C.A.P.S. - RELEASE TIME (A Christmas prezzie to all)

fiath · 23 December 2002, 00:21

NO GAMES ARE, OR EVER WILL BE, AVAILABLE FROM THE CAPS SITE

Yes, finally. We are there. The first C.A.P.S. release is done. The game "Wizard Warz" is the rarest we knew of and now it is no longer (except in physical form).

So...

CAPS, The Classic Amiga Preservation Society, has been working for two years to preserve original Amiga games. It was all started by the author of Abandoned Places I & II, now the founder of CAPS in April 2001. He was generally fed up seeing his and other ex-Amiga authors games being cracked, hacked and generally messed up - even including seeing author credits being replaced by things like "cracked by Quartex!". All this to make the games into a form that is not tied to the physical copy protected media.

But not only that, many Amiga game collections are "dying". TDK themselves are quoted to have said that a floppy disk's lifespan is only around 5-10 years, but most Amiga games are older than this! Magnetic media like floppy disks eventually suffer some form of "bit rot", where the particles on the disk loose their charge and floppy drive hardware can no longer determine if a bit was a 0 or a 1.

The only way people have been able to "repair" their disks was to replace it with a "cracked" copy, which may have had bugs introduced while removing the protection, but almost all have "intros" added by the cracking group, this really ditracts from the game and is not really in the spirit of preservation.

Is anybody really surprised when old Amiga games companies will not let their games be freely download from the net? They are damaged goods!

CAPS wants to preserve the originals for the future. This may be a time when the Amiga games companies of old, allow them to be distributed, or it could be when the copyright runs out. Either way, if CAPS get's it's way - at least we all will have the choice when the time comes.

So, to get to the point, CAPS have now developed the technology to read *any* protection or disk format that has been found by them so far, and they have developed a "abstract digital recording medium", the "Interchangable Preservation Format", or IPF, to allow these disks to be preserved how they were always meant to be found: guaranteed unmodified from the original mastering and error free. They come complete with all the copy protection that existed on the physical disk. In fact, the technology is not really tied to the Amiga, in the future it could be used to preserve other systems games, like PC, Atari ST, Mac, or even C64 disks!

The aim of CAPS is to preserve every single Amiga game that can be found. They themselves own several thousand games, and the thought of not being able to play them in the future is what really drives them.

Now the time has come to actually releasing the games that have been contributed by CAPS and by others to the community. Support for the images has been added to WinUAE (http://www.winuae.net), and CAPS have started working on a "re-mastering" solution to write the images back to disk for those people who would like to fix originals that have already suffered bit rot.

However, no images will be available from the website, as CAPS are only providing the technology and are not an Amiga games download site. The only game available to download is Abandoned Places 2 - because the author is the founder of CAPS and has provided it to the Amiga community. Hopefully people who own the games will be able to get hold of them, and the legal Amiga games websites can host whatever games they they have permission for.

So, if you happen to have any original Amiga games and are willing to help, why not contact CAPS so they can provide you will the tools to preserve your Amiga games for the future!

WW is one to cross off your list Twistin' ?

NO GAMES ARE, OR EVER WILL BE, AVAILABLE FROM THE CAPS SITE

andreas · 23 December 2002, 00:34

Quote:

However, no images will be available from the website, as CAPS are only providing the technology and are not an Amiga games download site.

But that's why dozens of people visited your site!
Am I lying? People, speak up!

And don't remember most games you have CAPS images from are such rarities that almost no one has originals of them anymore!

I can't help saying it's a kind of sneaky trick you played on all of us. You could have played with open cards and told this to everybody before you made that "funny" countdown on the CAPS page.
Please remove the note that the "dumps database will be online soon" because it's simply not the truth if you plan to not release any of the dumps anyway. What's a dumps database for then?
Thumbs down.

fiath · 23 December 2002, 00:38

???

We have *always* said we will not provide the games from the site. Look at the FAQ (and elsewhere)! We are not an Amiga game download site - we are just behind the technology!

We do not have permission to host the games for a start. There is no point risking CAPS over some stupid copyright dispute!

As for rarities: I don't think there exists even a crack of Wizard Warz, it is "hyper rare".

I can't see any trick played on anyone. I have NEVER said we would be offering games to people. Does WHDLoad pages offer games to download?

Believe me, CAPS releases will be easy enough to get very soon.

Dumps database: You have taken that the wrong way. But I agree it is misleading - I will change it. It means a database of all games we have dumps for. Information about them - not the games themselves!

andreas · 23 December 2002, 00:43

Well, if people are so kind enough to offer their dumps to the community.
Now then, I might have understood everything the wrong way, sorry for that. But I admit I did set my hopes much higher than having to press my nose against the display window, seeing all the goodies in there but not being able to reach any of them

Anyway, my point stays: a "dumps database" suggests that there's dumps available for download. If there isn't, another name might be more appropriate

Feltzkrone · 23 December 2002, 00:44

PROGRAM Truth;
USES FAQ, Reading_Capabilities;

BEGIN
writeln('EVERYTIME it was clear that CAPS don't offer the dumps on a download page. You should have read the FAQ more carefully. As fiath said some titles will appear on websites which have permission to offer disk images for free download. I hope BTTR will carry some of them. Another possible way to get those files will be usenet access (alt.binaries.emulators.misc), if someone is nice enough to put the dumps in there. But at NO TIME it was about releasing images on a download page or something similar. I don't like it that way, but one definetly can't say that CAPS just fooled us.');
END.

fiath · 23 December 2002, 00:45

@andreas

Another thing. I *assumed* people had read the FAQ and knew we would never offer anything for download from the site. I guess in retrospect that this is rarely the case. But I have always assumed everybody knew that and why I never thought to mention it.

After the HUGE technical feat accomplished. Something that has taken TWO YEARS to bear fruit. Does it really matter that you cannot download the games directly from us?

I think you are being rather unfair.

andreas · 23 December 2002, 00:48

No, just disappointed reading the HUGE "headline" in this forum

Therefore I admit my reaction might have been a little too harsh.
But I was so keen on testing first images on new WinUAE, possibly to find bugs for Toni who could fix them for the next release

But no fixes without images. Plain and simple.
No complaint, just hard facts.

fiath · 23 December 2002, 00:50

Quote:

Originally posted by andreas
Well, if people are so kind enough to offer their dumps to the community.

I doubt there will ever be a CAPS release that does not spead like wildfire.

But not only that, legals games sites (BTTR, ASO) will get the images if they have permission to host them.

Also the copyright holders will get them if we can reach them.

Quote:

Now then, I might have understood everything the wrong way, sorry for that. But I admit I did set my hopes much higher than having to press my nose against the display window, seeing all the goodies in there but can't reach them

No problem. If I ever thought anyone thought that, I would have made it more clear.

I think you can see the reasons for it. Like, how many times has BTTR been threatend by the IDSA down for their LEGAL downloads?

Quote:

Anyway, my point stays: a "dumps database" suggests that there's dumps available for download. If there isn't, another name might be more appropriate

Yes. Agreed. As I said, I will change that.

Feltzkrone · 23 December 2002, 00:50

As that post assigned to me? If yes, no way, your work is great, simply great, and the ability to download games directly from your site would just have been the cream in a hot chocolate. Anyway, hot chocolate without cream is VERY nice, too...

andreas · 23 December 2002, 00:52

Doubtful

Feltzkrone · 23 December 2002, 00:52

You're damned to fast...

Quote:

Originally posted by andreas
Anyway, my point stays: a "dumps database" suggests that there's dumps available for download.

So TOSEC claims to offer games for download, too?

Quote:

Originally posted by andreas
Doubtful.

Yeah, Jägermeister is much better than that!

fiath · 23 December 2002, 00:55

Feltzkrone: No, of course not, I replied directly, but you snuck in there ahead of me!

Okay, games page updated:

"PLEASE NOTE: The database listing what games are actually dumped will be online soon."

andreas · 23 December 2002, 00:56

Quote:

Originally posted by fiath
I doubt there will ever be a CAPS release that does not spead like wildfire.

Which could again be BAD!!

Imagine if some people *think* their original is still 100%, and they dump it "for charity reasons" and spread it on some usenet group or wherever.
This might create a new load of broken "original CAPS images" if the original isn't in unbroken condition, mightn't it?

And if a release came directly from CAPS (or BTTR), it would be WAY better because there's a kind of certainty that the CAPS image was created from an error-free original!

fiath · 23 December 2002, 01:01

The key word here is *release*.

For any contributor, we know if they own the games - so we can give them the verified "IPF".

CAPS dumps and CAPS releases are very different things. For one thing, nobody can use CAPS dumps but us... This is on purpose for exactly the reasons you mentioned...

Nobody will spead CAPS *dumps*, purely because nobody can use them!

andreas · 23 December 2002, 01:24

Unless emulators like WinUAE can read them.

So forbid Toni to include support for the *dumps* so that they don't get spread by accident

fiath · 23 December 2002, 02:02

Emulators are not able to read the dump files. They are completely different, not documented and you wouldn't be able to use them for playing the games anyway.

So, even if somebody (anybody) wanted to add support for dump files in an emulator - they would not be able to.

There is *no way* these would be spread, and we don't really care if they are - because people just **cannot** use them.

Don't worry - we have already thought about this.

andreas · 23 December 2002, 02:16

Hehe, thought so

MethodGit · 23 December 2002, 02:58

Does this mean we will have to wait longer again before the first CAPS image is downloadable from a trusted site?

The new WinUAE just burst out onto the scene and I'm dying to try out the CAPS support feature!

fiath · 23 December 2002, 03:23

As soon as you see the CAPS release, you can find out if it is authentic as I am just about to put a "dat" file on the site with all the file CRC information...

You should be able to find it very soon now.

23 December 2002, 03:26

I'm fairly disappointed...
I was always under the impression that any support added by WinUAE (or anything that uses the DLL) would allow us to use the raw output given by the CAPS imager.
I was hoping this would be the case....Personally, I wanted to image all of my original disks only for storage purposes, knowing that if ever need be, I could use these images. My intention was always to preserve my disks rather than to distribute...
Now that I know we can only use images provided by CAPS, there's no point IMO. It defies the whole purpose of preservation, because in reality, you can only preserve what the CAPS team releases.
To be honest, I'm hoping the remastering tool(s) you provide will be able to write these Raw images back to disk. If it can't, then I can say that I don't plan on ever using the CAPS tools.

I think you should provide Official CAPS releases in IPF format (as you already plan)....for those that want them, get the TOSEC datfile and download them all to have the Official set.
If this happens, then any raw images floating around are definately UNOFFICIAL. CAPS has no association with them. Noone is forced to download them, but they are still usable images.
Also, using the Raw image format is a definite bonus to the WHDLoad team. Rather than using MFMWarp (or similar) to image the disks, the user can simply image their disks and send them directly to WHDLoad team members who can write the image back to disk and have the disk sitting with them as if it were posted to them.

Don't get me wrong fiath....I've always been a supporter of CAPS and I realise how much effort has been put into this project, but I can't support it as much as I used to.

23 December 2002, 00:21	#1
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	C.A.P.S. - RELEASE TIME (A Christmas prezzie to all) NO GAMES ARE, OR EVER WILL BE, AVAILABLE FROM THE CAPS SITE Yes, finally. We are there. The first C.A.P.S. release is done. The game "Wizard Warz" is the rarest we knew of and now it is no longer (except in physical form). So... CAPS, The Classic Amiga Preservation Society, has been working for two years to preserve original Amiga games. It was all started by the author of Abandoned Places I & II, now the founder of CAPS in April 2001. He was generally fed up seeing his and other ex-Amiga authors games being cracked, hacked and generally messed up - even including seeing author credits being replaced by things like "cracked by Quartex!". All this to make the games into a form that is not tied to the physical copy protected media. But not only that, many Amiga game collections are "dying". TDK themselves are quoted to have said that a floppy disk's lifespan is only around 5-10 years, but most Amiga games are older than this! Magnetic media like floppy disks eventually suffer some form of "bit rot", where the particles on the disk loose their charge and floppy drive hardware can no longer determine if a bit was a 0 or a 1. The only way people have been able to "repair" their disks was to replace it with a "cracked" copy, which may have had bugs introduced while removing the protection, but almost all have "intros" added by the cracking group, this really ditracts from the game and is not really in the spirit of preservation. Is anybody really surprised when old Amiga games companies will not let their games be freely download from the net? They are damaged goods! CAPS wants to preserve the originals for the future. This may be a time when the Amiga games companies of old, allow them to be distributed, or it could be when the copyright runs out. Either way, if CAPS get's it's way - at least we all will have the choice when the time comes. So, to get to the point, CAPS have now developed the technology to read any protection or disk format that has been found by them so far, and they have developed a "abstract digital recording medium", the "Interchangable Preservation Format", or IPF, to allow these disks to be preserved how they were always meant to be found: guaranteed unmodified from the original mastering and error free. They come complete with all the copy protection that existed on the physical disk. In fact, the technology is not really tied to the Amiga, in the future it could be used to preserve other systems games, like PC, Atari ST, Mac, or even C64 disks! The aim of CAPS is to preserve every single Amiga game that can be found. They themselves own several thousand games, and the thought of not being able to play them in the future is what really drives them. Now the time has come to actually releasing the games that have been contributed by CAPS and by others to the community. Support for the images has been added to WinUAE (http://www.winuae.net), and CAPS have started working on a "re-mastering" solution to write the images back to disk for those people who would like to fix originals that have already suffered bit rot. However, no images will be available from the website, as CAPS are only providing the technology and are not an Amiga games download site. The only game available to download is Abandoned Places 2 - because the author is the founder of CAPS and has provided it to the Amiga community. Hopefully people who own the games will be able to get hold of them, and the legal Amiga games websites can host whatever games they they have permission for. So, if you happen to have any original Amiga games and are willing to help, why not contact CAPS so they can provide you will the tools to preserve your Amiga games for the future! WW is one to cross off your list Twistin' ? NO GAMES ARE, OR EVER WILL BE, AVAILABLE FROM THE CAPS SITE Last edited by fiath; 23 December 2002 at 00:58.

23 December 2002, 00:45	#6
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	@andreas Another thing. I assumed people had read the FAQ and knew we would never offer anything for download from the site. I guess in retrospect that this is rarely the case. But I have always assumed everybody knew that and why I never thought to mention it. After the HUGE technical feat accomplished. Something that has taken TWO YEARS to bear fruit. Does it really matter that you cannot download the games directly from us? I think you are being rather unfair. Last edited by fiath; 23 December 2002 at 01:04.

23 December 2002, 00:50	#9
Feltzkrone Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Germany Posts: 103	Great work! - Get my words right! As that post assigned to me? If yes, no way, your work is great, simply great, and the ability to download games directly from your site would just have been the cream in a hot chocolate. Anyway, hot chocolate without cream is VERY nice, too...

23 December 2002, 02:02	#16
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	Emulators are not able to read the dump files. They are completely different, not documented and you wouldn't be able to use them for playing the games anyway. So, even if somebody (anybody) wanted to add support for dump files in an emulator - they would not be able to. There is no way these would be spread, and we don't really care if they are - because people just cannot use them. Don't worry - we have already thought about this. Last edited by fiath; 23 December 2002 at 02:08.

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23 December 2002, 00:38	#3
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	??? We have always said we will not provide the games from the site. Look at the FAQ (and elsewhere)! We are not an Amiga game download site - we are just behind the technology! We do not have permission to host the games for a start. There is no point risking CAPS over some stupid copyright dispute! As for rarities: I don't think there exists even a crack of Wizard Warz, it is "hyper rare". I can't see any trick played on anyone. I have NEVER said we would be offering games to people. Does WHDLoad pages offer games to download? Believe me, CAPS releases will be easy enough to get very soon. Dumps database: You have taken that the wrong way. But I agree it is misleading - I will change it. It means a database of all games we have dumps for. Information about them - not the games themselves!

23 December 2002, 00:43	#4
andreas Zone Friend Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Germany Age: 50 Posts: 5,857	Well, if people are so kind enough to offer their dumps to the community. Now then, I might have understood everything the wrong way, sorry for that. But I admit I did set my hopes much higher than having to press my nose against the display window, seeing all the goodies in there but not being able to reach any of them Anyway, my point stays: a "dumps database" suggests that there's dumps available for download. If there isn't, another name might be more appropriate

23 December 2002, 00:44	#5
Feltzkrone Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Germany Posts: 103	PROGRAM Truth; USES FAQ, Reading_Capabilities; BEGIN writeln('EVERYTIME it was clear that CAPS don't offer the dumps on a download page. You should have read the FAQ more carefully. As fiath said some titles will appear on websites which have permission to offer disk images for free download. I hope BTTR will carry some of them. Another possible way to get those files will be usenet access (alt.binaries.emulators.misc), if someone is nice enough to put the dumps in there. But at NO TIME it was about releasing images on a download page or something similar. I don't like it that way, but one definetly can't say that CAPS just fooled us.'); END.

23 December 2002, 00:48	#7
andreas Zone Friend Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Germany Age: 50 Posts: 5,857	No, just disappointed reading the HUGE "headline" in this forum Therefore I admit my reaction might have been a little too harsh. But I was so keen on testing first images on new WinUAE, possibly to find bugs for Toni who could fix them for the next release But no fixes without images. Plain and simple. No complaint, just hard facts.

23 December 2002, 00:52	#10
andreas Zone Friend Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Germany Age: 50 Posts: 5,857	Doubtful

23 December 2002, 00:55	#12
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	Feltzkrone: No, of course not, I replied directly, but you snuck in there ahead of me! Okay, games page updated: "PLEASE NOTE: The database listing what games are actually dumped will be online soon."

23 December 2002, 01:01	#14
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	The key word here is release. For any contributor, we know if they own the games - so we can give them the verified "IPF". CAPS dumps and CAPS releases are very different things. For one thing, nobody can use CAPS dumps but us... This is on purpose for exactly the reasons you mentioned... Nobody will spead CAPS dumps, purely because nobody can use them!

23 December 2002, 01:24	#15
andreas Zone Friend Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Germany Age: 50 Posts: 5,857	Unless emulators like WinUAE can read them. So forbid Toni to include support for the dumps so that they don't get spread by accident

23 December 2002, 02:16	#17
andreas Zone Friend Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Germany Age: 50 Posts: 5,857	Hehe, thought so

23 December 2002, 02:58	#18
MethodGit Junior Member Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: The Streets Age: 39 Posts: 2,731	Does this mean we will have to wait longer again before the first CAPS image is downloadable from a trusted site? The new WinUAE just burst out onto the scene and I'm dying to try out the CAPS support feature!

23 December 2002, 03:23	#19
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	As soon as you see the CAPS release, you can find out if it is authentic as I am just about to put a "dat" file on the site with all the file CRC information... You should be able to find it very soon now.

23 December 2002, 03:26	#20
Amigaboy Posts: n/a	I'm fairly disappointed... I was always under the impression that any support added by WinUAE (or anything that uses the DLL) would allow us to use the raw output given by the CAPS imager. I was hoping this would be the case....Personally, I wanted to image all of my original disks only for storage purposes, knowing that if ever need be, I could use these images. My intention was always to preserve my disks rather than to distribute... Now that I know we can only use images provided by CAPS, there's no point IMO. It defies the whole purpose of preservation, because in reality, you can only preserve what the CAPS team releases. To be honest, I'm hoping the remastering tool(s) you provide will be able to write these Raw images back to disk. If it can't, then I can say that I don't plan on ever using the CAPS tools. I think you should provide Official CAPS releases in IPF format (as you already plan)....for those that want them, get the TOSEC datfile and download them all to have the Official set. If this happens, then any raw images floating around are definately UNOFFICIAL. CAPS has no association with them. Noone is forced to download them, but they are still usable images. Also, using the Raw image format is a definite bonus to the WHDLoad team. Rather than using MFMWarp (or similar) to image the disks, the user can simply image their disks and send them directly to WHDLoad team members who can write the image back to disk and have the disk sitting with them as if it were posted to them. Don't get me wrong fiath....I've always been a supporter of CAPS and I realise how much effort has been put into this project, but I can't support it as much as I used to.

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