Clock Radio Revival
Latest Release - 25/01/2025
Version - 2.0
A revival of an old They Might Be Giants flash application which offered tonnes of interesting and rare songs from the band's catalogue.
I was searching through the archives of the now defunct tmbg.com and stumbled across the flash program for their Clock Radio service, something I'd read about but never had the chance to use.
I discovered that old flash programs are very easy to decompile, and I decided to take a look at what data the program was expecting from the server. Despite having absolutely no flash knowledge, I reverse engineered the code to recreate my own server files and point the application towards them.
In the end, I managed to fix a few bugs with the original app and get it running both in browser and desktop (using Ruffle), playing most of the original songs that were part of the service.
Initially, I only served freely available songs from the server, as I didn't have access to any of the original songs exclusive to the service. But in early 2025, someone had kindly given me all the songs I was missing and I revisited the application to update it, fixing some more bugs in the process.
I also looked into rewriting the underlying code using the Haxe language, as it's based on the language used by flash programs and it supports importing assets from swf files directly. However, I kept running into compatibility issues, and I was dissatisfied with the drop in visual quality when rendering the original assets. As all of my goals with the rewrite were non-necessary features, I decided to shelve the idea and work on updating the flash version instead.
