The archive of v2 (the second generation of) Sifteo Cube games at https://doctormikereddy.com/sifteo-resurrecting-a-legend/ has an Application folder, containing the .elf compressed game files, and a Brochure folder, containing images and HTML files, which server as the banners, as well as instruction pages inside the Sifteo Sync App. However, the games (and accompanying files) I managed to retrieve, and get permission to upload, was sadly incomplete. Notably, the game icon (thumbnail) for the Sandwich Kingdom sequel, Ice Palace; two detail/instruction images for Word Caravan; similar files and images for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game, Ninja Slide; and other so called “landing pages” for a couple of other games. Although, I did, in the end, get access to a more complete archive of the Brochure files (via a fan on Reddit, called mechafroggie), I did manage to reconstruct the missing images from a set of nefarious places on the Internet. This blog post tells that story…

It’s iconic!

Firstly, let’s work out the missing icon for Sandwich Kingdom, Ice Palace. This was relatively easy, because some of the old Sifteo web site is preserved on the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/20150329211129/https:/www.sifteo.com/games and while many of the games landing pages, etc, are missing, the navigation strip is complete. A quick Save as… and we had our first missing image:

This needs to go in the brochure in a specific location, in a specific format: icon.png in the folder com.sifteo.skicepalace inside the Sifteo Sync AppData folder at C:\Users\<insertID>\AppData\Local\Sifteo\Sync\Users\nobody@sifteo.com\Booklets\com.sifteo.skicepalace and needed to be 96×96 pixels like the one for its predecessor:

Here is the resized version, ready to go in the right folder:

and in the context of the navigation strip, before:

and after:

Not too shabby 🙂 After this, until mechafroggie got me the complete files – even his archive didn’t have the Ice Palace icon – I had the following files missing from the Brochure folder:

• word-caravan-0.png and word-caravan-1.png from C:\Users\<InsertID>\AppData\Local\Sifteo\Sync\Users\nobody@sifteo.com\Booklets\com.sifteo.wordcaravan\images

• tmnt-1.png, tmnt-2.png and tmnt-4.png from C:\Users\<InsertID>\AppData\Local\Sifteo\Sync\Users\nobody@sifteo.com\Booklets\com.sifteo.ninja_slide\images

The Word Caravan images were retrieved from http://cargocollective.com/dear-american/following/dear-american/Sifteo-game-landing-pages and https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.coleslawdesign.com/wp-content/uploads//*

The Ninja Slide missing images were harder to source – Teenage Mutant NInja Turtles being a more “protected” IP to deal with. In the end, I managed to scrape a screen shot of one missing image from https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/sifteo-cubes-intelligent-play-system-review-giveaway/

and with some clever editing, and comparing to the existing images in the folder I got a working version of tmnt-2.png

Others came from archive.org, specifically:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161126084755/http://www.kellynloehr.com/post/sifteo-cubes/ (now not fully archived) and https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.coleslawdesign.com/wp-content/uploads//* one example being https://web.archive.org/web/20190214004236/https://www.coleslawdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/NinjaSlide_detail_3.png along with the original artist’s online portfolio at http://cargocollective.com/dear-american/following/dear-american/Sifteo-game-landing-pages along with the Word Caravan images. Incidentally, this page http://www.wobblyart.com/pixelart/TMNT/TMNT_art.html had some lovely close ups of the art assets used in the actual Sifteo game!

So, we had a complete Word Caravan and Ninja Slide brochure folders 🙂 Incidentally, the files that mechafroggie provided were – because I was judging by eye, sometimes with a fleeting glimpse of the target image in a YouTube video (!) – almost identical to the ones I recreated. However, in the accompanying archive update for the v2 games, I have (with the exception of the first icon.png file) used the reclaimed original images, rather than my Gimped versions; it’s nicer to have the authentic files 🙂

We now can finally complete the v2 commecrial game offering on this site. Here it is: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7qnnoro0ze8nbzj/Booklets.zip?dl=0

Decompress into your own AppData folder for Sifteo Sync