TankTrouble

tanktrouble.com as it ran — PHP 5.6, MySQL, Flash.
_{Six query routes, one index.php, and a garage full of tanks.}

_{↓ this is a reconstruction — how it was rebuilt is the second half}

---

The site

Routes

The whole site is one file. index.php reads QUERY_STRING and dispatches — no rewrite rules, no path routing.

/	front page — the game stage, the Scrapyard counter, news teasers
/?game	the game, full width
/?garage	your tank: paint, accessories, mazes, achievements
/?news	The Lab Report and site news
/?forum	the Tank Owner's Forum
/?lab	Laika's lab
/?shop	merchandise

Anything else is not a page. Directory listing is off site-wide, and /includes/ answers 403.

The document root

What a browser could reach in 2018, and what the pages of that year actually asked for.

/
├── index.php ····················· all six routes + the SAJAX dispatcher
├── embed.php ····················· the embeddable stage for other sites
├── content.php · getimage.php ···· media delivery
├── changePassword.php · sendRequest.php · feedback.php · uploadimage.php
├── robots.txt
│
├── Assets/ ······················· runtime-shared libraries — the game pulls
│   └── Tank.swf · GameTank.swf ··· these itself, the page never names them
│       Crate.swf · Laika.swf
│
├── includes/ ····················· 403 to the browser; the server's own shelf
│   ├── TankTrouble_v4.0.swf ······ the game
│   ├── mazeCreator_v0.3.swf ······ the maze editor, opened from the garage
│   ├── signUpTankDesign18StandardColours.swf ··· the tank designer
│   ├── laika02.swf · loggedInTank06.swf ······· lab and header decoration
│   │
│   ├── loadMaze.php · saveMaze.php ············ the maze store
│   ├── getScrapyard.php ······················· the scrap counter
│   ├── getUserAuthentication.php · achievement.php
│   ├── updateGameStatistics.php
│   │
│   ├── mootools-release-1.11.js ··············· the UI framework
│   ├── swfobject.js ·········· embeds the game
│   ├── scrapyard.js ·········· drives the flip-counter
│   ├── embed.js · phaser.min.js
│   ├── styles.css · boxStyles.css ············ page and panel chrome
│   ├── forumStyles.css · newsStyles.css · shopStyles.css
│   ├── c64.eot · c64.woff · c64.ttf ·········· the headline face
│   └── TTTradingCards Series I · II · Special Anniversary  (.pdf)
│
├── images/ ······················· the whole UI, as flat files
│   ├── box* ·········· 49   the three-slice panel chrome, per colour
│   ├── bigBox* ······· 28   the wide variant
│   ├── tab* ·········· 16   the six nav tabs, selected and deselected
│   ├── menu* ·········· 8   the connectors between them
│   └── shop/ ········· 10   merchandise shots
│
├── faq/ · privacy/ · ios/ · like/
├── shop/ · statistics/ · tankRanks/
├── spreadTheWord/ ················ banners to paste on your own site
├── tellAFriendMail/
├── theLabReport/ ················· the newsletter archive
└── infirmary/ ···················· index.html, hand-copied from index.php

Talking to the server

Two channels, both on index.php.

SAJAX, for the page:

GET /?rs=<function>&rst=&rsrnd=<nonce>&rsargs[]=<arg>

The export list is emitted into every page, so the browser knows what it may call. Anything not on it answers -:<func> not callable.

Pair messages, for the Flash client — base64 of shuffled key=value pairs, in and out:

GET  /includes/loadMaze.php?q=<base64>      →  r=<base64 of t,n,d,s>
POST /includes/saveMaze.php                 →  r=<base64>

A maze travels as four fields: t its title, n its author, d the grid itself, s which of the author's slots it sits in.

Behind the login

The garage is where a tank belongs to someone: paint and accessories, three maze slots with the editor behind them, achievements, ranks, and the forum identity. Almost none of it was ever crawled — a logged-out spider sees the front page and stops.

---

The reconstruction

This repository rebuilds the site above from what survived: Wayback and Common Crawl captures, decompiled SWFs, archived API responses, and 74,165 CDX rows. The server's PHP is gone and always will be — a web server emits output, never source.

A reconstruction that cannot be told apart from the original is a forgery, not a preservation.

So every file says what it is. LEDGER.tsv carries one row per path with a provenance tier:

O	original bytes, verified against the era captures
O?	authentic bytes, era service inferred rather than proven
M1	written, and gated byte-for-byte against real captures
M2	written from constrained evidence — a decompiled reader, a measurement
M3	invented, and it says so in its own header
known-lost	referenced, unrecoverable, filed with the evidence that it is lost

Original bytes are never edited. Written files carry a header naming their evidence and their caveats. Judgement calls go into DECISIONS.md, append-only — superseded, never rewritten.

Where it differs from 2018

Every user-visible difference is written down before it ships, not after someone notices, and anything visibly non-original announces itself on screen — so no screenshot taken from this stack can be mistaken for evidence. Full log with the undo for each: docs/standards/DIVERGENCES-SERVED.md.

The game does not run	Browsers have no Flash plugin, so the stage shows the browser's own message. Nothing is substituted and no shim is injected — a player would change what the page contains, and players are judged separately against the original SWF.
The ad slots are empty	Both 160×600 boxes keep their exact size; the layout never depended on an ad rendering. A dev overlay can fill them with labelled hatching, off by default.
Live numbers are frozen	Visit counters, online counts, top-ten rankings, forum latest-posters, the rotating tagline, seasonal promos — all held at the era-final capture's bytes. They are unrecoverable state, and plausible invented numbers would be the most dangerous kind of stub.
The Scrapyard counter stops	It creeps for about a minute, then pins. The seed row is frozen, so the original client re-derives a velocity of zero — the endpoint, the seed and the untouched client are all behaving exactly as written.
Most SAJAX calls refuse	Only reconstructed functions are exported; everything else answers the stock not callable error. Reject, never fake.
Login is deliberately modern	The original ran authentication over GET, which is why real credentials sit in the public archive index to this day. This rebuild uses POST and hashed passwords, verifies only synthetic accounts, and will never reproduce that.
Nothing behind the login renders	Almost no logged-in page was ever captured. Reconstructing the garage from nothing would be invention, so it is left undone rather than guessed.

Two other things are not divergences, and are not to be "fixed":

• The older game builds and earlier tank-designer generations sit on the shelf under includes/. The 2018 server still answered for them; the 2018 pages just never asked. The map above shows what the pages asked for.
• Duplicated version strings across four files, and infirmary/index.html being a hand-copy rather than a template — those are the original's own faults, reproduced on purpose.

Run it

cd docker && docker compose up -d      # needs MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD in .env

→ http://127.0.0.1:8056. Unreconstructed endpoints answer 501 on purpose.

The stack is period-correct — PHP 5.6, MySQL 5.5, both long past end of life — and binds 127.0.0.1 only. It must never face the internet (SECURITY.md).

Setup

The archive is a read-only junction, and needs no administrator rights:

New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\eth\websites\TankTrouble\archive" -Target "C:\Users\eth\websites\_NOT-PART-OF-MAIN-ARCHIVE_swf-recovered-2026-08-02"

Or set TT_ARCHIVE_ROOT. Without either, the gates fail — they never skip.

Gates

python -m pytest tests/ -q                 # everything
python -m pytest tests/ -m "not live" -q   # offline only

A	every O file's bytes match the ledger and the archive source
B	loadMaze reproduces every invariant the 843-payload corpus pins
C	the projector and Ruffle render the rebuilt SWF identically
D	everything labelled, everything announced, no stub returning 200
E	every subresource a page requests resolves, or is a recorded loss
F	served HTML byte-matches every era capture, outside the masks
S	the seeded row counts match the corpora

Gates A, D and F all walk srv/ → ledger. Only E walks page → subresource, which is why a byte-perfect page serving zero images once passed three of them at once.

Where everything is

Working on it	CLAUDE.md — the operating manual · docs/NOW.md — the current target
The rules	docs/REBUILD-GUIDE.md — read its superseded table first
What is structurally committed	docs/FOUNDATIONS.md — with the falsifier for each
Done, active, blocked	docs/PROGRESS.md · plans in docs/plans/
The standing disciplines	docs/standards/
Commands, constants, vocabulary	docs/reference/
How each claim was reached	DEDUCE.md · docs/evidence/