XeNTaX Game Research Forum

» see xentax.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Every game ships its art and its levels inside container files that only that game knows how to read. XeNTaX existed because some people find that intolerable. For twenty years its forum was where you went to learn that the header of a particular .dat file was four bytes of magic number followed by a file count, and that if you wrote a short script describing that layout you could pull every texture out of it.

It came out of the Dutch demoscene rather than out of modding. Mr.Mouse and Captain Corney were two Commodore 64 people, and in 1997, at 23, in a student room in Groningen, Mr.Mouse wrote a DOS command-line tool called multiex.exe. That became MultiEx Commander, which got a Windows version in 2001 and a scripting language of its own for describing archive formats. The forum grew around the tool. By the end it was the first stop for anyone trying to get inside a game that did not want visitors, and it carried 161,906 posts across 19,790 topics.

The last version of MultiEx Commander, 4.6, shipped in November 2022, and the announcement on the front page is worth reading as foreshadowing. Mr.Mouse wrote that it was the last release ever, that it no longer needed an internet connection, and then: "Get the version while the page is still up, since it will go down in a not so far away future." He said that a year before it did.

I never had an account there. A forum like XeNTaX is not somewhere you join, it is the fourth search result for a question nobody else on the internet has answered, and you read the thread without ever coming back to it. My actual forum life was in Turkish, on donanimhaber and frmtr, where the signature under every post was your hardware list and the arguments were about memory timings. Specialist English-language boards were a reference library I used without ever signing the visitor book.

~ the case file ~

~ what a game research forum did ~

The name was precise. XeNTaX was not a mod site and it did not host downloads of games. It documented formats and published the scripts that described them, and the wiki of specifications beside it was what other people's tools got built against. Plenty of software that still works today works because somebody wrote down what a header looked like in a thread there in 2009.

The last archived index gives you the shape of the place in one page. 151 people online at that moment, 12 of them logged in and 137 just reading, which is the right ratio for a reference site. Most users ever online was 1,760, on 2 June 2021. And a thanks leaderboard where Mr.Mouse sits at 1,161, nearly four times the next name on the list, because for two decades the answer to the hard question was usually his.

~ the refusal ~

The closure was announced in May 2023 on financial grounds and set for the end of the year. Then it moved: on 6 October the date was confirmed, the forum's own banner was changed to read 3 November, and posting was switched off ahead of time. The banner that sat on the index in its last week is the whole policy in four sentences. "Important information: this site is currently scheduled to go offline indefinitely by November 3, 2023. Transfer to the new Reshax now! If you wish to donate to attempt the preservation of tools and software somewhere else before it goes down, check the GoFundMe. An effort WILL be made to preserve software. Ahead of the site going offline, posting has been disabled."

What made this death unusual is what happened to the archivists. Mass grabs were discouraged by the operator, on the grounds that the members had never agreed to have their posts republished elsewhere, and the Wayback Machine was handled as a specific exception rather than as a right. Data Horde, which covers exactly this kind of loss, wrote the aftermath up under the title "Without being exploited", because a community choosing not to be preserved is a harder problem than a company deleting one. The index itself had already been emptied by the first of November: where the board list should be, the page says "This board has no forums."

~ the suspension notice ~

The timings are tight enough to date to the hour. forum.xentax.com answers 200 for the last time at 12:58 UTC on 1 November 2023. At 19:24 UTC on 3 November the same address is a 302 pointing at reshax.com, the independent forum the members were sent to. By 9 November the main site had become a 301 to xentax.org, and on 24 November the address served 820 bytes reading "Suspended Domain. This account has been suspended. Either the domain has been overused, or the reseller ran out of resources." A site that closed over hosting bills got switched off by its host for the same reason three weeks after it stopped needing the bandwidth.

xentax.org is alive today and it is not a revival. It is Mr.Mouse back where he started, posting about an FM synthesis cartridge for the Commodore 64 and a tracker he forked to drive it, with entries dated 2026. The wiki is a 403 of 199 bytes, which is a server saying no rather than a server asking who you are.

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