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.