Any forum about The Incredible Machine?

Ron_Stard · July 28, 2016, 08:33:06 AM

Years ago, I knew about a site named TIM-Exchange, thanks to you, the Lemmings Forums users. That forum gathered together a lot of The Incredible Machine saga custom levels. Now that site is defuncted. Is there any other forum similar?

By the way, I collected a lot of custom puzzles from there: if any of you is interested on them, I can upload some and link them here.

Wafflem · July 28, 2016, 04:08:30 PM

Wow, I'm glad there's someone else aside from me who plays the Incredible Machine!

I don't know of any similar forum yet. I still have the Incredible Machine 3 CD with me, so I'm not sure if your puzzles will be compatible with that. Currently, I am doing a video playthrough of Contraption Maker, and I'm surprised and pleased at how the game closely has the feel of the original Incredible Machine!

Ron_Stard · August 01, 2016, 07:25:56 AM

Yeah, it's very faithful and lovely

Ramon · August 02, 2016, 10:46:04 PM

I too have been an avid player of TIM3 back when I was a child/teen (which isn't terribly long ago) and have played Contraption Maker just a couple of months ago. I really liked the latter as well, it is a worthy spiritual successor indeed. There are a few annoying quirks though, and one that I'm mostly bothered by is that in Sandbox mode, it's not possible to use RMB to clone objects. This really turned me off from playing it much longer than I already have ;(

grams88 · August 08, 2016, 10:29:37 PM

Oh the incredable machine, a very interesting and frustrating game. My dad and I played a newer version of a game that was very similiar. We took turns doing the levels and most of the levels we done were not done the intended way. We were more surprised seeing the intended solution, oh and I remember that the intended solution was not showing until you completed the task.

Here are some screenshots of the game.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=crazy+contraptions+pc+game&FORM=AWIR

It was a very fun and annoying game.

Lemika · September 17, 2016, 04:28:09 AM

The Incredible Machine was a fun game, yeah! I never knew there was a TIM3; I played TIM and TIM2, though (although I believe I may have only ever had a demo of TIM2). I've thought off and on about trying to find and play them again, but so far haven't, so I haven't played them in sixteen years or so... which would've been before I knew about any forums at all. Contraption Maker sounds interesting.

gui.lherme · October 22, 2017, 10:42:59 PM

I'm sorry to revive such an old topic, but I came across this when searching for the tim-exchange.com forum, since back in the days I posted and downloaded some contraptions from it. Unfortunately, as I feared, it is now defunct. Using the Wayback Machine I was able to find what was a goodbye message from the site owner and download links (most of them are dead too) for a collection of puzzles uploaded from 2007 until 2012. Luckily, one of the download links still worked and I was able to get a copy of this collection and upload it to MEGA so it's easier for more people to download it too. I hope that from doing this, if more people end on this topic looking for the tim-exchange forum, they can at least know what happened and get the puzzles collection as well.

Pages gathered by the Wayback Machine from tim-exchange.com: https://web.archive.org/web/*/tim-exchange.com

Goodbye message from Chris Denman (Site Admin): https://web.archive.org/web/20130602112739/http://www.tim-exchange.com:80/

Puzzle collection download links: https://web.archive.org/web/20140412134915/http://www.tim-exchange.com:80/downloadlinks.htm

The link I found that was still working: http://ge.tt/9f6nAla/v/0?c

New upload I made on MEGA: https://mega.nz/#!F4AF1YjK!N9ncxXjVVQQbJYOLOknuISg4C5Yqorpxw9FAcCDMAgA

grams88 · October 22, 2017, 11:14:50 PM

Hi gui.Iherme

Welcome to the forum,

sorry to hear that the site is now defunct, that must of been a popular one back in the days, the incredible machine was a very fun game and might be something I could go back to and try to complete one day. I've never used the wayback machine before and was wondering if it is a simple one to use. It's a great tool for retrieving old things or old content. I wonder if it would work, say if you were to delete a youtube video, would you be able to salvage that? (Not that I Have deleted anything but asking more as a curiosity thing)

I went a bit off topic there.

Thanks for retrieving some of the stuff.

gui.lherme · October 23, 2017, 12:57:04 AM

Quote from: grams88 on October 22, 2017, 11:14:50 PM
Hi gui.Iherme

Welcome to the forum,

sorry to hear that the site is now defunct, that must of been a popular one back in the days, the incredible machine was a very fun game and might be something I could go back to and try to complete one day. I've never used the wayback machine before and was wondering if it is a simple one to use. It's a great tool for retrieving old things or old content. I wonder if it would work, say if you were to delete a youtube video, would you be able to salvage that? (Not that I Have deleted anything but asking more as a curiosity thing)

I went a bit off topic there.

Thanks for retrieving some of the stuff.

Hi grams88,

The Wayback Machine it's very simple to use, just go to the homepage and type some web address to view a history of pages that the bots crawled through and saved. As far as I noticed it doesn't save videos or any large content, but I'm not sure. It usually saves whole pages and it's text and images. I've also seen some relatively small files (bellow 100MB) being preserved too.
I tried with YouTube and saw that it preserved some pages completely, others not so much. I tried to play a video; it didn't show actual video, but I could hear the audio of it (had to enable flash cuz old YT doesn't support HTML5), but maybe the saved page was just grabbing the audio/video content from the live version of YT, so, who knows about deleted videos.

grams88 · October 23, 2017, 12:11:49 PM

Hi gui.lherme

It's a good thing for getting old content. The technology is getting better each time and this one does seem a good one for this sort of thing, maybe it might be able to retrieve deleted videos in the future. I remember a youtube user who has lots of videos up on his youtube account, one time I checked his youtube and everything seemed to have disappeared, I'm not too sure if I'm remembering this right but after or just under a month everything was back again. (Strange)

Do stick around on the forum gui.lherme, Are you a big lemmings fan as well.

nin10doadict · October 24, 2017, 01:24:07 AM

If anybody else has made custom contraptions for The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions, I'd be willing to play those. I have actually swapped contraptions with someone in the past and it was pretty fun.

kieranmillar · October 24, 2017, 06:42:15 AM

I made levels when I was younger. I can't say anything about the quality these days, some might be garbage.

http://www.kieranmillar.com/incmachine/

BBP · October 24, 2017, 08:15:17 PM

Cool!:thumbsup:

I'm on a Sierra fan forum at http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums where there're a lot of fans of the Sierra games and Sierra family games, Dynamix games were later published by Sierra. There's a subsection on TIM. Unfortunately posting in one of the Other... game sections can mean your posts would get buried, but if you have any TIM levels, that's one good place to share!
http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=68

Never got to play much TIM but I was a huuuuge fan of Sid & Al's Incredible Toons, later re-released as The Incredible Toon Machine.