You can now follow XeNTaX’s proceedings as well on Facebook.

If you wondered why we were down, we suffered an attack by a bot. The last few days our host and us worked hard to remove the infection. We will spend some more time to update the code to latest versions as we go. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Webmaster note: We were hit by a virus called Gumblar. It was a more sophisticated virus than usual. It used the password stored in the scp client of one of our webmasters to gain access to our server. Once it had access, it added obfuscated and encoded javascript to all index.html, index.php, etc files, in order to spread the infection.

If you have visited the xentax main site or any of the xentax subdomains from the 25th of august to the 28th, it’s probably a good idea to run a virus scanner. If you’re a webmaster who stores ftp or scp passwords in a local client, check your site’s source code for suspicious scripts.

We are still cleaning up this shit, and are taking this opportunity to upgrade our forum and blog software as well. We will be busy with this at least until sunday, because as usual real life gets in the way: a friend of ours is getting married tomorrow.
Sorry for the downtime and the inconvenience it may have caused.

Final edit: The javascript exploits a weakness in adobe acrobat reader and flash, probably only in Windows. So if you run Linux or other Unix clones, you get to be smug and self satisfied that this particular virus doesn’t target you. If you run OSX you can remain clueless about this whole conversation.

The Commodore 64 Scene Database (CSDb) is the principal archive that collects all C64-scene related material. I’ve run a raw analysis of the collected data so far and plotted it against time (1982-2009). The CSDb lists 88395 releases from 16363 sceners that were in 5729 groups during this time period. There’s a lot to analyse there. Check it out at the special page: CSDb Analyses

We offered brienj a place of his own for his XBox Hacking portal! There you will find many tools to mod your favourite games, such as SvR2010 v2.0 for Smackdown vs Raw 2010. Move over there now and keep checking for updates!

Alera has his own subdomain at XeNTaX Game Research now! He has already posted his first blog on Biohazard and Outbreak’s *.NBD files. This will be his portal to publish more information on game formats!

Check it!

Yes, there is now the public release of a brilliant 3d models tool! With it you can open many game models to explore and even alter (in the future). From Final Fantasy 7characters  to Quake 2 whole maps, you can view them! Check out the rest of this post for all supported formats to date. Get the download at The Oasis. Discuss the release here at the Game Research Forum.

Read the rest of this entry »

Señor Casaroja has set up his 3d-models site. In time, he will detail all there is to know about reverse engineering 3D-models. If he feels like it. Because you never know. Find his oasis.

Well, after much delay, we finally have a game tools blog, linked to our forum! If you have a registered account you can also post at the blog. The purpose of this blog is to have a single place where all of our tools can be stored and easily found back. Be it custom-made tools by request of someone at the forum, or tools that you found on the internet, post it here so everyone can find it and use it! Make sure however that you provide the standardized information you can read in this post. Click on ‘Read the rest of this entry’

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I’ve released a new tool pack + loader! In the new work-in-progress tool pack you will find 10 tools: PICT2BMP, VFS Extractor, Painfull, Sexwad, ClipMon, base64, CDDS2DDS, TRE Archiver, DownScanner and FileCutter. A lot of them are not idiot proof and are undocumented. Come to the forum if you have questions about them. Oh, and there’s a loader music, called NWP1999D. It’s an oldie by me, but still a nice ode to StarCraft hehe.
Download the package!

No task is too difficult at our fabulous Game Research Forum. Thanks to combined efforts, and a great find by bugtest the *.PAK file format of the Cities XL game is now known, and using QuickBMS you can already start extract the resources from these files. Read all about it here: http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3544 Also, find many more answers to difficult formats there!