[game_preservation] Re: Introduction

[The CAPS Team]

Dear All,

Following on from Andreas, I would like to introduce myself and the 
organisation I represent. My name is Kieron Wilkinson, and along with 
István Fábián, Christian Sauer and Richard Rayner, we form the Classic 
Amiga Preservation Society (CAPS). Though CAPS will soon become the 
"Software Preservation Society" to reflect how we are looking towards 
including other platforms.

What we have mainly dedicated ourselves to, is the technical side of 
digital preservation, currently working on 3.5" magnetic "floppy" media 
containing original (non-pirate, non-cracked) games for the Commodore 
Amiga platform. We look at preservation of these artefacts in very 
strict way - basically if they are not true to the original item, then 
they are not suitable for preservation.

Ignoring some technical details for the moment, there are basically 
three things we do, and believe vital, when doing this:

1) Low-level imaging of media, so any copy protection, custom formatting 
on a disk is (after passing quality checks) bundled into a digital 
representation suitable for preservation. A disk image file. Assuming an 
emulator for the target system is accurate enough, this can then be run 
and played as you would expect on actual hardware.

2) Integrity-based quality assurance. Due to age of the media, many 
disks are not suitable for preservation due to errors, etc. Since we 
describe exactly how each format is structured, including description of 
any checksum information found on a disk, we can check if the data is 
correct.

3) Authentication-based quality assurance. Save games, hiscore saving, 
viruses, hacking, pirate or otherwise counterfeit/backup copies copied 
onto original media and sold on are some of the problems we face. 
Fortunately we can detect such modification by various techniques, most 
prominently by looking at the unique "fingerprint" left by the disk 
drive writing the media. If some tracks differ, or the fingerprint does 
not "look" like the hardware used by commercial mastering equipment, 
then we know we need to find another copy.


All of these three things allow us to preserve the games in the form 
they were intended at duplication.

So far, we have digitally preserved just under 2200 games for the 
Commodore Amiga platform, all verified true to the original item as 
above, and playable on the WinUAE Amiga emulator. Since the technology 
we have developed is intentionally generic, we will be turning to other 
platforms in the future. Certainly the Amiga is one of the biggest 
challenges for preservation due to the diversity of disk formats found 
on the system and therefore was for us the most suitable starting point. 
For more information on what we do, feel free to visit our website 
(http://www.caps-project.org) though a complete re-write in currently 
in-progress to support our move over to the more generic, "SPS".

We, or more specifically István Fábián, joined Andreas, Simon and Henry 
at the WOS conference to speak and to help form some directed discussion 
on how we are going to start going about all this from the broader 
perspective and associated issues. Thanks go to Andreas for organising 
that...

Anyway, apologies for the large mail. It is certainly great to be in 
company with other like-minded individuals on this issue, and I look 
forward to some constructive discussion and progress! :)

With good thoughts for the future,

-- 
Kieron Wilkinson
The CAPS Team
http://www.caps-project.org