Helpful Tools
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
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.
- 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.
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#3385, 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#3385 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 Extractor
- Download
- A PHP script written by Seirade for downloading files from open S3 buckets. To use the script, place it in the same folder as PHP.exe (or your platform's equivalent), then run a command like this from the Command Prompt:
php s3_bucket_extract.php <url>. This will generate a TXT file with a list of asset URLs from the bucket. - 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.