"Amateur Archivists"
 

In this months EDGE magazine an interesting article caught my eye in the 'REDEYE' section.

From EDGE magazine issue 122

.....The videogame industry has a curious relationship with emulation. On the one hand we are always told that ROMs are a bad thing, that they are piracy and that owning them without owning the original cart is a lot like, well, you know, home taping and so on. But Redeye's yet to meet a developer who doesn't appreciate the beauty of XBOX MAME or a games journalist (who cares about games) who hasn't got a massive collection of emulated software somewhere on their writing machines hard drive. Besides, there is an argument for emulation that goes above and beyond the need for entertainment. There is a historical need for them.

.....The path that the videogame is taking is continually branching, and at present, that path is only being archived by amateurs, by the underground, and our reward to them is potential prosection. We can curse the pirates as much as we want, but in 20 years time those perfectly labelled ROMs will be the only coherant record we have of what weve been doing.

I thought this was a very good article and although it talks about ROMS rather than ADFs, the points made are equally valid.

Why do we collect these games? Is it for personal reasons or to stop them disappearing forever?

Funnily enough, I've just read this article less than 5 minutes ago.

Yeah, it's like all the TOSEC stuf (Apart from TOSEC is a 'little' excessive. CAPS on the other hand is very similar to what he's talking about. (Except the bits about the museum)

Good to see other readers of EDGE are Amiga fans too.

PS - There's not a lot of Amiga games in the hardcore section, good to see Project-X made an appearance though.

Re: "Amateur Archivists"
 

For me, it's both. Since I have a personal interest in the classic Amiga and it's akin to what I used to do when I collected that massive vinyl archive :cheese

The developers, journalists and gamesplayers are usually the people who love games and want to archive and save them, while the people who want to quote the copyright laws and shut down websites are the businessmen who are in it for the money. It's sad to see the industry strangled by these suits who have the power and who view games as solely IP or 'products' to make them rich.

At one day something has to happen like the crimson permanent from Monty python's meaning of life.

:lol

hmm... i'm a semi-hoarder, i try to get everything but don't bother getting the alternatives...

Cody is 100% right....

funny how Retro is now cool....

Transformers on DVD
Atari Retro collections
Edge's Retro Mag

My personal attitude to collecting involves collecting every game I ever had or played or heard about and thought looked good.
I know Ill probably miss out on a lot of great Amiga titles but even doing this my collection is growing very large. So I suppose my reasons for collecting are totally selfish but if I have anything that someone else wants to help complete a collection, I will always share. :)

I try to collect all the games on systems that used floppies, and every GOOD game for systems that use CD's.

Everything old becomes new again to the next generation, and the old generation looks back with nastalgia for toys of their youth.

I owe a debt of gratitude to all the people who backed up/cracked/distributed games back in the day because now they would be impossible to find in any state.

I always wanted quite a few computers when I was a teenager but couldnt afford to buy them untill way after they were obsolete.

I love corvettes when I was in high school during the early 80's and ended up getting a mint 1981 corvette in the late 90's. There are multiple companies selling parts (you can order every part ever made and construct a corvette from all new parts if you want to) for that car if I ever need one. There are very few companies selling games for 80's vintage IBM PC's. Even ebay has very little offered for the classic age of PC gaming. If it wasnt for the War*Z groups most of the titles would be lost forever.

While pirating hurts companies to some extent its not as bad as they make it sound. Piriting windows 3.0/3.1 made microsft what it is now, Rampant PSX pirating also helped that system become on of the most profitable/popular consoles ever made.

I think software companies should release their distributed code to the government , and that code (finished product and source code) should then be available for free download 10 years after it was first marketed (its obsolete by then and usually hasnt been marketed for years). This information should be available at all public libraries online (maybe small charge for it to be burned on cd and mailed to you). This would be educational and will save the information for later generations in an easy to find/catalog way.

The government backs up files onto many mediums as it is, but 100 years from now there will be nobody alive who understands how to do anything with it.

Haven't read this article yet, but it looks damn interesting! As much as I don't really like these mags which are "cashing in" on this whole "retro" gaming fad, I think I'll check this one out ;)

I think the most important thing to note is that not everyone is actually "archiving" the games for historic purposes. Personally the only reasons I play these games are because

a) they were good when they were released
b) they are still bloody good fun now
c) i can't stand pretty much most of the trash games released today

still, there's probably even fewer of us collecting the music from said "old" games and demos, the history of which has already been totally destroyed by this so called "industry" and has already reverted to CD based audio tracks!!! the consoles of today are so standard, the only thing thats different about them is the amount of polygons they can shift in a millisecond and the games that get released on them (and hey, even most of them get ported to all formats!)

so in conclusion... i'm not an archiver, i'm a player :cool

I dont really see it as "cashing in". I just think they have recognised that there is a growing market for retro games stuff.
Personally I love seeing all this old stuff back in print and I thought it was great to see an interview with the Bitmaps :)

I don't have the time being an "archiver", even if I'd like to. I emulate various systems because of the particular feel they had, graphically and musically.
As for the Amiga in particular, I have very fond memories of this machine. winUAE (and now my real miggy, back from the dead) is a way for me to be immersed again in a gaming world I almost forgot for 6 or 7 years!

I'm don't collect all of the tosec stuff because it's not true to it's original source (and I have no need for cracked games because of WHDload) but I am collecting the CAPS stuff.

I also collect the WHDload games because they are all being installed on my Amiga ready to go. :)

I hope to have them all installed some day, size permitting.

PS - re: your signature, isn't it 'fear is the little death that brings total 'oblivion' not 'obliteration'?

Or are you paying tribute to the Psygnosis game Obliterator?

Huh, you are probably right... Actually I read Dune in French, and I fetched the original Litany in english on the web... If you are certain it is "oblivion" let me know I'll change it!
Can't trust the damn internet nowadays! :p

[Edit: in french I am certain that it is "obliteration"... We need a Herbert scholar!]

I did a search on the internet and it says both all over the place.

Strange, seems like everybody is getting it muddled. :spin

It says here Oblivion
http://www.kevincmurphy.com/herbert.html

But here it says Obliteration
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/4577/

BUT I've just found that the second link has a sound file. I think that answers the question.

So I was wrong. :crazy

Well I know that Peter Puppy says total oblivion in Earthworm Jim. :cool

I'm with Dastardly on this one. I get stuff *I* remember seeing/playing back all those moons ago. A complete rom/data set of all console/arcade/computer systems to date must be 150gb+ by now, something I'm not prepared to keep up to date :laughing

My dedicated emulation disc (DVD-R) has only about 1.5gb for everything I'm interested in. Programs and data, and several platforms. The only complete set on it is the Spectrum TOSEC as it's fairly small (~700mb).

TV/movies/music... now that's another thing :eek

150GB? You need quite a few TB to hold just the PSX images, let alone DVD PSX2 games

Looks like you need to jump ahead a few generations in storage to hold all the older systems archives.

Well I wasn't counting PS1/2, that indeed would be horrendously large :eek

Yeah thats how I feel too, although Im glad that there ARE people willing to try and collect EVERY adf there ever was as I think its a worthy cause.

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong - it's great that full sets are around. But so long as these are available online, users can pull off their favourite games. For someone who doesn't intend to create a distribution site, I see little point in keeping every single ADF/HD image locally.