Video Game Archival Autism / TCRF / Jul / Sonic Retro / And More - Harvest Troon: Friends of Byuu-Near-al town

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The Fatriarchy said:
So people have been talking about it a lot, and the thing about finding new stuff for a mentally stable TCRF spinoff is that it requires a lot of different skills.

Looking through some game rom for plain text is the bare minimum.
Looking for plain text in another format or shifted out of the ascii standard is another way of finding hidden and unused strings in the really old stuff.
Understanding assembly instructions for the game is a big part of finding most stuff, especially cut features or debug menus, maybe even special inputs.
In some games you'd have to be familiar with data structures and certain file formats to be able to dig any further.
Games with graphics, that can be easy with game-focused sprite editing tools unless the graphics are compressed or otherwise drawn in an arbitrary way, and that requires a knowledge set of its own.
Finding hidden music, that would usually only require figuring out how to manipulate the game's sound engine to play a different song, though I'm sure there could just be hidden, isolated music data in some old games too. That's a more complicated issue.
Disk-based media might sometimes have things hidden and copied into otherwise empty space, but disk copying probably doesn't account for this deleted data in the rare event it might happen anyway.

I'm only really scratching the surface, but if anyone is serious about getting into something they've never done before, it helps having an idea of what it's like and the different avenues you can take to discover something.
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Yeah finding stuff is going to be pretty specific to the specific game (or game format) and specific media, for example in the /vr/ thread about finding/decrypting the source archive of that football game (great read btw) someone posted a while back you can see it started with the dude having a script to interrogate potential archive files and apparently running it over the entire PSX library.
So not to be discouraging, but when talking about finding stuff generally it's probably one of those cases where if you have the requisite skills you already know what you're doing, and if it's something obvious that anyone could do then someone with the skills has probably already run a batch job.

However, the tough part is really in examining, screencapping (or whatever) and documenting all this stuff. So I'd say if you want to help out the thing to do would be to start with a game you like and know well, and research whether there's stuff people have already dug up that needs wading through/further investigation. That'll help get you acquainted with the tools and techniques used in that specific context.
If nobody's taken a superficial look yet, you can take a swing yourself by looking into modding tools (like extractors/viewers) for games on the same platform or engine--looking into the history of the studio to see what progress people have made with stuff they released around that time can help too. It might just work, or you may need to learn about how to fuck with headers or hack up some shit you found on github to use a new file list or graphics format, who knows. It'll be different every time. (Eg. someone recently asked me to recover some "lost media" from a game I made ages ago and lost the source to, and I ended up solving it by digging up some random-ass tool made by the FNAF community for customising their fazbears or whatever, of all fucking things.)
Basically, if you're a complete beginner, I'm recommending finding some way in that'll let you start building an understanding of how a game you're passionate about fits together technically, which you can expand and eventually apply to other games logically.

Enig said:
They really need to encompass unreleased hardware too, there's a lot of shit beyond just devkits that either has barely any documentation readily accessible or is buried in old websites or news articles, eg. the wide range of weird Atari test consoles, or that time a Macbook Pro with 3G networking and an antenna for it appeared and then disappeared. The hardware always seems to get skipped over when a lot of the time it's more insane than the software is.
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Yeah that might be pushing the "unused stuff" concept kinda far, but it actually could be pretty interesting within that scope. Like Kaze often posts about hacks that exploit some undocumented or half-working feature of the N64 hardware that were overlooked by devs back in the day but are getting rediscovered by modern turbonerds:
(Maybe not the best example but a recent one; actually his whole channel is pretty interesting in terms of seeing what the N64 was really capable of in retrospect and with modern approaches.)

It could be pretty fascinating to see all in one place. And while this might not directly overlap with the games archeology, come to think of it I'd be thrilled if the new site had a more technical attitude. Like, given enough time the process of digging this stuff up becomes interesting in itself, plus wouldn't it be better if the sub-pages on an article could be more of a living document of research efforts rather than basically fucking empty most of the time aside from some wiki editor snark? So much shit probably dies on Discord when people lose interest all the time.

That might be optimistic since it's a matter of both culture and the constraints of wiki software, but idk. It might be worth thinking about how a new site could actively facilitate efforts because I suspect the dudes who dig and the dudes who get off on editing wikis don't overlap that much. So TCRF has often just been a scavenger, which might be fine but part of the reason they're hated is doing that while also gatekeeping exactly what is documented and who is allowed to be credited. A good version of TCRF could do better on both fronts though, maybe.
 
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I hate to say it, but it's unfortunately the truth that with most of this you kind of just have to hope someone with an autistic fixation on a particular game comes along because they're usually the ones that rip all of the cut and unused content from those games.
Especially with how differently programmed a lot of old games are there isn't just this one expert who can decrypt every single N64 game for example.

A lot of it inherently relies on autism.
 
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They got Gizoogle.
 
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Gimmick Account said:
Basically, if you're a complete beginner, I'm recommending finding some way in that'll let you start building an understanding of how a game you're passionate about fits together technically, which you can expand and eventually apply to other games logically
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This is what I think would be a natural complement to a TCRF+ site. In fact, I think there's a (fairly empty) wiki in the TCRF-verse that does this.

Gimmick Account said:
So TCRF has often just been a scavenger, which might be fine but part of the reason they're hated is doing that while also gatekeeping exactly what is documented and who is allowed to be credited. A good version of TCRF could do better on both fronts though, maybe.
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So true, King.
 
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Treatlerite said:
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This is just objectively a stupid way to look at things in an archival perspective, though. TCRF's retardation is stirring the pot because there isn't really another database that shares its purpose. It's a sole point of failure that exists at the whims of a fragile ego. Alternative sites, even as competition, would solve that problem AND create more copies of the data you're supposedly interested in preserving.

But that's assuming archival is actually a priority, which apparently it isn't.
 
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kona2kona said:
Well, would you look at that. The Urban Dictionary entry for "TCRF" highlighted in this thread earlier is completely gone. Someone must've went and complained like a little bitch.
View attachment 7518576
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They better come nagging harder than ever to internet archive, least they run afoul of Alex "Internet Totalitarian" Workman's wrath.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250608185020/https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TCRF
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TCRF​

Short for 'the cutting room floor' aka tcrf dot net, a famous site for game preservation and documentation of unused content. Jul, residing on the 'jul dot rustedlogic dot net' domain is its sister site, a web forum running the AcmlmBoard software. However, that's unfortunately where the good of it ends.

Nearly everyone inside the community knows each other, and lots of them are very influential and active on Twitter and Mastodon: many are vulnerable terminally-autistic men who were groomed into being trans activists via hanging around too many furry/brony/anime futa porn addicts. They pretty much ban anyone who isn't this or susceptible to becoming this because they KNOW that they will turn on them at some point.

Everything on modern twitter/discord culture seems to be linked back to these people, no matter how hard you distance yourself from them. They are like a plague that will always sink into your circles no matter what.

Speaking of furries, it's owned by edgelord nonces-turned-troons Robert 'Rachael Mae' Flory and Alex 'Xkeeper' Workman being the main 2, who protected a real life child molester, Dustin Wyatt aka SonicTweaker/fuktwonk, back in late 2011, and helped him rehabilitate into the Sonic community sometime in 2019. Good thing to know, right.

Dare get on their bad side, and you'll have the AcmlmBoard Mafia after you, the Troon Mafia, and the Pro-Byuu Mafia... it's all connected. ALL OF IT.

kn08: everything's connected back to these schizos
Compa: I wouldn't be surprised if TCRF and the circles around it pretty much control the whole narrative when it comes to these subjects and much more
 
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Turkey Beef said:
Everything on modern twitter/discord culture seems to be linked back to these people, no matter how hard you distance yourself from them. They are like a plague that will always sink into your circles no matter what.
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Our war against them may be a bigger deal than I initially thought if that's truly the case.
 
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Toilet Paper said:
Well that's nice and all, but there's no way that there would be some all-encompassing Category containing most, if not all of the games, right?

View attachment 7493401
Oh... Well, that's the text of 16000 articles
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Has anyone made the new TCRF clone yet? I can potentially bring one up soon, before August, if nobody has done this already.

Downloading the file right now and beginning to unpack it.

Gimmick Account said:
A dude in here told me privately that a secret cool idea for his TCRF killer is to make it about archival of beta/hidden shit for classic software in general, not just games.
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I'm doing this saars
 
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>us doubel postas be wyte
The 100MB HTML file is the only major leak we got, right?
I scrolled through the thread, might've missed when someone separated into it into separate files for individual articles (as well as uploaded images, audio, and other attachments). I'll begin unpacking this simple HTML file if there hasn't been a more majestic leak already.
 
kona2kona said:
My contact plans to make the site a functional mirror of TCRF at a given point in time before accepting contributions, simply on the basis of having everything working before throwing new things at it.
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Can I somehow assist with this? Perhaps with the provision of that spare server I was talking about, maybe some IT related rubbish as I've done with the Swinny, or just some efforts on writing additional articles about teh old softwaerz (that was my idea, I just haven't used kf every day and missed all the juicers)
 
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