Archiving Tamatown

[Tacoburritotchi]

Yeah, but when I tried it, it just said:  Context3D not available! Possible reasons: wrong wmode or missing device support.

 

[hwd45]

Yeah, but when I tried it, it just said:  Context3D not available! Possible reasons: wrong wmode or missing device support.

That's likely not an issue of the revival, though, considering others have had it work with no complaints. The most likely issue, I would speculate, is that your device just doesn't support it. Regardless, that's something that should be taken up with the creator of the recreation rather than here.

 

[Tacoburritotchi]

Hm. I'm using a desktop, connected with a Raspberry Pi.

 

[Tacoburritotchi]

And it said the same thing with the wayback version, so i guess there's no surprise there.

 

[Tacoburritotchi]

Anyone know what this means? go to tamago-land.com

 

[hwd45]

In case anyone was wondering where I am with this, some life things came up which have taken a lot of my focus away from Tamagotchi research for the time being (it's nothing serious or negative, just some exciting research in a different field!)

That said, I did buy a whole bunch of equipment for checking out my old cache files for lost Tamatown files, so when I get around to using those I'll document my process.

And yes, the post about the V6/7 Tamatown will come at some point, I've not forgotten

Speak soon, Tama fans.

 

[SilicaAndPina]

Yeah, but when I tried it, it just said:  Context3D not available! Possible reasons: wrong wmode or missing device support.
Anyone know what this means? go to tamago-land.com

Basically, for some reason DreamTown uses Context3D (i think its a thing with the sterling engine thing. idk) ,

despite the name, "Context3D" has little to do with 3D graphics, its a wrapper around OpenGL ES. in ActionScript >-<

it was a feature added in Flash Player 11, make sure your using flash player 11 or higher lol

anyway, im not sure whats up with the Flash Player on Raspberry Pi but Some users have reported similar issues on Firefox for Ubuntu.

In completely different games, so probably not an issue with DreamTown ...

you could try the Adobe Flash Projector which is a standalone app provided by Adobe for running SWF files, just go "File > Open > "https://famita.ml/friends/prelauncher.swf?1.0.1.1776" 

the plus to using that is that it'll probably work after December 2020

 

[SilicaAndPina]

One obvious way to approach the matter is just to find people that actually saved some of the Tamatown files. Problem is, not only are these people already few and far between,

Mm what about Binary? he did a bunch of reversing tamatown stuff back in the day on TamaTalk (mainly how to request codes?)~

it seems likely he could have some files from TamaTown .. potentially?

 

[hwd45]

Mm what about Binary? he did a bunch of reversing tamatown stuff back in the day on TamaTalk (mainly how to request codes?)~

it seems likely he could have some files from TamaTown .. potentially?

I think I'd already sent Binary a message by the time I wrote that paragraph. He's not particularly easy to contact.

As I recall, he was around in a few old threads where people discussed how to download the character SWFs and I think some of the music too. To me, this would certainly suggest that there are some people out there who have some of the missing files saved to their old PCs, but I've not had any luck in actually locating or contacting any of these people.

 

[hwd45]

Hello everyone!

Today I've got a treat for you all, courtesy of Wolf Nanaki (a.k.a. OsuMesu21). Whilst digging through some of their files, they found a number of previously lost character swf files and location mp3s. This is a small step, but it's significant one, nonetheless!

I guess the next step is finding other dedicated fans who are still around and would have downloaded a bunch of the files at the time they were still accessible? Though I can't see it as particularly likely that too many more people would still have these files, even if they did download them at the time.

You can download the files here.

In the zip you'll find two directories - a V3 directory and a V5 directory, corresponding to the V3 Tamatown and the V5 Tama & Earth EXPO respectively. The V3 directory is additionally split up into two subdirectories, one for mp3 files and another for swf files.

V3/4

• Quite a lot of character files!
  
  
  bill.swf
  
• billotchi.swf
  
• bunbuntchi.swf
  
• chomametchi.swf
  
• decotchi.swf
  
• hashizoutchi.swf
  
• kuchitamatchi.swf
  
• kurokotchi.swf
  
• megatchi.swf
  
• mimiyoritchi.swf
  
• nyatchi.swf
  
• pipotchi.swf
  
• sekitoritchi.swf
  
• tamatchi.swf
  
• teketchi.swf
  
• tsunotchi.swf
  
• warusotchi.swf
  
• wooltchi.swf
  
• nazotchi.swf
  

[*]A couple of location mp3s! These would have been used in the Tamagotchi School and the Town Hall respectively. It's a shame that the travel centre mp3 is still lost, though, that one was my favourite.

• 
  
  school.mp3
  
• townhall.mp3
  

V5

• Four character swfs are included:
  
  
  r29.swf (Magictchi)
  
• r32.swf (Prince Tamahiko)
  
• r51.swf (Jeweltchi)
  
• r53.swf (Nazotchi, would have been used by guests on the website)
  

If you're aware of the status of Macromedia Flash, you may know that it won't be long before many browsers will be dropping support for it. Future incarnations of Tamatown - or recreations thereof - will need to use something other than Flash. Regardless, for the sake of data preservation, ensuring these files are publicly available would be a good idea, even if there's not much use one can get out of them alone. Though, that said, in the scenario where the rest of Tamatown is also recovered, these files would be vital. On top of that, if you've got a Flash decompiler like JPEXS, you can use it to obtain high quality images of the characters corresponding to each of the files, which is something Wolf Nanaki has done to enhance some of the character art on the wiki.

Thanks again to Wolf Nanaki for digging up these files!

Until next time, everyone!

 

[hwd45]

Also, a brief update because this has been on my mind for a bit. This topic alone is useful in providing insight into what's still lost, but I do intend on making more comprehensive documentation soon so that it's very clear how the site was structured when it was up and running. I'll be packaging the recovered files into ZIP files with a README detailing instructions on the directory structure the site used so that Flash Player emulators such as Ruffle will be compatible with Tamatown.

Slightly longer-term, emulating the bits of the site that we have using the web archive's Ruffle implementation - or alternative solutions - will allow the game to be preserved beyond 2020 and in the future new versions can replace this one, should any of the other flash files be recovered.

This is not a piece of history I want to become lost or obscured

 

[hwd45]

Another brief update - I've begun work on a site specifically dedicated to documenting all of what is currently archived of Tamatown. I've got an early version ready to view for those that want to see it, but I'll hold off from posting it publicly until it's a bit more fleshed out. I'm hoping that, by raising awareness on what's currently lost, we have a greater chance of recovering it!

 

[KareliaTheTama]

Hi, just wanted to say excellent job and you're doing God's work out here. Best of luck.

 

[hwd45]

Hi all,

This is just going to be a brief update because naturally I don't really have any newly recovered files or anything like that to show just yet (working on it!)

What I am attempting to do, however, is spread some awareness about how some of these files may be recovered. I think, potentially, there's a lot of people out there that could put their old PCs to use and recover some of the lost files, but I think every time I mention this it slips by most people with few attempting it themselves. Casting a wider net and informing more people of what is lost (and also that the site is lost at all, as many old users may not know this!) seemed like the best approach.

I should probably state in advance that this is yet to have led to any new findings, and I don't think many people have really taken any of my spread awareness as an opportunity to try out any of the methods I proposed themselves, but maybe it's just a matter of time and continual raising awareness that will get us there. I've considered making a YouTube video on the topic too, which would hopefully spread awareness further, but that'll take longer to prepare.

Anyway - I've taken two steps to help better document the history of Tamatown and give it some more attention, and I'll start with the latter:

The Twitter thread
When I first joined Twitter about 10 years ago, a tweet getting about 50 favourites was usually a fairly big deal. Nowadays you can tweet just about anything and within moments it'll be at 10 likes and 2 retweets - and if you tweet about something people actually care about - or better yet, a whole thread about something people care about - then you're bound to cause quite a wide range of people to see your content.

A few days back, I wrote a long long loooong thread on Twitter about the current state of Tamatown with the hope that it would end up with the right people or motivate more people to check their old PC caches. As of yet, no luck, but the thread did get roughly 150 retweets before slowing down. As for how many people saw it, if the analytics are to be believed...

Apparently, quite a few. I can never remember what the link policy is here, but if you want to read the thread and learn a bit of Tamatown history (and perhaps help spread awareness), I've embedded the thread below:



At the end of the thread I announced something I've been working on for a month or so:

MameMame Library
The documentation surrounding what Tamatown files are lost has always been a little bit rubbish - I even made mistakes in my initial post in this thread. The spreadsheet I was maintaining is perhaps not the friendliest or easiest to access source of documentation, so I decided to make a website to keep up-to-date info about the preserved (and lost) Tamatown files, as well as what each file did:

https://mamemamelibrary.crd.co/

There's still a lot to fill in (eventually I'll get around to those Music City files!), but as it is this really helps illustrate just how much is left to find. I've tried to spend time getting feedback from people to make sure it's as accessible as possible, and there's FAQ and help pages for anyone that wants to learn more about Tamatown or how we can attempt to recover some of the lost files.

Looking forward to seeing what people think of the site, but the most important thing is that this will help keep a much more public-facing form of documentation for Tamatown's lost files!

Until next time!

---

Off topic: apparently I've been on this site 14 years now, that definitely doesn't make me feel old at all

 

[Penguin-keeper]

I think, potentially, there's a lot of people out there that could put their old PCs to use and recover some of the lost files, but I think every time I mention this it slips by most people with few attempting it themselves.

I always feel kind of helpless every time that I see these call-outs - I never used the site myself due to not getting along with the Connexion line so I have no machines potentially housing any of the lost data, and having been both an x86-64 and ARM Linux user over the course of many, many, many years, the Flash-free web has been a reality for me for around a decade, so I couldn't have used it even if I'd wanted to!

 

[SilicaAndPina]

TRAVEL THEME FOUND
ARCADE THEME FOUND
FOODCOURT THEME FOUND
KING THEME FOUND
.. etc

- few weeks ago, I left a comment on a video about Tamagotchi Town, (this one: ) explaining missing .SWF's

some 'errant harpy' replied saying they actually downloaded all the music for the game, this made me go *wait what*
i struggled a bit to get in contact with them (youtube spam filter ..) but we got in touch on discord and they sent me the REAL music files from Tamagotchi Town V3 !!

almost every track was there, king.mp3 was not found at first but later was once they got on there old pc, they found it *without a .mp3 extension*, all thats missing now is grandparents.mp3 and theatre.mp3 and then we would have all music from the game,

you can find these tracks here: https://archive.org/details/tamatown-music

i have also uploaded them to alexgtama.tk, so if you enter the kings room with "pass king" as password, you'll hear the glorious king music in game also!

thanks !!

 

[Tinkalila]

This is amazing work you guys are doing here. I'm so happy that there are still efforts to preserve this game! I am looking forward to seeing how this develops.

 

[Alex Grigoriou]

Hi there. It's been a while, hasn't it? So, as you guys can tell, fully recovering TamaTown is a game of trial and luck at this point. So, your help is essential and i totally agree with @hwd45 regarding the lack of awareness of the missing files in old hardware. Just to let you know, we are not giving up on this project and I am hopeful that new findings will emerge in the future.

 

[Cookiez]

Hi there. It's been a while, hasn't it? So, as you guys can tell, fully recovering TamaTown is a game of trial and luck at this point. So, your help is essential and i totally agree with @hwd45 regarding the lack of awareness of the missing files in old hardware. Just to let you know, we are not giving up on this project and I am hopeful that new findings will emerge in the future.

how's the music star one going on?

 

[hwd45]

Hello! It's been a while. After putting it off for about 3 years, I finally got around to dumping some old browser caches. It's still an ongoing process, so I might have more to update on in the future, but for now it seems like I've probably been able to gather as many files from my old browser caches as I can. In case you need a refresher:

A last ditch effort which I've heard might be effective is looking in old PC cache data to find the missing files. Some versions of Internet Explorer had a habit of not clearing their "Temporary Internet Files" folder so it would get crammed full of junk from tonnes of websites.

Allegedly swf and mp3 files were amongst those that would've been cached. Making life a little bit harder, these files wouldn't have been named correctly (and likely had seemingly random filenames) and may have even had their file extensions totally removed, too. I wasn't aware of this when I looked through an old PC for these files before, so I may just have to look again.

In essence? One potential solution would be to dig out an old PC that used Internet Explorer to access the website a number of times, find the Temporary Internet Files folder (I may provide a better tutorial of how to do this in the future because I recall guides online not being all that helpful, you may have to go to the folder directly instead of by moving through different folders. I think there may be multiple folders with this name, too.), copy its content elsewhere and try changing the extensions of extensionless files to mp3 or swf to see how programs that can run these file formats interact with them and determining if any are the lost Tamatown files.

This is pretty bad advice, actually, for a number of reasons. The two main ones, though:

• This doesn't just apply to early versions of Internet Explorer - most of what I've found today have been from versions of Google Chrome from around 2010.
• Finding this folder manually is a nightmare and not worth it at all. There's a tool called the Flashpoint Cache Exporter that does the job automatically without too much hassle.

After digging out an old laptop I used to play TamaTown on and exporting the cache, and expecting zero files to be discovered, I was pleasantly surprised to find that in fact multiple were still lying around on my old PC. None of them are anything spectacularly new or mind-blowing - it's all V3/4 stuff, it's mostly just new versions of files we already have, and the only brand new file is just an item file (which is essentially just a single vector image), but hey, it's better than nothing and it proves that this method can work.

Now onto what I actually found:

V3 (US) files:

• town.swf (http://v3.tamatown.com/town.swf) - duplicate of a previously archived file
• song1.mp3 (http://v3.tamatown.com/music/song1.mp3) - duplicate of a previously archived file

V3 (UK) files:

• tama_shell.swf (http://www.tamagotchieurope.com/EN/T3EN/tama_shell.swf) - new version of a previously archived file
• intro.swf (http://www.tamagotchieurope.com/EN/T3EN/intro.swf) - duplicate of a previously archived file
• town.swf (http://www.tamagotchieurope.com/EN/T3EN/town.swf) - new version of a previously archived file
• passport.swf (http://www.tamagotchieurope.com/EN/T3EN/items/passport.swf) - entirely new file
• song1.mp3 (http://www.tamagotchieurope.com/EN/T3EN/music/song1.mp3) - duplicate of a previously archived file
• items.xml (http://www.tamagotchieurope.com/EN/T3EN/items.xml) - new version of a previously archived file

V4 (US) files:

• town.swf (http://v4.tamatown.com/town.swf) - new version of a previously archived file

As I said, nothing spectacular, but it's nice to know I was able to find something, and aside from these files I was also able to get some more information as to when these files were added and used on the site, which paints a slightly clearer picture of its history, too. I also recovered quite a large collection of Club Penguin files which are currently being reviewed, in case there's any new assets in there that were previously lost (why couldn't they have been TamaTown files!!)

If anything, I think this really just indicates that all we need is for more people to give this process a try. Hopefully that's something we'll see more of in the future, and I'm considering making some long form video content on TamaTown and its current state in order to motivate more people to attempt this.

I'll be uploading these new files to the Internet Archive here, though IA is currently giving me some upload issues. It'll be up by tomorrow, hopefully.

Until next time!