this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
125 points (95.0% liked)
RetroGaming
19804 readers
769 users here now
Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
- Be kind.
- No spam or soliciting for money.
- No racism or other bigotry allowed.
- Obviously nothing illegal.
If you see these please report them.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don’t think they care about the void, honestly. There was a story last week pointing out that like 87% of games are being lost to time. They don’t seem to care. They’ll just keep churning out clones and bullshit so long as the money keeps flowing. And it will.
Its a slow motion septic pipe burst. I'm just watching as 80% of people don't care and neither to 100% of organizations. These are pieces of our digital history. They matter. We can't see how things were before all the bullshit profit squeezing if no one preserves them. Even my "techie" friends don't give a shit. "Why would I care abiut old games?" Its so much more than that.
I totally agree. It’s not frivolous; it’s an important part of who we are now, and it’s a real shame we’re already losing it.
In case you’re interested, there’s a fantastic video by NeverKnowsBest on the entire history of video games that I watched yesterday and found fascinating. There’s lots of vintage footage and interviews that I’d never seen before. It’s six hours long and I watched it in one go, it was so interesting.
I hope there are enough independent people saving at least some of our gaming history, because it’s a shame to see it evaporate like this.
Watched that documentary a couple months ago (also all at once) and can vouch
It's a great video
I have a buddy who had fond memories of an old Apple ][ game, but he couldn't find it anywhere. No copy of the software existed anywhere he could find, for sale or otherwise.
After a literal decade of searching, he finally found a copy of the game disk on eBay! He picked up a 5.25" floppy USB drive, hooked up an Apple ][ emulator... And nothing. The disk was encrypted in some way that made it unreadable.
Not one to give up easily, he then found and purchased an Apple ][ with a working drive.
The disk worked!
He started researching old copy protection schemes and it turned out that the disk had information written between the standard tracks to make it unreadable by standard hardware, but accessible to the software on the disk when it manually tweaked the drive head's position.
One USB driver patch (and a couple months) later, he was able to extract the original software from the disk for archival. It works in emulators and is finally archived.
That’s amazing. I’m glad some independent people are doing things like this. Kudos to your friend.