[game_preservation] Digital Press kickstarting a videogame history museum

[István Fábián]

Those are all interesting topics.

1, Yes, you can rewrite a bad disk if you want to, unless there is physical damage on the disk surface, coating or sleeve. Of course, you might as well write what you want to any disk. 
Just like museums would display replicas of certain artefacts, you could use remastered disks for e.g. demonstration as needed without damaging the original - and of course you could have the original forever preserved in digital form.
However we understand the need for physical copies (even if we are talking about the preservation of digital artefacts!) so we could have the best of both worlds now with KryoFlux.
2, Getting (readable) copies of disk based games is getting harder and harder. 
Also, more and more expensive as we seek less "common" titles. 
What we do is a (well, many... ) full time job, done in spare time, and time is running out. 
Hence my request; we really need some help with funding and otherwise to do the preservation work while we can. There won't be anything disk based to preserve (at least not in any economic way) in a few years time. 
We have the right technology, the right expertise (10 years) and more than working proof of concepts (3600+ titles preserved, runnable in emulation or remasterable as replicas) - the only thing we don't have is funding, apart from what we invest from our own pocket into this work while doing our day jobs. Obviusly, this situation is not ideal...
I'd like to thank some of the members of this mailing list for buying the Academic Edition of KryoFlux; all of the income from that goes into further funding our projects.
3, We may provide IPF images to original copyright holders, authors, contributors and legitimate archives. 
That's where it ends for us right now.
Yes, some companies allowed the distribution of IPF files, but we let other people to arrange those things. 
Getting the rights is something that (worst case; expires in 75 years) can be done by anyone at any time. 
Preserving the artefacts properly is something that can only be done now and requires a very niche expertise, so we'd rather concentrate on the preservation efforts only, if possible.
4, I am not sure whether reselling those games on disks is a viable market, however given the resurgence of retro gaming, it may have surprising results with the right marketing. 
Technology was not available for that until now though - but it is obviously possible now, if anyone is interested.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Devin Monnens 
  To: IGDA Game Preservation SIG 
  Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 2:46 PM
  Subject: Re: [game_preservation] Digital Press kickstarting a videogame history museum


  Now I think that's fantastic!

  With this in mind, would it be possible to take the original disk that's become unreadable and rewrite to it? From my understanding, the magnetic structure of the disk itself has decayed, but the ability of the disk to be rewritten to has not...

  This (along with floppy drive emulators) raises interesting questions for the preservation of games. Maintaining original hardware becomes more feasible, but since both hardware and software is so old, how easy is it to get copies of the games? If your copy doesn't work, can you legally download an IPF? Or, will companies who own the software be interested in selling or otherwise distributing copies?


  On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 5:36 AM, István Fábián <if at caps-project.org> wrote:

    Hi All,

    You can take preservation one step further: re-create the original artefact now.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypT_H-Dg3bs

    In other words, KryoFlux is no longer constrained to reading, it can write back authentic IPF disk images, just like the games you'd have bought 20 years ago with every bit including any kind of on-disk copy-protection intact.
    You can now use those IPF files for emulation as well as a gold master for remastering a disk.
    This being a shameless self-plug, I'd like to ask anyone who is in the position, to consider helping our preservation efforts.

    Thanks,
    István

    www.softpres.org
    www.kryoflux.com



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  -- 
  Devin Monnens
  www.deserthat.com

  The sleep of Reason produces monsters.



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