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

[István Fábián]

It's good to hear about moving forward with the proposal and hopefully we can start working on preserving the Cabrinety Collection soon together.

I agree with Henry; the preservation of media from different eras of computing have very different issues.

Classic gaming have to deal with the very technical nature of disk duplication, imaging, analysation, authenticity and integrity problems. 
Tape preservation is actually much simpler, as the media is not designed to be user-modifiable, so it's all about sampling and analysation. As long as the original samples are available data can be recovered, even if the analysation part goes wrong somewhere for tapes. 

For newer games the focus shifts onto capturing context and content, many of which are social issues and not necessarily technical - although this varies title by title. Copy protection is still at large on CD, DVD and Blu-ray although much more streamlined than on previous platforms. 
Since the media duplication technology and the gold masters are still around (unlike the technology and most of the masters for floppy disks) the masters could be retrieved if there was enough lobbying to do that for preservation - this would save on the reverse-engineering and other development costs that would incur later otherwise, when all these games will only be of interest for research, nostalgia and exhibitions... or when publishers will re-issue them on the would be popular retro game distribution channels.

Once people will actually try to preserve modern gaming, especially the upcoming next generation, including server side activation, online authorization, server challenges, downloadable content and the likes that will be a completely different problem again...


István
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Henry Lowood 
  To: IGDA Game Preservation SIG 
  Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:33 PM
  Subject: Re: [game_preservation] Kotaku: Videogame History Museum Kickstarter short on funds


  Christian, in fact I agree with your objection!  That's part of what I meant when I wrote that IMHO capture and imaging were the weaker parts of the report.  However, I think that we have worked out a lot of issues for transfer to and ingest by a robust digital repository.  And often capture is not so complex; for example, it is not that difficult to verify a DOOM installation package.  I guess another issue is that of file vs. image capture, but in many cases particularly of the more modern games, file capture is good enough, since these installation packages were made with awareness of network-based distribution.  DOOM is a good example of that.

  And yes, we are moving forward with the one proposal for imaging here, and I will be talking with my colleagues real soon to see how we can work with SPS with some of the materials on earlier media formats.  The Cabrinety has been housed in very stable environmental conditions, so I am hopeful that most of the media can still be read -- note that the collection goes back to the Odyssey, so nearly 40 years!  It will be a good test of media longevity under real-world (rather than lab-test) conditions.

  Henry

  On 8/23/2011 1:12 PM, Christian Bartsch wrote: 
    Henry, thanks for the read! I saw some familiar names there that I already got in touch with over KryoFlux. ;) 


    On page 52 in the second paragraph ("Copyright") I found this: "This is typically done by creating an image of the original media; that is, making an exact, bit-for-bit replica of the disk that can then be mounted from the hard drive or burned to a fresh disk (e.g. an ISO or IMG file)" and I would have to object.


    While I agree that a bit for bit replica of the disk (or disc) is what one would want, both image formats named - ISO and IMG - are unable to carry the information that might be present on the source. To my understanding e.g. an ISO can not hold the protection data used by e.g. SecuROM or CD Cops. The same applies for IMG files, which are sector dumps only. You can only store decoded data in them, thus eliminating everything that does not fit the structure of the IMG (=everything that is non-standard, like copy protection).


    I think we really have to demo this with a forensic dump of some game sooner or later. I know hundreds of games that use something that won't fit into any standard container, e.g. a recording density based Rob Northen Copylock. The only chance you'd have for such data present in an IMG (or ADF if we'd be speaking about an Amiga game) would be the removal of the protection, thus cracking it. Since many of the later games on Amiga and Atari with Copylock use a trace vector decoder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_vector_decoder) - basically a hardware assisted way to decrypt the current instruction in memory only and leave the rest obfuscated - this would need a pretty skilled person. Taking into account that many games we prepared to fool crackers and had additional checks that would see if the Copylock is still in place, this is a demanding task.


    The only alternative is reading and preserving disks at the bit-level, taking note of everything, describing (scripting) it and making sure it will be interpreted correctly. The only way to achieve this is to preserve mastering data, data that describes how a disk should be written, not how it was read. This is why we spent ten years on IPF (Interchangeable Preservation Format), which already supports Amiga, Atari ST, IBM PC, Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. Other platforms, like C64, are in development, but we needed to develop a 5.25" drive (to be precise a modification) first that can read disks the way they were produced - in one single pass, with a drive that physically can access track -8, to access track 0 on the flip side (where all tracks are shifted by -8 tracks).


    Having said that we are eager to exchange information and help getting more titles preserved the right way...


    --
    Christian Bartsch
    The Software Preservation Society
    http://www.softpres.org


    On 23 Aug 2011, at 18:30, Henry Lowood wrote:


      Just a reminder: The Preserving Virtual Worlds final report goes into some of the issues that have been discussed here.  I think we came out in pretty good shape on transfer, ingest, metadata control, etc.  Not so far on capture, imaging and access, and the Second Life case and machinima conference told us plenty about the difficulties introduced by "soft" issues such as privacy concerns, legal environments, etc.
      https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097

      Henry





     

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-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections; 
  Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood


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