[game_preservation] Kotaku: Videogame History Museum Kickstarter short on funds

[Christian Bartsch]

That would actually be my concern. Due to excessive use of copy protection many disks won't be readable this way and in even fewer cases you would be able to write such data back without losing something. Protections were designed like this on purpose.

And even if you would try to repair something that actually could be written with legacy hardware, you would once and for all lose the option to do a further analysis. Drives like e.g. the 1541 alter (=modify) data while reading. Without replicator information that might have been present in the first place you will be unable to verify integrity and authenticity because you have nothing to compare against.

You would be surprised how much of the games in circulation were fixed on consumer machines. We can detect this, and such a copy would be unusable for preservation because of this.

Apart from this, almost every image format we came across has its flaws. It's okay if people do this for their own collection, but this is where I would draw the line between professional preservation and hobby. Data should not be discarded because there is no room for it in the image format.



>> 

> 

> Another option (which requires the original hardware) is creating a

> disc image and restoring the image to the disc once deterioration

> occurs, which is another common practice.

> 

> 

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