Computer Troubles

Been having some computer troubles lately, so it's difficult to work through all the current tasks/problems.  It's delayed my work on all Bash and AviSynth scripts as well as updates to the Reactor.

I may have to replace said computer, but it's a good thing the holidays are coming up.  There could be a good deal on a fairly basic desktop.

Riddler's Secret Identity Inventor

What everyone's been clamoring for, right?!

"Play" Riddler's Secret Identity Inventor @ Toonami: Lost Data

(The Batman: TAS version of Riddler was better.)

Batman: Crime Wave

Batman usually makes for a good game.  It's probably because of the gadgets.  They make for interesting power-ups and level design.  Conversely, Superman's too overpowered for most games.  His weakest opponents should be tanks. 

Developers could always pull a Boktai and have Superman literally powered by the sun.

Play Batman: Crime Wave @ Toonami: Lost Data
(Not many Toonami games go with the isometric viewpoint.) 

Wonder Woman: Curse of the Underworld

Justice League:  The successor to both the Batman and Superman animated series.  It's unfortunate that it never really found its groove due to its massive ensemble cast.  There were simply too many characters to focus on.

Well, at least Justice League had better action and serious plots compared to the He-Man remake.

Play Curse of the Underworld @ Toonami: Lost Data
(Athens was originally made of wood, but the discovery of gold enabled the city to build great stone structures.)

PPG Video Director

In addition to Toonami's Big Shot Video Director, Cartoon Network also created a Powerpuff Girls Video Director.  It follows the same format, but with different clips and music.

Since The Powerpuff Girls aired on Toonami, and it was good, it shall be placed on Toonami: Lost Data.  Pokemon: Chocobo Chronicles Generations, however, will never be on the site.

Play PPG Video Director @ Toonami: Lost Data
(Whoever is reading this is responsible for the box office failure of the PPG movie.)

Happy Cancelversary

As we all know, Toonami was cancelled on this date two years ago (or, rather, the cancellation became publicly known).  While we mourn its loss, we can celebrate the downfall Cartoon Network's experiment in live-action television.

I hope to update Toonami Reactor 2.5 sometime this week in commemoration as well as upload some type of Batman/DC Comics game.  I would upload the Naruto games, but those are still on Cartoon Network's main website for some strange reason.

In the meantime, here is a Slider Puzzle:

Play yet another cheap game @ Toonami: Lost Data

(All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put TOM1 or Toonami back together again.)

Frameless Toonami Reactor

(50% less annoying than before.)

The interface for Toonami Reactor 2.5 has been upgraded.  No longer will awful frames cause confusion across multiple browsers.  Now it should work across most browsers, though older versions of Internet Explorer may be problematic.

In addition, several features have been added:

• Video quality can be set and kept across multiple videos.
• Video timing can be adjusted.
• Ads, games, and bumps can all be toggled on or off.
• Obtain a video list just by searching a user's uploads.  Saves a lot of time versus creating new playlists.
• Can now sort playlists/searches.  Important as a lot of playlists are improperly organized.
• The Episode List box will now auto-scroll to the selected video.

Several bugs have been squashed:

• Double-play bug:  This was caused by trying to correct the video quality after it loaded instead of requesting quality with the video.
• Removed auto-play from embed code as it seemed to interfere with the JavaScript auto-play.
• Removed Related Videos from embed code as it tended to get stuck when switching videos.
• Block-skipping:  The player skips a chunk of video when switching videos.  Probably solved or reduced in frequency.  Related either to the embedded auto-play or video timing.

There are still some improvements that could be made:

• Allow the viewer to set how many episodes before a bump.
• Allow two searches/playlists to be merged (there are some difficulties in searching).
• Might even allow two searches/playlists to be "diffed" and "unioned" to add some better logic.
• YouTube also searches comments made by the video poster (or event commentators).  This causes massive problem with searching, so may need a separate Title or Tag Search.

Toonamify your YouTube experience at Toonami Reactor 2.5.

Sasami's Run

This game apparently appeared only on the UK Toonami's website.  They had an even smaller game budget than the U.S. Toonami website.  What's odd is that this is the only Tenchi-related game ever produced for Toonami.

Play Sasami's Run @ Toonami: Lost Data

(Sasami sure is threatened by tree branches and rocks.)

Coming Soon... Eventually

 
(Why, it looks almost exactly the same!)

A frameless version of Toonami Reactor 2.5.  Hopefully, this one will work much better across multiple browsers.

This will replace all other versions because it's a lot sleeker than the framed versions.

(Technically, there will be a couple of iFrames, but those are only for compatibility and loading playlists.)

IGPX Spanish Version

(Play IGPX Spanish @ Lost Data)

The Spanish-version of the IGPX Total Immersion Event game is now up on Lost Data.  This was the original version I found via Googling.  One of those scraper/spam websites hotlinked to the game.  From there, it was easy to determine that one of CN's Latin American sites had this game and an English-version as well.

The only problem is that the win/lose .JPG files are in English.

Related Project: YouTube Viewer

Toonami Reactor 2.5 isn't the only YouTube-related project I've worked on.  The first was a YouTube "Let's Play" viewer that automatically runs through a playlist of videos.  Basically, I hook a laptop up to a TV with a VGA connection (many new HDTVs have them), select someone's playlist, and just let it roll.

Many improvements made in either the YouTube Viewer or Reactor 2.5 are cross-pollinated, so that both function better.  It is essentially a prototype for experimenting with YouTube embedding and managing playlists without worrying about frames or extraneous HTML and JavaScript files.

The YouTube Viewer currently has a few experimental features such as measuring download rate to ensure videos load quickly.  I plan to add a voice synthesizer to read video titles and descriptions, but it will have to be an external program on the viewer's computer.  Any sort of voice synth plug-in will simply be too slow or too simplistic (not enough voices, etc.).

Of course, now I'm working on a "master" YouTube Viewer.  The current one is okay, but I'm trying to make one embeddable in any webpage with minimal hassle, rather than hard coded as it is now.  If it all works out, I might be able to get rid of the frames in Reactor 2.5.

I've also got a JavaScript file that parses and threads comments from YouTube discussions, but I'm still cleaning that one up.

P.S. A bunch of new shows have been added to Reactor 2.5 (WS).  Some of these took a bit of work as not all were in playlists (and one playlist was completely misordered).

IGPX Restored

Good news: the winning/losing image files for the IGPX microseries were recovered thanks to the efforts of an anonymous (unless he wants to be mentioned) person.

Check out the now-complete version of IGPX @ Toonami: Lost Data.

Toonami Reactor 2.5 Widescreen

(Now with 50% less resizing!)

After some work, Reactor 2.5 now has a "widescreen" layout.  This should work well considering that YouTube standard definition video is far larger than the original Reactor's tiny streaming content.  The Reactor and navigation panes were moved to the bottom half of the screen to accommodate the change. 

In addition, Toonami promos should now play between episodes of series.  More than that and they risk annoying the viewer.  The promos are randomly selected, so they won't necessarily match any particular time period of Toonami.  There are also "Intro" and "Later" bumpers that activate at the beginning and end of a playlist.

See the Toonami Reactor 2.5 Widescreen version.

Or proceed to the 'old' version of Toonami Reactor.

Accident #1

I think I accidentally deleted someone's comment.  It was whoever mentioned "wee".

He-Man Games

Oddly, the only games produced for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe were made for the Toonami UK website.  The only He-Man-related item on the U.S. Toonami website was a "Map of Eternia".  Part of that is in the Wayback Machine, but it is mostly broken.

The Courage of Adam @ Toonami: Lost Data
(It would be easier if you could ride the tiger.)

The Courage of Adam:  Race back and forth as Skeletor tries to hit Adam with energy bolts.  Tranform into He-Man and use the shield to reflect lightning ("purple") blasts. 

Lair of the Slime Mutant @ Toonami: Lost Data
(Stupid bug-monsters.)

Lair of the Slime Mutant is quite a bit more fun than Courage, but is fantastically difficult.  Jump platforms and try to kill beasts as they cheat and hit you no matter what.

fsed.sh

After downloading the Toonami Reactor web files from the Internet Archive, I needed to strip out all the Wayback Machine code/markers.  The Wayback Machine added JavaScript code to rewrite HTML links thus maintaining "temporal integrity".  These needed to be removed for Reactor 2.5 to function properly.  Removing them manually would be too time consuming and frustrating.  The application Cygwin provided access to many tools such as sed that allow for bulk replacement of text.  However, sed (or this version on least) can only replace text on a single line.  The solution was to write a custom bash script to replace newline characters ('\n') with the bell character ('\a') and switch back after removing the offending text.  See code:

#!/bin/bash
# fsed.sh
# Name: File sed
# Replaces all newlines with the bell (\a), performs sed,
# then switches back.

regex=$1;
# Shift the argument array, to move the regex value. 
shift
for i in $*
do
  cat $i | tr "\n" "\a" | sed "$regex" | tr "\a" "\n" > $i;
done


Called like this: >fsed.sh "/regex/replace/g" ./*.html
(Of course, this is designed to work on a mass of files.  And it's incredibly dangerous, what with rewriting files and such.  Use caution.)

It's possible there are other escape characters other than the bell that could be used, but it worked well enough at the time.

Reactor v2.5.3231463968 Alpha Gaiden

(It sort of works!)

After some work, I've got a fan-version of Toonami Reactor up and running. It's missing some features currently, but those will be added in gradually.

Why Reactor instead of Jetstream? Because Reactor's layout is easier to copy and YouTube's embedded player comes with a variety of color schemes. Jetstream was all Flash and loaded its files in a most annoying fashion.

YouTube also has the most powerful and complete API of the video hosting services.  Dailymotion has an API as well, but I can't figure out if it allows API access to playlists.

Since it is YouTube, content is somewhat limited due to copyright restrictions. 

On to Reactor 2.5's current capabilities.

What really makes it the Reactor.  Every three minutes:

• Reactor Mindburn pops up on the right-corner ("Reaction") panel and asks a question.
• An "advertisement" is displayed in the Reaction frame/panel. These aren't really ads, but just links to anything interesting related to Toonami or not.
• The Reactor Meltdown plays.

The Reactor runs through a YouTube playlist, allowing a viewer to watch an entire series/set of videos.  The viewer can also play any embeddable YouTube playlist he or she chooses by copying and pasting a playlist ID string in a text box.

Features to add:

• Playing a Toonami intro before the playlist starts.
• Playing an interstitial between every two videos (approximately).  Interstitials include the "blood" graphic.
• An "Up Next" graphic or animation.
• Playing a montage such as "Dreams" or "Mad Rhetoric" between episodes.
• Ditto for video game reviews.
• Finishing a playlist with a "Later" bump.
• The ability to turn some or all features off.

The current layout essentially copies the original Reactor.  However, YouTube allows for video resolutions far larger than the original Reactor's 320x240 Real Video Streaming.  It'd probably be best to move the Reaction frame (where messages and trivia games pop-up) to the bottom-half of the screen, giving more room for video.

Features Probably Never Implemented:

The original Reactor had the episodes keyed in so that a message would appear for a given moment during a video. For instance, during the episode in which Goku launches a Spirit Bomb at Frieza, the Reactor panel might pop-up a message stating: "Goku learned the Spirit Bomb from King Kai in episode ##." Hypothetically, that could be implemented, but it's an awful lot of work that could be wiped out quite easily.

Or Reactor 2.5 could scan the comments section for chronological links and display the comment at the appropriate time...

Other:

The code's a mess.  I wanted to get an initial version out before the end of April, so there's still a lot of clean-up to do along with testing and adding the above-mentioned components.  It should work across all modern browsers and operating systems (I hope; Internet Explore seems to have some major problems).

I know nothing about color schemes or aesthetic taste.  I just picked whatever colors looked okay for text boxes and such.

The hardest part is collecting videos for the Reactor.  Right now, there's only two good playlists on the page.

Check out Reactor 2.5 (Preview).

Background Changes

Made some changes to the blog that has broken all previous Bookmarks/links. I didn't really want to, but had to do it.

Toonami Reactor Meltdown

After some time of gathering images, the Reactor Meltdown game has finally been "repaired". As some of us may remember, the Meltdown game was a quiz game similar to Mindburn except the player must guess the person/object/item/place in a slowly-revealed image.

The game was obtained from the Internet Archive with only one image (out of fifty-six) still present. The only image was of Frieza, but it at least provided some information on the proper height and width of acceptable images. Fortunately, most of the questions (stored in separate files) were spidered by the Wayback Machine and preserved.

Play Reactor Meltdown @ Toonami: Lost Data

(Some images look better than others. I was rushed.)

Using the SWFTools package, another fifty-five images were converted to work with the Meltdown game. Now it should function near-identically as it did in the Reactor.

Flash/Shockwave Game Download Tools

So, you may be wondering how I download Flash or Shockwave games that may contain dozens of dependent files on a server. Well, it's quite simple. I use a custom Java program based on the JPcap (packet capture) library to spit out all the requests that are being sent over a network connection. I look through the requests, find the files I want, then download them with wget.


(Tcpdump allows you to see all the crud a modern Flash game loads. And download it!)

It works something like this:

java Tcpdump 2 >> .\output.txt

(The number "2" indicates which network interface to use; generally either a WiFi connection or Ethernet port.)

And ".\output.txt" will contain text such as this:

GET>> www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/characters.xml
GET>> www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/naruto3.swf
GET>> www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/tracker.swf

I replace "GET>>" with wget instructions to make it into this:

wget -nc -x www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/characters.xml
wget -nc -x www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/naruto3.swf
wget -nc -x www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/tracker.swf


The flag "nc" prevents overwriting of existing files and "x" forces the creation of directories. These changes are saved to a .BAT file and run in the same directory as wget.

On top of this, I have Mozilla Firefox equipped with the FlashBlock plugin. This enables me to control when a Flash or Shockwave item is loaded, thus making my "output.txt" file neat and clean. Otherwise, dozens of non-related requests would need to be discarded to obtain a game.

To make things easy, I've packaged together all of the files that I use (except for Java and FlashBlock, of course; that would just be silly). The WinPcap library must be installed before installing the Jpcap library as one is dependent on the other. The Windows version of wget is included since most people can't be bothered to search around for it. After that, the Tcpdump* application can be run from .BAT files if the command line is too esoteric.

I'm sure there are other/better tools out there, but this has worked fairly well for me. There's only one major pitfall: some games only load resources as they need them, meaning that you're required to play through the entire game to obtain all the files. Some filenames can be guessed, but others can't be.

Download:

• Credits & Resources page @ Toonami: Lost Data,
  
• or click this link directly (tcpdump_package.zip).

*This is a misnomer in that my version doesn't dump whole TCP packets, but that's just the name I've kept ever since experimenting with an example program.

Update: Batman Beyond: Evolution of Evil

(Seeing "Enter Level Access Code" means the game is working.)

Someone requested help in getting Batman Beyond: Evolution of Evil to work. The game definitely works, it apparently just isn't compatible with current versions of Adobe Shockwave Player.

(Terry gets socked.)

It took a while to test this out as I used a Virtual Machine running Windows 98 to install old versions of Shockwave (thus avoiding screwing up my computer's configuration). I can't say for sure how well these old versions will install on modern systems. They might work on XP, but I can't be sure about Vista or Windows 7.


(Exiting the stage.)

Anyway, the game requires Shockwave version 8 at the least. It also works on version 9 (seems less buggy on this version). The game doesn't appear to work on version 10 or above.


(Batman taking a break behind some barrels.)

With the latest player, Adobe added some backwards compatibility, but only to version 10. The only way around seems to be 1.) Uninstall the current version of Shockwave, 2.) install version 9, 3.) play game, 4.) re-install current version of Shockwave.

It's annoying, but it appears to be the only way to play this game.

Older versions of Shockwave Player: kb2.adobe.com/cps/186/tn_18629.html

Level Codes:
Elevator
Bellhop
Cargo
Pinpoint
Barrel
Abandoned
Lab rat
Malice

So Much for Trapped in Hyperspace

I tried contacting Pepworks.de to see if they would send me a copy of Trapped in Hyperspace. No such luck. They only give copies to the customer. That would mean contacting someone from CartoonNetwork.com and obtaining it. That just doesn't seem very likely.

Oh, well.

Kirby 64 Promo Game

Going through the Wayback Machine (yet again), I noticed an odd file called kirby.game.html. Curiously, it appears to be a promotional game for Kirby 64.

Kirby 64 Promo Game @ Lost Data


It's a simple memory game. Upon completion, the player is able to download a Kirby wallpaper. (It appears in the same download area as Toonami wallpapers, so it wasn't a big secret.)

Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine failed to save the wallpaper. However, at least one website saved the file and noted where it came from, and so we know which wallpaper was offered by Toonami.


(Click to view 1024x768 image.)

I don't remember this game from back then. Of course, the Toonami homepage wasn't very interesting until the Intruder premiered and Reactor came online. I probably didn't visit enough...