Welcome! I'm glad you found Village Sim and our forums. Village Sim was a lot of fun to develop and paved the way for the entire Virtual Villagers series.

You are a good judge of game development practices, since you correctly assumed that we are no longer working on Village Sim (or any of our Palm or Pocket PC games, for that matter).

The two utilities that you found mention of were created by a fan of Village Sim, and they worked only with the initial version (1.0) of the game. We changed the savegame file structure in v1.1, which 'broke' those two utilities, and the creator of the utilities opted not to update them to work with v1.1.

There is a way to back up your game manually, however. Carla posted my procedures for managing Village Sim savegame files here.