Thought I should post here too since Blake00 poked me asking how I found that
And I'm so glad I lured you back as this is going to help a LOT! I've got a bunch of lost Civ 3 and 4 scenarios that were not part of the
Atomic Gamer CFC backup due to being personal uploads on their site instead.. I and others have been trying to figure out how to search for download codes in the MASSIVE backup collection for years and hadn't had any luck!
https://archive.org/details/atomicgamer
The codes in the archive names and the download codes were 2 different things and I couldn't work out a connection as I had not realised that the searchable codes on the archives were actually shortened reversed dates!
Stromling already explained this to me over PM but since he can't post links I'll stick these step by step examples here for others so we can spread the word and solve a lot of problems across this site (mostly in the civ3 & 4 forums). Basically if we put any broken atomic gamer download into web archive we can hopefully see the extra info we need..
Example 1 - the missing Civ4 Age of Discovery Mod (no not Dale's, this is another one) I was trying to find yesterday:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/age-of-discovery.415830/
I put it's dead download into webarchive and find this backup:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130531074316/http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/90780/age-of-discovery
From this link I can see the download code of 90780 and the page tells me the file name, it's size, and the date it was uploaded to Atomic gamer:
AgeOfDiscovery.7z - 32.7 MB - 03/19/2011 (19/03/2011 outside of America)
That date means it should be in the 110319 archive or archive days close to that. So I search for that number
in the collection and up it comes:
https://archive.org/details/AtomicGamer_110319
I click show all files:
https://archive.org/download/AtomicGamer_110319
I click view contents on the main tar file:
https://ia801306.us.archive.org/vie...ems/AtomicGamer_110319/AtomicGamer_110319.tar
And bingo.. there's a archive with the download code 90780 and it's a similar size!
![Smile :) :)](/data/assets/smilies/smile.gif)
Filename is not there sadly so ya gotta download, check if its the right file and then rename to it's old name.
Example 2 - the missing Civ 3 Star Trek mod bonus music files I've been trying to find for 2 friggin years (link briefly mentioned in the description text)
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/star-trek-mod-v-0-9-0-beta-7z.16249/
I put it's dead download link into webarchive and it
FAILED:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=86966
However I can see the failed link is in an old format (file php id) compared to the discovery one above (files/xxxxx/) which had the download code in some slashes, so I try the 86966 code in that format with a * on the end which will show all pages listed under that download code that were hopefully backed up.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/86966/*
Bingo!
https://web.archive.org/web/20120617234339/http://www.atomicgamer.com:80/files/86966/mussfx_civ3stm
From this link I can see the download code of 86966 and the page tells me the file name, it's size, and the date it was uploaded to Atomic gamer:
Sounds.zip - 724.3 MB - 07/03/2010 (03/07/2010 outside of America)
That date means it should be in the 100703 archive or archive days close to that. So I search for that number in the collection and up it comes:
https://archive.org/details/AtomicGamer_100703
I click show all files:
https://archive.org/download/AtomicGamer_100703
I click view contents on the main tar file:
https://ia801300.us.archive.org/vie...ems/AtomicGamer_100703/AtomicGamer_100703.tar
And bingo.. there's a archive with the download code 86966 and it's a similar size!
Filename is not there sadly so ya gotta download, check if its the right file and then rename to it's old name.
Sometimes there
won't be a web archive backup of the old atomic gamer download page but as you can see above it could just be a matter of the old format atomic download link needing to be adjusted to their final one, and if all that fails then Stromling points out that you can usually work out the date of upload by the day it was posted on the CFC forums, sometimes file names and sizes are mentioned in the posts too.
. . .