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The Data Dungeon is here!

It goes without saying that the archive we’ve provided here for some time now doesn’t really do much in the way of context or any other information for that matter, which has always bothered me. It’s more of a file dump than an archive. And what’s also bothered me is that, besides the Internet Archive, there are few sites that aim to provide a curated catalogue of data.

This is something I deeply wanted to change and something we’ve started working on.

So, today, after some delay, I’m happy to finally unveil the future of our archive in the form of The Data Dungeon! It’s faster, we can update it more frequently and we have our own in-house indexing tool for generating the whole thing.

This is of course a first step for the new archive and right now it’s very raw, but this will change over the coming weeks (and months) as we provide our indexing tool with more metadata and make further improvements.

If you’ve got any feedback for us too we now have a GitHub repository open for tickets and of course our Discord.

Roadmap

As mentioned, this initial release is very raw but we have a number of features we’re already working on which you will see introduced over the coming weeks.

  • Merge builds/source into a ‘Distributions’ set, grouped into collections by what they are – automatically organized by age w/ thumbnails
  • HTML pages per file with additional information for that given file inc. preview, content listings and more
  • Search functionality
  • A copy of the site HTML zipped for download so output can be archived
  • An automatically generated list of changes
  • Make the indexer open-source so others can contribute it and use it for their own collections

Q&A

Q. What does this mean for TalonBrave.info?

This blog will continue to exist and ‘TalonBrave.info’ will continue being the face for The Data Dungeon.

Q. What will happen to the TalonBrave.info File Archive?

For now it will remain but as the new archive matures we will eventually be looking to shut it down. That said, we will be looking at setting up redirects for everything under the Dynamic directory.

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Dumping to archive.org

There hasn’t been any formal announcement yet but we have a new archive site in the works over here. The archive available via the new site is with a significantly faster provider which will allow me to keep it updated more often and also allow you guys to have faster download speeds.

That said, there’s nothing yet on the new archive (besides some random Final Fantasy XV bits which were thrown up as a test) as I’ve been wrestling with myself to get on with indexing our offline archive so we can get significantly more up than we had before.

Anyway I digress, the whole reason for mentioning the above is a rather poor explanation as to why I’ve not been uploading to our current archive so much as of late and instead I’ve been dumping software onto archive.org.

Below are a couple of discs I’ve recently dumped that may be of interest to someone out there. Some of these aren’t particularly rare but weren’t yet on archive.org so I’ve seen to it they’re now available for anyone to download.

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Small Furry Creatures

Or more widely known as Creatures – if you’re not familiar with it (and unfortunately I’d take a bet you’re not), it’s a 2D simulation “artificial-life” game featuring rather odd beings known as Norns and Grendels. I don’t believe it is the first, but it is likely one of the first games to utilise neural networks for simulating some surprisingly complex beings.

Before you read too far into this article, I’d highly highly recommend purchasing a copy of Creatures and taking a look at it yourself, as otherwise you’ll be missing a lot of important context!

In late October, I was given permission by EemFoo from Eem Foo’s Archive to take a look at a prototype of Creatures (referred to as Creatures 0 by the community) from March 1994 (it should’ve since been made available for everyone). This is back when the game was called Small Furry Creatures – hence the title of this article – and, at the time, was targetting ol’ MS-DOS as opposed to Microsoft Windows.

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Fable Source Tree

At the end of last month I remembered that there was a build of Fable that’d been dropped a while back which included PDBs, which is of course super exciting from a reverse engineering standpoint. You can find it here. I’ve been slowly digging away at it and taking notes.

That said, just as I’d done with Final Fantasy XV before, I’d decided to generate a copy of the source tree so that I could see how it was possibly laid out when originally compiled.

You can find the results here.

Again, there’s no actual source code here. It’s just an interesting glimpse as to how their project was set up when it was compiled.

The bulk of the project exists under the dev directory, under both the audio and bbbprojects/releasebranch sub-directories. You’ll notice there’s a few third-party libraries they were using at the time which existed under the dev directory too.

On another note, there didn’t seem to be an application to quickly generate a tree of files from a list so I ended up quickly writing an application to do so “creatively” called gentree. It’s open-source but I haven’t bothered putting it under a specific license as it seemed a little too trivial to bother doing so, so consider it public domain. Do let me know if you find it useful however!