The Dink Network

Since I've been catching up on the dmods from the last few years, and thinking of replaying some old ones, it's been bugging me that I can't easily peek just peek in these without installing them like you could with plain old zip files.

7Zip seems able to open them about half dmods I try. I don't know if that's down to version differences or just luck, but anyway half the time isn't really good enough.

Any suggestions? Or if somebody knows the exact name of the compression format this things use (I know it's something Unixish), that would help too.

.dmod is really just .tar.bz2 (I believe). Renaming the .dmod file to a .tar.bz2 file should allow 7zip to unzip it.

EDIT: Actually just tested this, apparently 7zip can extract the .tar.bz2 file to a .tar file which it can then extract again... Strange...

Like I said, sometimes that works. But for certain dmods (e.g. "The 9 Gems of Life") it doesn't work properly. It seems to get through the bzip2 layer okay, but then can't make sense of the tar.

Or does it work for you? Maybe it's just my computer that's goofy.

It's not just your machine. My 7zip (OS: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bits) can't get past the .tar layer either. Haven't tested any other extraction tools yet, and I currently don't have any alive Linux machine to test it on (and I'm too lazy to install a VM for now <_< .

howzabout one of us just sends you the files you want already unzipped... If I can help, my email is on my profile thingi and if this is how u want them gimme a list of the dmods and I can (ZIP it lololol and) send? Most are really small files so wont be too hard.

I do appreciate the offer, but it's not that I can't open them at all... I can, by installing them with DFArc going into the folder it creates and then deleting the whole mess afterwards if it wasn't something I intend to keep installed. It's just a pain. Especially when I'm looking through a bunch of old files.

I think I better stop before this turns into a rant. Suffice to say I'm still on the lookout for a simpler way to do this, if anyone knows one.

I don't know about 7zip, but winrar will open them fine with a tar.bz2 extension. 9 gems throws errors when you try and open anything, but they don't appear to cause an issue and it does at least open.

Honestly, I'd say installing the D-Mods and then removing them is much less of a pain than trying to figure out a way to "peek" into them, like you want to.

But assuming a program that can deal with this odd (and slightly corrupted, it's starting to look like) format exists, I wouldn't have to deal with this every single time in the future.

And thanks for the tip Arik. I see WinRAR is a time-limited trial or $30 program. Not ideal, but still encouraging that anything semi-standard can open these. I'll keep looking.

The first version of DFArc had a bug and did not produce 100% valid .tar files.

Consequently you may get incomplete files if you extract them with another application.

The best solution to open .dmod files is to install them

A technical explanation of this bug is available in the DFArc3 source code:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freedink/dfarc.git/tree/doc/dfarc.txt#n37

Thanks for the explanation. I suspected it might be something like that. So does the current version still make broken archives? Or has it been fixed?

Anyway, Bandizip (which is freeware), seems to open them OK. Even if there's a risk of minor file corruption, it's still better than dealing with DFArc.

I fixed the issues in DFArc3

That's good to hear. So ideally the old d-mods could eventually be updated to use non-wonky compression. I doubt that's really going to happen though. But I can at least update my own d-mods. Possibly doing a few other bug-fixes while I'm at it.

Incidentally, this inspired me to check out the newest version of DFArc. And I have to say, it's significantly less annoying than the last one I tried.