Some game communities write walkthroughs. Others eventually start documenting the byte layout of the save file.
Visit the RCT Technical Information Depot
The RCT Technical Information Depot belongs firmly to the second category. It collects technical information discovered by fans about RollerCoaster Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, and Locomotion.
The site explains that it was originally hosted through GameSpy’s StrategyPlanet as part of RCTUK and was later moved after that server disappeared.
What survived is not a conventional fan site. It is documentation for people who wanted to understand the games underneath the interface.
When curiosity reaches the file format
The Depot covers formats such as TD4 and TP4 track files, SV4 and SC4 saves and scenarios, RCT2 object DAT files, TD6 track designs, SV6 and SC6 data, and later RCT3 formats including TRK, DAT, OVL, FWD, FWR, and PRF.
That means checksums, compression or encoding methods, record layouts, object structures, and the odd undocumented behavior required to make outside software read or write data correctly.
Utilities sit beside the documentation, including object editors, save-game tools, and explorers.
This is fan work becoming informal specification.
Commercial game developers rarely publish enough internal detail for third-party preservation and tooling. Communities fill the gap by comparing files, changing one value at a time, observing what breaks, and sharing the discoveries.
The Depot’s framing is careful about purpose. The material is aimed at enhancing and extending the games, not replacing their commercial distribution.
That distinction helps explain why technical fan archives are worth preserving even after newer modding frameworks appear. They contain the path by which the community learned what the software was actually doing.
Modern projects may eventually turn that knowledge into source code or a polished wiki. The old HTML pages preserve the excavation layer beneath them.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes game-technical sites because software history is often reconstructed by enthusiasts long before anyone calls the work preservation.
Somebody had to figure out what byte 37 meant.
Then somebody had to write it down.