Rim Selector.
I found the original site files on a backup drive. Every image below — the car, the rims, the thumbnails — is straight from the 1999 archive. The rims are period-correct because they are the period. All 19 wheel choices are here, exactly as Sport Compact Car saw them in August 2000.
The only thing that changed: the JavaScript. The original used a Netscape 3 document.images[].src swap. This uses React state. Same effect, same experience — hover a rim, watch the car change.
Pick your shoes
This is literally the code that ran the tool in 1999. Pulled straight from the archive. Netscape 3 browser detection, image preloading, and the hiLite() mouseover swap:
// preload universal images:
car_bot_lo = new Image();
car_bot_lo.src = "car_bot.jpg";
car_bot1_hi = new Image();
car_bot1_hi.src = "1.jpg";
// function hiLite manages mouseOver animations
function hiLite(imgDocID, imgObjName) {
if (browserVer == 1) {
document.images[imgDocID].src = eval(imgObjName + ".src")
}
}
// And in the HTML:
<a href="rims.html"
onMouseOver="hiLite('car_bot','car_bot2_hi')"
onMouseOut="hiLite('car_bot','car_bot_lo')">
<img src="ACE-120.GIF" />
</a>Note the eval() and the Netscape user-agent sniff. 1999 was a wild time. And it worked better than the ones at some wheel vendor sites — because most of them made you click a rim, wait for a page reload, click back. This did it live.