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

[István Fábián]

Exactly, that's what people should do in theory.

Sadly, many people just write back onto the original, thinking if it is already bad, it does not matter anyway... which couldn't be farther from the truth. 
Sometimes damaged disks are our best friends at SPS; for example finding a title that encourages players by making it easy to enter the highscore table then saving onto the disk. Sometimes if we are lucky enough there is some damage on the disk that prevents usage (for example incompatible or damaged protection), but the highscore is untouched thanks to that. 
If you think this is very unlikely to happen, indeed it is... but happened to us several times!

As for writing an original game back to a disk: duplicator machines did cost gbp 25000 25 years ago for good reasons.
One being, that the technology they used was way ahead of its time and way ahead of anything in technology that consumers had access to for copying.
That's why cracking game protections and converting the games to platform native disk formats became a pass time of many people apart from the challenge factor, and later on the business and competitive cracking interests...

Surely, we can do better 25 years later with KryoFlux, and it costs Euro 90. 
But keep in mind 25 years and massive technology advancement was needed to make it accessible and affordable as a consumer level equipment.


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Devin Monnens 
  To: IGDA Game Preservation SIG 
  Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 8:02 PM
  Subject: Re: [game_preservation] Kotaku: Videogame History Museum Kickstarter short on funds


  Why don't you just use a blank disk then and keep the original untouched? If you've got the disk image, surely you can copy it back to a disk and get it to run again, right? Otherwise, floppy drive emulation should be an option.


  On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Christian Bartsch <cb at softpres.org> wrote:

    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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  -- 
  Devin Monnens
  www.deserthat.com

  The sleep of Reason produces monsters.



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