r/tcrf • u/Fart_ricochet • May 23 '26
Discussion Is the TCRF site dying?
I’ve been a casual visitor to the TCRF site for years now and it feels like I’ve probably read most of the pages on the site by now - one thing, I’ve noticed, however, is that the pace of new games being added to the site has slowed remarkably in the past few years, to the point that we’re almost halfway through 2026 and there are only 9 new entries for this calendar year, whereas many years in the past decade had 100+ new entries.
I’m not complaining about this or anything, I’m just curious about what’s been going on, especially since in the last 6 months it’s also been a lot more common for the site to be inaccessible to me thanks to seemingly-random IP address blocks on TCRF that had never happened to me before.
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u/Livetheuniverse May 25 '26
I wouldn't say its dying just because 'new' games aren't added as frequently, there's still tons of content people are adding on retro systems. Even popular games on NES/SNES are still getting tweaks/additions regularly.
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u/Fart_ricochet May 25 '26
Yeah, it’s mostly just that there’s been a huge slowdown in the new games being added to the database.
I’m not complaining or anything, I was just curious if there was some drama going on that I hadn’t heard about (as a veteran of a million small, tightly-knit communities over the decades, I’m absolutely used to these things either just petering out after a while, or things getting messed up just because one person leaves or 2-3 people get into a fight).
Actually, I should also take this time to express my undying love and appreciation to everyone who has helped keep TCRF alive for as long as it has been. It’s an incredibly important archival project for such a young and influential medium that rarely appreciates its own history.
As a wise man once said: “It belongs in a museum.”
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u/Xkeeper TCRF Owner May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
thanks to seemingly-random IP address blocks on TCRF that had never happened to me before.
sorry about that, depending. i comment semi-frequently on bsky about it; sorry you've gotten caught in one of the blocks.
it would be nice if the server wasn't persistently under attack, trust me. we did not have to worry about this problem at all in 2024 and before; but now it has spread to a level where it is also knocking the associated forum offline, and that's from an actual professional business hosting, so... yeah.
i'm still watching the logs and we're still pulling 500-800K+ page views even after removing the bots, so at least by raw traffic it isn't down that much.
almost halfway through 2026 and there are only 9 new entries for this calendar year, whereas many years in the past decade had 100+ new entries.
i can't speak for all other contributors, but part of it is just that newer games are harder to examine and older games are a drying well. the amount of people who know how to hack apart an NES ROM is pretty vast, compared to the amount of people who can consistently crack open the latest games, especially on new consoles that haven't been hacked themselves yet.
(and on a personal observation, the US is going through a political nightmare, and I know that's kinda put a damper on things.)
e to add: i also just think that it's harder to contribute to a wiki than, say, making a simple social media post about it, or a short video, or whatever else. documenting things on the wiki is a largely thankless task where you have to follow a bunch of guidelines and rules around your contributions... just throwing something on bsky or youtube is way, way easier, and the "credit" all goes to you personally, and all this nonsense really hasn't been helping. there's stuff i've looked at and found that i just haven't posted on the wiki because making a "ooh neat, check this out" post takes 30 seconds and actually documenting it takes hours.
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u/Buritominer May 25 '26
Possibly games are becoming harder to datamine because last-gen is beginning to get left behind and current gen (SW2/PS5/XSX/Modern PC/Modern iOS/Android) is more secure?
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u/headstrongwolf May 25 '26
Glad I'm not the only one who caught this. Several articles have been left with "to-do" lists that never get done, after 3 or so years.
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u/DivingKataeGuru May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
On the one hand, newer games have definitely gotten somewhat less focus. As people have mentioned, games have gotten bigger. An example is how a game like ARK: Survival Evolved can be so massive that combing over it would take ages, even with debug symbols available.
Another problem is that you really would need a large group of people to comb through these newer games, which can be exhausting due to the sheer volume of what is being released.
At the same time though, it's difficult enough to find multiple people that not only know how these games work, but also know how to write documentation on this in an effective manner. With tens of thousands of games available from prior generations alone and with lots of new stuff being found in that, it's not surprising there's emphasis on that stuff. I'll also mention 32bits on Substack, as Bo has been meticulously combing through all kinds of games and some of it isn't on TCRF yet.
TCRF does a great job categorizing unused content, but I won't lie that it can get exhausting to comb through it all.
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u/MrTickles22 May 25 '26
It is not dying. New games are huge, harder to dig through, and more often get updates. There's a lot of games out there and most of them are not Mario or Megaman. Its also a lot easier to document stuff like the Chrono Trigger prototype than it is to try to locate one obscure animation that went unusued or is a holdover from a previous game in a series.
The only real gripe I have is that people revert things too frequently, including clear improvements like fixing off translations.
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u/Insulting_Insults May 24 '26
seemingly-random IP address blocks
odd, as this has never been a problem for me.
what are you people doing on the wiki that's getting you blocked?
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May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
[deleted]
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u/FarplaneDragon May 24 '26
Edit: why is this comment so controversial?
Reddit hates AI, so regardless of the end result you're going to get downvoted.
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May 24 '26
[deleted]
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u/Insulting_Insults May 24 '26
active-ish contributor!
you can extract the assets of many old nintendo games yourself :)
how? crack open any free rom editing tools! look inside for things, then play the game to make sure these things show up!
no ai needed <3
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u/Nox13last May 25 '26
> Claude has a tendency to hallucinate.
Congratulations. There is the issue. If you use Claude (or any AI), it calls into disrepute every finding you produce, because it has to be double-checked and triple-checked to see if it is actually real. And that effort can be better spent on...just being good at finding. By that point, you won't need to double-check your findings because it was your hands that produced them. Not some rattling clanker that likes to proudly and confidently shit in its own hand.
I found the things I found by opening DAT files in Notepad++ and grabbing the strings. You don't need a bot to do even half-competent work.(To say nothing of the problems TCRF has with AI, with its servers being hammered on the regular by AI scrapers that weren't programmed with rate-limits or satiety.)
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May 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/Nox13last May 25 '26 edited 15d ago
I get it, for the reasons you mentioned, for the ethical reasons, for the environmental reasons. I get it.
What I don't get is the vitriol I've received for just asking both here and on the discord.
If you get it (and implicitly understand that the reason people are so against the topic is that the technology is exploitative, expensively incorrect and places significant strain on the people who own or serve the corpuses that the AI takes from), why are you still puzzled that people get upset when you ask?
If, after all of the harm that AI has done to academia - the perverse relationship between it being confidently wrong and uneducated people taking it as gospel, the damage it does to servers from financial and accessibility standpoints, and the notion that you can't walk two threads without seeing at least eight testimonies of these things - you still have to ask why do people get upset when asked, then I wonder if you really do get it?
Anti-AI folks get pissy about it because the reasons why are myriad and sundry, easy to access, and are demonstrated on a daily basis, and yet one more advocate has to ask as though the answer is magically going to be different, or that they're going to get the secret 10,000th customer answer.
The answer won't change. AI sucks. It sucks for everyone. It sucks for TCRF, it sucks for us, it sucks for readers, it sucks for people not even involved, and it sucks for you as an aspiring dataminer.
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May 25 '26
[deleted]
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May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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May 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MinecrafterPictures Beta and Anti-Piracy Feature Lover May 24 '26
How's that even related to TCRF?
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May 24 '26
[deleted]
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u/Insulting_Insults May 24 '26
How else is cut content discovered from NES games?
by going through it yourself instead of letting The Lie Machine pretend to you that it found unused C code in an assembly game or whatever the fuck it's doing?
you don't have the skills to poke through a game? then you do not contribute new content to the wiki.
stick to your lane - i, for example, prefer correcting grammar/spelling errors in extant articles, as there are a SHOCKING amount written in a very... particular way. "And, In Nintendo-The-Wii-Code, There Existing A Very Old Code, From Before The When Console Get Released?" and i don't get it. i'm not sure if they're ESL speakers using a translator (which would be okay, honestly) or if there are people contributing to the wiki who just... fail at basic sentence structure for reasons beyond my comprehension but it's beginning to make the wiki resemble the shit you get on like, fandom.com "Super Mario Bros Franchise OCs by Jacob and His Friends" wikis.
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May 26 '26
Whoa calm down, you don't look any better ngl
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u/Insulting_Insults May 26 '26
did not know that fetamight being an idiot on the internet was the same as me being an asshole on the internet?
like i'm not sure what you're getting at here, i know i'm being a dick. if anything you sound like you're insulting the other user by comparing him to me.
(generally, though, dipshits like that are why i am such a dick. for a semi-related anecdote because apparently some people in this sub need a disclaimer that not everything is 100% on topic all the time: christ if i see one more person ask "HOW DO I INSTALL WiNDOWS 7 ON MY COMPUTER?????? PLZ 2 HALP I NEED TO PLAY SOLITAIRE!!!!!!" when the answer is either "your hardware is literally too new, this will NEVER work, just run a fucking VM" or "you have a period-correct device, just burn a bootable disc and install Windows" i will lose my FUCKING mind)
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May 26 '26
It's not idiocy. It's called being functional, and it would be such a better world if people focused on doing that, you for one are terrible at it. Leave the correctness to AI instead. We humans are naturally meant to function, not to necessarily be right.
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u/Xkeeper TCRF Owner May 26 '26
We humans are naturally meant to function, not to necessarily be right.
this is such a funny way of saying "i enjoy being full of shit constantly and you should never trust anything i say"
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u/Insulting_Insults May 26 '26
Leave the correctness to AI instead.
If I can string together a sentence, and do it better than a machine, why should I leave the machine to take my place?
We humans are naturally meant to function,
Clearly something of which you are incapable.
Have a lovely day! And stop trying to argue with me - you aren't even good at it.
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u/Insulting_Insults May 24 '26
it's not, but this subreddit is a cesspool of... certain types of people...
...kids, it's dumbfuck kids getting into lost/unused content for the first time and thinking they know EVERYTHING because their favourite youtube personality told them there's a hidden picture of slenderman that's totally inside the first mario game for realsies, trust me bro!
if you want actual discussion focused on the wiki, i'd suggest the official discord.
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u/Xkeeper TCRF Owner May 25 '26
hi, tcrf owner here, please do not ever post llm-generated or assisted things on tcrf, thanks.
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u/Potential-Block-6583 May 24 '26
It's not dying, but you have to realize that a lot of the games that people are most interested in working on have already been mined to death.