[game_preservation] 3,400+ 8bit games - preserved!

[István Fábián]

Some news from SPS :)

It started with improving the compatibility of floppy emulation of the
famous Commodore 64 emulator Vice, to give it extended G64 support to load
many images properly without any user interaction or patching of the data.
>From there we got more involved with the wonderful C64 community, especially
Pete Rittwage's excellent C64 Preservation project, and together we've been
working behind the scenes on something very special.

Softpres.org has now been updated with a list of more than 3,400 fully
verified, properly preserved original titles in pristine condition for
Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Plus/4, Apple II, PC and Atari 8-bit
platforms. Hundreds of hours were necessary in a joint effort with
contributors and platform specific experts from all over the world to get a
hold of dumps which were then analysed with our new chain of tools, the
SPStudio* framework.

See for yourself: http://softpres.org/games


The addition of the most popular and widespread 8-bit platform, the
Commodore 64, marks an important step for Softpres. We now aim to preserve
all versions for all platforms so budget versions, collections, cover disks,
promotional disks and magazine disks are more than welcome.

So don't be shy - please consider offering your original disks for
preservation.

Enjoy. If you like it, please consider donating. Thanks!

The Software Preservation Society


*) SPStudio allows us to accurately verify that a disk is unmodified,
professionally duplicated, or otherwise in such condition as it was when it
was sent to a retail market. It requires excess knowledge of the various
media formats used on these platforms to correctly decode and verify that
the data is free from any unintended errors. Please understand that this is
a time consuming process with an important priority on first having the
fragile data checked and preserved before it is too late. Later on this
verified good data can be used to produce such formats as IPF or G64 for
general use.