RFC: SPS/CAPS @ back2roots ?

[hippie2000]

dear caps/sps community & maintainers!

this is my first posting to eab (!!!), and i want to use
it to end an old outdated story which i hereby call past
by offering friendly cooperation between our projects,
if you want, which the amiga friends would benefit much
from (and that should be the most important for us all).

like your faq says - we are all amiga friends....

i do this in public, so everyone could see that it's a
given word and no half truth with an expiration date

i hereby offer caps/sps a legal distribution channel for
all releases covered by the licenses at BTTR, giving you
unlimited webspace at i.e. sps.back2roots.org, which you
could maintain independently. (just a few common hosting
rules not taking much freedom). you can have as many
"per person" ftp accounts as you need and can update
your site in realtime.
fyi, we have the space for this since a week or two.

all i ask for in turn is allowing us to put your work
(of course not hiding the source) in our existing infra-
structure. means it would be forwarded (maintained by us
so delayed by update frequency) to a i.e. Games/SPS-Games
section, same as the files would be mirrored (automatically
daily) to ftp.back2roots.org/pub/back2roots/sps also
allowing to extend our licenses to caps/sps versions of
all games we have online legally.

we should also both (you and us) let the user decide whether
he/she prefers an ADF, WHDLOAD, SPS or CD version of a game
(or whatever format will be introduced later) with each format's
advantages and disadvantages, without turning such subject
into politics further (which i already did, but hereby stop).

i'm currently writing our hosting rules and one rule is
"do not be political", and it should be me who follows my
rules in first place. I started to write this posting in
the moment after i wrote above rule
there was/is noone who's wrong or right, and noone even
needs to change opinion. Now there's enough (disk) space
for multiple opinions, and opinions should never block
hard work.

we all work on similar topic, and there should not be a
reason important enough to not do that hand in hand.

if there are (besides above point) other issues open, (which
i could not imagine) let's mail about peaceful, and not
combat here. from my side past is past, and since we are
all in this universe to learn, we should only refer to the
past to make the future better.

please feel like i came by on sunday with cake, so after
shaking hands we should make some coffee or tea and sit down

metamonk@yahoo.com - make sure my reply passes your spam filters

[kriz]

Cool, and finally welcome

[Zetr0]

@hippie2000

Hello there,

welcome to the EAB, i am sure you know most about it
I hope you join in with us here as there is plenty of mischief to getup to, and please keep us informed on how it goes with the SPS/CAPS team.

Personally i do indeed believe it would be cool, BTTR was one of the first sites i found on my retro-revival until I found here.. it would be great to see if have even more content to offer the retr0-netizen...

it would also be nice if HOL / AMR could link to a page of possible game-linked downloads if possible... that indeed would wrap up some projects nice and tidy...

[Carlos Ace]

That will be cool.

[Chain]

just wondering why bippy is against that idea...

[Doc Mindie]

I think more options would be a good idea. People who don't know anything about SPS, but know ADF could then download their ADF's. And vice versa. Or, if they want a "true original copy" (as SPS strives towards, as I understand them) they get the SPS image instead.

One thing I WOULD enjoy, is people to stop disk-images for "ROMS" because it's a diskimage, not a ROM image :/

[Zetr0]

@Doc

I would like them to make an interesting and enjoyable a space scfi movie... without the sound in space.... i know its artistically correct, I just wish for once physics would trump them softy artists!!!! i cannot see this happening either!

The thing is if you consider it for them images for moment... if you have a true SPS image, the last thing you are going to do is write over it. thusly making it Read Only Memory.... much the same way as a cartridge.. and I have considered for a moment the Sega/SNES & N64 that have a write back portion, as a parable to saving to disk....

its... a niggle... when people do refer to a disk image as a ROM, but i fear its with us to stay ...


@Hippie2000

I do have concerns about how you will disseminate the SPS / CAPS archive, after all there would be an absolute ton of traffic to your site, and this would slow down even browsing.

I had considered Hosting the TOSEC libraries (at least the legal ones) but even with unlimmited webspace and unlimmited traffic, i am sure buy the end of the week my host would be crippled.

Another thing that might be an issue would be if any revenue was in place generating money from such a high foot fall on the back of SPS/CAPS archive.

Although i serious doubt that would be the case.... i am sure this would be a concern to the SPS/CAPS teams....

hmmmm

now why oh why would bippym be against such a move?

AHA!!! i know.... all those sellers on ebay that would be out of a job!!!

its sad bippstah i agree, but some times you have to let go....

[Avanze]

Very cool indeed.

[P-J]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

its... a niggle... when people do refer to a disk image as a ROM, but i fear its with us to stay ...

You should think yourself lucky! You don't have to wade through the grammar in your posts. We do!

Anyway, could anyone explain why people are talking to Bippy when there is no such post... Did he delete it?

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by P-J

You should think yourself lucky! You don't have to wade through the grammar in your posts. We do!

Anyway, could anyone explain why people are talking to Bippy when there is no such post... Did he delete it?

He voted for "that would be bad" so I assume that's why people are talking to him.

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by Graham Humphrey

He voted for "that would be bad" so I assume that's why people are talking to him.

well that and the fact he is an evil megalomaniac

[hippie2000]

Hello, and thank you for your nice welcome! Shows me it was
the right decision to discuss this here. I didn't know the
board is that handy in creating polls (noticed it at submit
time) but that was a helpful tool to get an overiew of
common opinion, even after one day. The poll will last
30 days, but it already shows the direction to go if sps wants...

@Zetr0: you wont believe it, but same here. i found BTTR being
bobics page in times when lazarus was still alive. when
lazarus got closed bobic had the idea to ask companies, and once
he had license for 3 (!!!) games i asked "may i help you" cause
i liked the idea.

regarding cross linking. that will happen, the cross linking was
my idea which i discussed first with rck (who is coder friend,
a likeminded cooperative nice person). we then opened export
feeds to each others. now when i was off the net our part did
not happen. but now that im back we already talked on where we
last stopped (time wasnt an issue :) and i already got an export
yesterday of all hol id's and bobic already agreed on doing the
(ugly onetime) lookup task. so be sure it will happen...

@doc: i hope you did not misunderstand me, my posting should not
enforce sps to be pro adf or point at adf images in same location.
just they should not object against adf, same as we should not
object against sps. each format has a target where the other
doesnt work, so both are needed. and when i say freedom of speech
i mean it. they can promote their format there as they want to.

regarding ROMs, well, as a techie i always smile when i hear ROM
as a word for disk images, but most amigans being a bit informed
know the difference, and all need ROMs to boot the images. besides
this, disk images burned to CD in fact are Read Only Memory :)

@Zetr0 (2nd): your concerns are very realistic, but these are
common to our archive too. without the help of the university
trondheim we would also have trouble to host our archive elsewhere.
its just too traffic hungry. but since >5 years we have a good
home there. we are even allowed to serve ISO images, which went
about half of the traffic since.

Until now bttr was hosted on a single machine (400MHz K6/2) both for the
ftp (with one million downloads per week) and for the http part of
all hosted projects including bttr www and winuae.net. still many people
found it fast. but now that we bought a blazing fast multi xeon raid
server we will dedicate the other machine to hosted http projects
(same connectivity as the big machine) and the primary machine for
the anon ftp and the bttr www site. both machines are ready to be used
to serve the bttr file collection simultaneously (you may have noticed
they currently come from files2.back2roots.org). im techie and i'll handle
that part, like possible load balancing or in worst case even bandwidth
throtteling (hopefully never necessary).

regarding tosec amiga, with the ok from the responsibles and people
who want to maintain it we can arrange something similar, should
imho be discussed and polled in a tosec forum later.

from our host we only have the limit that it must be all legal and
nonprofit, so no sales and ads or links to illegal archives at our
site to not offend our (very flexible) host. pretty fair limits imho,
pretty much the opposite to usual (ad driven) hosting.

just one example how flexible they are. many years ago an IDSA robot
called "sir henry hunter 4th" found bttr while crawling the web for
trademarks they protect, and since a robot is stupid, did without
any research notify the university that they host a pirate archive
and that they should shut it down. the university in turn notified
us and asked IDSA back to approve their claim, which never happened,
so bttr wasnt shut down (the uni knows its licensed stuff).

@Bippym: in case your vote was not topic related, i could not
remember we ever had problems with each other, last i remember before
i was offline was being in friendly talk with you, which i enjoyed much.
did i miss something? if i ever promised something and forgot, remind me,
nothing expired. Seeing that you compile demo DVDs today
with having to seed them slowly we can also arrange something for
you quickly to defeat bandwidth problems, if you want.

@everyone who knows me from before: i still have hundreds of unresponded
mail being stuck in the server before disk space went down, and
hundreds further ones never reached us due. besides that i use no
icq atm (db crashed after first login, so many messages were lost there
too). this all will be fixed with time. bttr server is the most imortant
atm, and im before the last (visible) step, moving www to new machine.
after this moving dns and mail server is next step. old mail in there
which is not lost will be responded with time, once it reaches me. mail
sent to my yahoo address is responded quickly (for now). webspace can be
arranged quickly too (now that our limits are past) and is stable.
Any FTP account ever opened is still open, use upload.back2roots.org
instead of ftp.back2roots.org to login. reask PWs if you forgot.

the last >5 years we had ~100% uptime (see winuae.net, same machine).
just bttr script and mail server broke when space went zero and no
hippie was around to fix it...

@PJ: man what a young veteran you are :)
but in fact, it's true. i rember you being around since my first
trials using emulated amiga (that was on "fast" 133MHz pentium 1 :)

[Zetr0]

@Hippie2000

Indeed its a great idea, and one that i feel BTTR should do!

thanks for answering my query's.

[whiteb]

Well, so far.. its 31:1 vote ratio (Didn't take a genius to figure that out).

Welcome Hippy, and glad to have BTTR back with us, it was worth the wait (And the wonder where it went).

Now, as for BTTR hosting CAPS images, if the title is already a title that BTTR has got "PERMISSION" to host, then where is the harm ? I gave a Thumbs up to the Idea.

[hippie2000]

@whiteb
>And the wonder where it went
in short, bttr ran stable for years, so i did not fear to leave it running for the
time it took to collect the donations required to go on. now what failed was
that the scripts, updating itself hourly, did not find any space any more one
day (while i was off) resulting in zero size scripts. while some space could be
freed by someone else the scripts were entirely gone until i returned. from
now on we keep a backup on the server for such cases...

>where is the harm
well, i posted here not only to request common opinion, but also hoping
someone of the caps/sps team would join the discussion (i thought it was
"their" forum. since the ipf work is not my work i woul like to hear from
some responsible "go for it, but we dont have time to maintain" or "no, let
it be" or such feedback. its a matter of fairniss to get a consent before
adding large amounts of 3rd party work. in case they dont have time but
agree, im sure someone else can be found here. (or was already found :)

[Doc Mindie]

@Hippie

Don't get me wrong.... I just thought some people would want the "original" legal copy (as is SPS' strive) while other's are happy with a quick rip (the normal ADF/DMS).

As for my commetn about ROM versus diskimages... that was more a wish from my side, rather than trying to hammer it into less educated people's heads

@Retro:

An SPS image, is STILL an image of a floppy disk, thus it's (technically) _not_ a ROM file. After being written back to floppy, the floppy should of course be writeprotected so that further writings (aka alterings of the disk) is prevented. And CD is, IMO, still no "memory" as we know it, it's a "Disc" just like Floppy or HD, and thus, technically, should be called "CD-ROD"(Compact Disc - Read Only Drive).

Just because it's an accepted term, doesn't make it technically right

And in any case, I'm for any and all things that goes on the BTTR servers, whether they be in SPS, ADF, or DMS format (for floppies) or as ISO for CD's

Preservation for the future

[eLowar]

Originally Posted by Doc Mindie

And CD is, IMO, still no "memory" as we know it, it's a "Disc" just like Floppy or HD, and thus, technically, should be called "CD-ROD"(Compact Disc - Read Only Drive).

How is it not memory? What's the definition of memory then, IYO?

[Zetr0]

@eLowar

i dont know about you but I am more interested in this member "Retro" that the Doc's on about

@Doc
whom is this Retro of whom you post of ?!

truth is my friend, those that don't know any better will continual to call it what every the like as apposed to what it really is.... for me... i can understand the confusion of ROMS, but what I can never forgive people whom refer to my or any other Amiga (CD32 not included) as a "Console" ....thats just people being completely illiterate.

Now.... wheres all them CAPS/SPS members we have here..... they should say something.

[eLowar]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

Now.... wheres all them CAPS/SPS members we have here..... they should say something.

It's only a matter of months.

[Zetr0]

Lmao!!!!