBS was an area where registered users could upload photos from their Phantasy Star Online games on both the Dreamcast and GameCube. Since these services have been offline for some time now, I thought it would be a fun, small project to try to archive as many of the photos as possible.

It’s now live. I was able to use a modified version of a utility called wayback-machine-downloader to download the whole Visual BBS instances from both tails04.sonicteam.com and vbbs2.sonic.isao.net.

After many days of downloading, I set out to make a small utility to display the images and (attempt to) link to their proper archive.org page, but many post pages and thousands of images are, unfortunately, lost to time. However, it should be noted that well over 30,000 images were able to be backed up successfully.

At the end of the day, this small task brought a ton of joy looking back to events that happened ~20 years ago. I hope you enjoy it.