Intro

[malymin]

Name/Pseudonym: Schaf, Malymin
Hobbies/interests:
Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? I don't think I have as much of a "hoard" as I'd like, but I do tend to squirrel away PDFs (ranging from articles to entire books) and random image files on flash drives and hard drives. I also like to keep anime episodes (for easy watching without internet access) and abandonware games on my PC.
Why do you data hoard? When I was a kid I noticed that websites I loved would often go down and never come back, because the webmaster could no longer afford to keep the domain. As a result, the internet not being a place of permanence struck me pretty early on. In addition, two formative pieces of media for me (the 1990's "Petz" games, and the 1998 Toei adaptation of "Yu-Gi-Oh!") only manage to continue to exist and be experienced due to piracy-as-preservation. If something goes out of print in an official capacity, it's gotta be preserved and backed up somewhere. Also, I like researching various topics, and it's cheaper to build a little nest of free PDFs than to splurge on books, as much as I prefer reading paper to reading a screen...
Anything else? I'm probably not as cool or good at this as most people here. u_u; Hope you'll have me anyways!

Comments

[gze]

Oh hey, classic Petz! We used to be super into that series and it also inspired some early data hoarding for us! We were so glad to see a couple sites are archiving breed files like VPZ's. The only Petz we don't have physical media for is the very original, some day we hope to complete the collection. Good times, very nostalgic, A+

-G (they/them)

[malymin]

Petz still has an active community, if you'd believe it! There's... three major-ish forums (Whiskerwick, RKC, and Duke's Group), several discord servers, and the fansite culture never really stopped being a thing for Petz like it did for other fan cultures when social media became the norm.

There's been some very exciting developments in the modding scene, too... around 2017, a former Petz dev made contact with Ringor, one of the popular hexers in the community, and the stuff they told us about the inner workings of the AI inspired the creation of the reverse-engineering effort led by Reflet. Reflet's long term goal is to create an open-source reimplimentation of the game, so that it can be maintained once the original software no longer functions.

We now know where information of phenotype genetics and personality traits are stored in a .pet file, for example, and how to edit them, as well as how to make rudimentary edits to the properties of toy files (such as changing the flavor of a box of treats, etc).

Also, a fork of PetzA has been developed that allows "palette swapping." You know how Petz draws from a 256 color palette for the color of all its critters and sprites? Prism (the developer of the fork) has made it so that, if you edit a [Palette] section into a Petz' LNZ data and create a folder of palette bitmaps within the resource folder, individual pets can load custom 3rd-party palettes, like this. It's kind of nuts to me that the game even can be modified in this way, to be honest.

[gze]

Oh wow, we've missed out on a lot! I'm glad to see the editing and fansite culture never died for Petz, that was the best part for me. And so much progress with the tech! PetzA now allowing palette swapping? That's so awesome!! Thank you for all the links!

Kinda glad our old kennel website isn't in that historical name list though lol

This might be a shot in the dark, but...do you happen to know of/remember a website that was like an adoption center? Where people could upload their pet files for credit, and then you could spend that credit adopting someone else's uploaded pet? We used that site all the time before it died, but we can't find it mentioned by name in our old files. :|c

-G

[malymin]

Glad to share! I'm very fond of the Petz Community's editing and fansite culture, too. Always excited to meet another person who knows Petz in the wild. ^_^

Was the website you're thinking of called the "Auto Adoption Center"? There's been a few sites vaguely like that over the years, but i know AAC is one of the earlier ones.

[gze]

YES, yes yes yes that's exactly it!! AAC!! The moment those words hit our brain in that order I knew that was the website title, and finding it on Wayback Machine confirms it! We spent so much time on that site! Thank you thank you that clears up one mystery we can finally put to rest!

-G

[malymin]

No problem! I asked the kind people on Petzcord (biggest Petz discord server) for help because I couldn't quite remember the name myself. Glad I was able to help! :D