English Amiga Board - View Single Post - The sorry state of Amiga software preservation

absence · 18 February 2017, 02:22

I was poking around at the WHD slaves for Lotus 2 and 3, and noticed that there are four versions of Lotus 2 supported (not including the cracked NTSC one) and three versions of Lotus 3. A web search suggests a fourth version of Lotus 3 with a fix or something that could be obtained by sending the original disks back to Gremlin. I wondered what the differences between all these versions were, and realised that there's basically no way of finding out, because almost none of them are preserved!

While SPS had a promising start, they've long since ground to a halt. They have one single version each of Lotus 2 and 3, and the others aren't even on their wanted list. We're missing three out of four versions for each game! And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Where can you find a clean set of original floppy images of Directory Opus older than 4.0? Deluxe Paint 2? Sonix 1.0? Certainly not in TOSEC.

Is there something the community can do about the situation? Are there missing floppies in the hands of collectors? Could stuff like Kryoflux, MFMWarp, etc. help? Are the images already dumped, but circulated privately instead of being added to curated collections? Or are they simply lost for all time?

18 February 2017, 02:22	#1
absence Registered User Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: moon Posts: 373	The sorry state of Amiga software preservation I was poking around at the WHD slaves for Lotus 2 and 3, and noticed that there are four versions of Lotus 2 supported (not including the cracked NTSC one) and three versions of Lotus 3. A web search suggests a fourth version of Lotus 3 with a fix or something that could be obtained by sending the original disks back to Gremlin. I wondered what the differences between all these versions were, and realised that there's basically no way of finding out, because almost none of them are preserved! While SPS had a promising start, they've long since ground to a halt. They have one single version each of Lotus 2 and 3, and the others aren't even on their wanted list. We're missing three out of four versions for each game! And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Where can you find a clean set of original floppy images of Directory Opus older than 4.0? Deluxe Paint 2? Sonix 1.0? Certainly not in TOSEC. Is there something the community can do about the situation? Are there missing floppies in the hands of collectors? Could stuff like Kryoflux, MFMWarp, etc. help? Are the images already dumped, but circulated privately instead of being added to curated collections? Or are they simply lost for all time?