Helpful Tools
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The following is a list of tools or otherwise helpful software that we have found useful for saving web games.
General Software
- JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler
- GitHub
- A tool for decompiling SWF files. This is useful for figuring out how a game loads files or fixing bugs. It is also useful for finding the SWF version or ripping graphics or music from a game.
- exe2swf
- Archived official webpage
- A tool that extracts all the SWFs that it can find from an EXE. If you have only the EXE version of a Flash game, you can use this to easily grab the SWF from it.
- HxD
- Official website
- The best and most popular free hex editor for Windows. Very useful for looking at file headers or other plain text information in files.
- Hiren's BootCD PE
- Official website
- Can be installed to a CD or USB stick and used to change or nullify the password of a Windows user profile. Useful if you have an old PC laying around that you want to search for lost media on, but you don't remember the login details for it. Install this program to your USB or CD using a different computer than your old one!
- Your browser's Developer Tools.
- The most useful and versatile tool for any Flashpoint curator. Use the Inspector to find embed codes and iframes, and use the Network tool to see every connection your browser makes.
- As this feature stopped working for Flash in most browsers, it is recommended to use FlashPatch or the Basilisk browser.
- Fiddler
- Official website
- A free web debugger with even more features than a browser's Developer Tools.
- Instead of filling out your info, just use the direct download link.
- 7-Zip
- Official website
- Free, open-source, and reliable. 7-Zip is the best tool to decompress almost any file. It can also be used to check the hash of a file from the "CRC SHA" submenu.
- Universal Extractor 2
- Official website GitHub
- Universal Extractor 2 is a tool designed to extract files from any type of extractable file. Throw everything that 7-Zip can't unpack to it.
- Motrix
- Official website
- One of the best ways to reliably download very large files (like Flashpoint Ultimate). An alternative is Free Download Manager. Power users might prefer aria2.
- qBittorrent
- Official website
- The best free BitTorrent client out there. Use this if you'd like to download the Flashpoint Ultimate torrent.
- WinMerge
- Official website
- A tool that allows comparing folders, text files, or binary files. If you're wondering exactly how a file or folder was changed, use this tool.
- GrepWin
- Github
- A regular expression search tool to quickly and easily find and/or replace text. Incredibly useful for finding https references in your curation, or any specific keywords.
- Google Translate
- Official website
- Useful for translation, but can also be used to type characters from languages with different scripts than your own, by drawing them manually. Click the dropdown on the bottom right corner of the translation box and choose "handwrite" to manually write characters in a language you can't type. For automatic transcription of longer texts, there are also various image-to-text OCR programs. These aren't always accurate, so be sure to verify that the characters these generate are correct, and ask someone else if you're still unsure.
Software for Curating
- fpcurator
- Download GitHub
- A next-generation tool for automatically curating games from websites and downloading lists of URLs. Recommended over cURLsDownloader and the AutoCurator for these tasks, in most cases. Supports downloading and filling in metadata for games from many popular sites.
- cURLsDownloader
- Download GitHub
- Created by nosamu, cURLsDownloader is a tool developed for easily and quickly capturing URLs. It's excellent for saving multi-asset web games. It can also be used to save open directories and simple websites.
Software for Archiving
- Wget
- Download for Windows
- The endlessly customizable command-line web crawler that cURLsDownloader is based upon. Works best for open directories and simple websites.
- ArchiveWeb.page
- Official website
- A Chrome extension and desktop application for browser-based web archiving. Since it runs inside a real browser engine, capturing nearly every kind of website is possible. To extract the WARCs for use with Flashpoint, you can use warcat.
- grab-site
- GitHub
- The state-of-the-art tool that our Archivists use to scrape websites. You'll want a Linux machine, or better yet, a beefy Linux server.
- HTTrack
- Official website
- An ancient but reliable website copier that works for some simple sites. You might find its interface easier to understand than the command-line.
- Cyotek WebCopy
- Official website
- A somewhat simpler and more modern, but less capable website copier. A notable feature is that unlike Wget on Windows, it correctly saves Unicode filenames.
- Wayback Machine Downloader
- GitHub
- A command line tool that allows for whole websites or single items to be downloaded from the Wayback Machine.
- HAR Extractor
- GitHub
- Requires Python. To install, run
pip install har-extractorfrom the command line. To extract somefile.har, runhar-extractor file.har. Note that many browsers truncate large files in HAR archives; you should only use HAR Extractor to extract files with a size of less than 1MB.
Site-Specific Tools
- S3 Bucket Scraper
- Download
- A Python script written by nosamu for listing files in open S3 buckets. More information is available from the Scraping S3 Buckets article.
- GameJolt Downloader
- Download
- A Python script written by eientei for downloading Unity Web Player games from GameJolt. More information is available from the Unity Curation article.
- fpdeviant
- GitHub
- A Python script written by prostagma for automatically downloading and curating games from DeviantArt.