Helpful Tools

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. Be sure to download the Nightly version to get the most cutting-edge features.

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.

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.

Free Download Manager

Official website

One of the best ways to reliably download very large files (like Flashpoint Ultimate). 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.

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.

AutoCurator

Download

A tool from XXLuigiMario that automatically curates games from websites, ready for adding to Flashpoint. Will not download any files other than the front facing SWF; you need to play the game to make sure files aren't missing.

Game Saver Extension

Chrome Web Store GitHub

A Chrome extension that helps with downloading Flash games for a Flashpoint curation.

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.

WebRecorder

GitHub

An advanced application for recording high-fidelity web archives. Includes a Chromium browser with full Flash and JavaScript support, so 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

Download

Compiled by nosamu from its repository using PyInstaller. To extract any HAR file, drag it onto the HAR Extractor EXE. 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.