The Palace, a nearly ancient, proprietary (at least in its day) internet chat protocol lives on, so it seems. Completely free now. Not surprising, though. Even the big main Palace chatroom, mansion.thepalace.com, looks the exact same was as I remember it from about 1996.
The Palace was different from all other chat software I used back in the day. It seemed much more interactive than IRC. I suppose it was a little bit more like IM, with a little bit of IRC culture thrown in.
The Palace chatrooms were literally rooms, with jpeg backdrops (which were awfully slow to download on a 14.4kbps modem), and little avatars floating all over the room. When one spoke, a little speech bubble appeared next to one’s avatar. You dressed up your avatar with all sorts of props (and they were really called props). It was quite a lot of fun.
As a guest (i.e., non-paying user) you were limited somewhat with what you could do with your avatar, props, scripts, and the like. I became a registered user a few years later. Something like $20 USD for the year, if I recall correctly.
Native clients are being developed for all sorts of platforms, in addition to a web-based Java client. Back in the day, clients only existed for Windows and Macintosh. Seems a good community keeps The Palace going. The company that owned rights to the name seems to have disappeared.
I rather like seeing the community keep things like this going, even after the commercial venture flops or goes its own way.
