More info from the DarkSpore website has been unearthed by those from the Sporums.  We’re still not quite sure if the previous screens and information is 100%, so take this with a grain of salt until we get an official confirmation sometime next week.  Anyhow, Sporum member ‘DVDMaster’ discovered coding within the official DarkSpore.com website which, when compiled, creates this image:

If you “view source” on the blank html page, you see that there is a large html comment that has rows and rows of text, this text is the graphic. It has been encoded in a format called “base64” that uses alphanumeric codes to transform the binary file into text. This was one way of sending binary files via email or newsgroups before those things supported attachments (yes, this gives you an idea of how old I am).

You can use programs to convert that base64 text into a binary file. When you do that and give the file an jpg extension, web browsers or graphic viewing programs can display the file.
You can do this conversion yourself:
1. View the source of that page.
2. Copy the base64 text.
3. Go to http://webnet77.com/cgi-bin/helpers/base-64.pl
4. paste the base64 text into the text box and click the button to convert.
5. It will give you page where you can download the binary file. Download the file and name it “image.jpg”.
6. Then open the file.

The strange thing about this is that in the coding, it says “4TOMBk” in the coding, which is referencing Tombik’s discovery of the DarkSpore website.  So it could be that this is a prank (even though the site’s server and domain is registered by EA…or it could be a nod from the DarkSpore developers congratulating Tom for having a sharp eye and posted this as a gift.