IPF image database

[Avanze]

I will do. As always, thanks for your help.

[IFW]

First, as you might have noticed I don't really read these forums frequently - not because I don't want to, but because there are only 24 hours in a day, which I should share with my real work, family (baby!), and work on KryoFlux. (EDIT: and finishing my MSc, which I finally did last December)
So if anyone wants to bring something to my attention it would be great to send an email, rather than posting to forum X, and hoping to get a reply - which won't happen, until like a few months later I accidentally read the thread or someone like StingRay would send me the link

[IFW]

As for status... let me share a few random thoughts... in a few posts.

Amiga preservation is getting extremely difficult to continue.
There aren't that many images submitted (and that's an euphemism) for the platform, which is understandable, as the community is small, fairly constant and almost eveyone here on EAB or other forums have already contributed their entire collection in one way or another.

What would be required is a concentrated effort of buying up missing games from ebay, from car boot sales, advertising in magazines, searching warehouses, buying up company liquidation stocks and so on.

It's not that we don't know know what to buy or where to buy - it's the cost associated.
It's no longer early days like for other platforms, this has to be a very well organized and very well funded team effort.

What is not preserved yet, is usually something rare or obscure, usually released in low volumes, and tend to command high prices on ebay.
Last time I estimated the cost to make the Amiga collection "mostly complete" was about gbp 50 000 (fifty thousand british pounds).
That estimated cost was years ago, and prices have gone up since.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by IFW

As for status... let me share a few random thoughts... in a few posts.

Amiga preservation is getting extremely difficult to continue.
There aren't that many images submitted (and that's an euphemism) for the platform, which is understandable, as the community is small, fairly constant and almost eveyone here on EAB or other forums have already contributed their entire collection in one way or another.

What would be required is a concentrated effort of buying up missing games from ebay, from car boot sales, advertising in magazines, searching warehouses, buying up company liquidation stocks and so on.

It's not that we don't know know what to buy or where to buy - it's the cost associated.
It's no longer early days like for other platforms, this has to be a very well organized and very well funded team effort.

What is not preserved yet, is usually something rare or obscure, usually released in low volumes, and tend to command high prices on ebay.
Last time I estimated the cost to make the Amiga collection "mostly complete" was about gbp 50 000 (fifty thousand british pounds).
That estimated cost was years ago, and prices have gone up since.

i will contact you then in order to sort out some IPF i still don't have (i prepare the batch in RAW format and will upload it to the server as proof).

I still have games which needs to be preserved in IPF (toposoft games like lorna and Viaje al centro de la Tierra for instance, and there are others.

My greatest fear is that those will never be preserved in IPF format. Considered the huge amount of money i have invested in those, i would really feel bad.....

My collection is not the biggest, but i have a big quantity of very rare games, and its value comes near 80 000 euros all in all.

[IFW]

KryoFlux has made it possible to write back the disks - something that people here on EAB had been requesting for a very long time, before it was finally possible.
Developing something takes time. Developing something like KryoFlux takes even more time

People should realize, when they request/demand something it takes away resources from other developments - we are not a big corporation with infinite resources, and as a matter of fact we are not funded at all apart from some income from KryoFlux. Everything else is funded by our day jobs.

Why is this important?
You should realize that there are very well funded "preservation" projects at various institutes - who would have all the money in the world to make it happen.
It does not happen, as they don't have neither the technical knowledge, nor the interest to make it happen.
Doing something won't get you funds - talking about what great things you'll be doing in 50 years time gets you funds, if you represent an institute; it does not matter how incompetent you are, or that at the end of day you did not deliver a single preserved game. Even if it is your daytime job to do that...

We can't compete with these institutes, and we haven't had the sort of funding in 10 years time, that these players spend in a few weeks time...
But I am happy to invite anyone to compare the results of any of those projects with ours.

[IFW]

The preservation work we've been doing has come to the point where it should be a full daytime job, where we wouldn't have to worry about actually making a living.

This is not the case.

If anyone is happy to finance real preservation work what we've been doing, I am all ears and would leave my job promptly.

Until that happens (read: unlikely, ever) this has to remain a hobby at best and things should be prioritized based on their importance.

One such important thing is preserving other platforms, not just Amiga.
Imaging disks for those is easier, quite simply because it's early days for them, the majority of the games are "low hanging fruits" - just like how we started 10 years ago on Amiga.
Once we reach the same point that we had with Amiga games, advancing the preservation work for those platforms will be just as difficult as it is now for Amiga games.

Additionally, for example C64 5.25 disks are often in a much worse condition than anything recorded on 3.5 disks, e.g. Amiga.
So preserving those games are very important, as long as they are actually readable at all - many of the disks are damaged beyond repair by now, even when using advanced technology like KryoFlux for sampling them.

[IFW]

The online/database driven effort is something I proposed as the next step many, many years ago within SPS - so you are spot on with that approach.
I also proposed of having platform leads who would be responsible of the preservation of the various platforms to the very high standards we've set.

Right now all the work we are doing is based on tough decisions: what are the blocking issues, how this or that development would benefit more than a single platform for presevation and so on.

Again, costs, funding, time are the limiting factors.
Projects are usually described by time, quality and cost.

I am (admittedly) reluctant to compromise on quality and hopefully SPS will keep this spirit even if once am no longer around.
However, the price to pay is the time things take and the cost associated.

[IFW]

Tooling such a distributed solution would require some refactoring work for the existing pipeline, and creating additional tools.

I have the complete vision of how this could be done, but... if I worked on that, that would mean completely stopping work on other activities possibly for years.
Software development methods like Agile can be religious matters (and I am not going to post anything pro or con about it here), but there is one thing that is easy to understand: dividing your attention among hundreds of various activities just makes progress slower or eventually halt it completely.

Things that are blocking issues, things that would benefit most of the users would have to have priority over personal favourites - e.g. Amiga or C64 games for me

As for other commercial ventures some people mentioned: they might be used (again) to fund our main activity.
It's no secret that all the software we provide is free for personal use.
Therefore commercial requests need to have higher priority, otherwise even the minimal funding we currently have would be completely gone.

Ideally, as I posted earlier we could get funded by some generous people here or anyone else. It hasn't happened for 10 years, so I find chances of happening it now, slim, to say the least.
Of course, I'd be extremely happy to be proven wrong, but I am living in the real world, and frankly I've seen and experienced quite a few disturbing things, even in the niche world of "software preservation"...

Please prove me wrong

[ascp]

Thanks for the long answers, i guess one way for us in the community to help SPS is to buy some of the games on this list and kryoflux them http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?N_nb_sps=no
and i guess donations is another. http://www.softpres.org/donate

Can't belive that HOL has around 4000 games listed as no release by SPS. wow.

[IFW]

The problem as I said is a very nice, but small community - so what is generally available for this community has been preserved, but naturally, those are the titles everyone wanted to own, or some very precious collectors items.

HOL lists non-commercial releases (PD, freeware, shareware...), so you should filter out those from the list. Also CD only, CDTV, CD32 releases. Late ports of games, engines, interpreters eg. SCUMM based games/ports.

Could someone make a list filtering out these outliers?
What is the number then?

[Retro-Nerd]

HOL isn't up to date, e.g. 1869 was dumped to IPF.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

HOL isn't up to date, e.g. 1869 has dumped to IPF.

The info is maintained on SPS side...

[Retro-Nerd]

Now that's funny then since IFW asked.

[TCD]

Indeed

[TCD]

Originally Posted by IFW

Could someone make a list filtering out these outliers?
What is the number then?

Just as a rough estimate:

Commercial games : 5647

Out of which the following don't count:

Compilations : 474
AmigaCD : 136
CD32 : 217

That are 4820 games, but I guess somewhere around 4500 games that are commercially released on floppies for the Amiga is more appropiate.

[IFW]

So say something around 1500 is a realistic number, right?

[TCD]

Not sure what 'realistic' means, but if you consider that there are different releases for each commercial game, the number is even higher than 6000. If you mean unique games (not counting language differences and name variations) then it's surely still more than 3000 games.

[IFW]

So I was wondering: would the community be up for targeted preservation, where people actually get what is needed (no bidding wars etc)? Or we just eventually preserve whatever is being submitted?
As I said there are no more low hanging fruits, no more common games, and no more collectors items - anything that is missing must be purposefully bought/obtained/nicked

[Calabazam]

About that Kryoflux, is it possible to have one inside a big box amiga such as an A2000 or A4000 to turn it into a "restore original games" machine?
Can it operate with a big Chinon drive of the A2000 type?

If not, could a Catweasel be used somehow to restore ipf to disks from a real Amiga?

I'm not interested in a PC based solution (i only have a PC laptop so no floppy drive or controller). The future of PC, according to Intel last statement, is no more in the PC as we know it, so better have a real Amiga based solution to preserve/restore disks.

[Abaddon]

I'm a bit unclear what you mean by targeted preservation? It's not like we can stop the bidding wars on EBay.

I am willing to help out with purchasing missing items, but I don't think the community actually knows whats missing anymore. There have not been any updates in quite some time and I know people have been uploading dumps, but have no idea what. And, yes, I know you have full time jobs.

When I first received my Kryoflux I dumped several games and never heard anything back whether or not the dumps were good, so I have not uploaded anything since (I am still purchasing rare ones). The dumps include: Gladiators, Rebellion, Twin Turbos, 1000c Turbo, Eye of Horus US release and a few others. Prior to Kryoflux I dumped with the Amiga Tool and only heard back once (granted this was the month the Kryoflux was released).

I now know the dumps are good thanks to Kaffer and his disk-analyse tool. I know have personal IPFs for each of the except Eye of Horus. I have started looking into adding new formats to his utility, but like you I have a real job and am trying to stay active in WHDLoad community.

It would be nice to have a list maintained for good dumps received and maybe you need to ask for help from the community to accomplish this and other tasks you have in mind.

Originally Posted by IFW

So I was wondering: would the community be up for targeted preservation, where people actually get what is needed (no bidding wars etc)? Or we just eventually preserve whatever is being submitted?
As I said there are no more low hanging fruits, no more common games, and no more collectors items - anything that is missing must be purposefully bought/obtained/nicked