[Pheonix]

Preservation is only usefull as long as the material can be used. I would say that writing back would be necessary, only if there is no other way of using it that is 100% compatable.

I don't know much about the HxC project, I stumbled across it once, it sounded interesting, but after 2 hours of searching, I gave up being able to buy one. Because I cannot seem to get it, preservation that depends on it in order to use the material is absolutely useless to me. Also, I don't know if it is completely compatable. Are there some programs that won't run through it?

The next option (without write back capability,) is to only use it in emulators. Well, I've been very impressed with the emulators that are out now, but are they completely 100% and absolutely compatable? I, personally, don't think they can ever be, without building hardware with original chips & such for the emulator to fall back on. I'm willing to admit that I'm wrong on that last point, but remember, I'm talking about absolute 100% compatability and functionality (not 99.9% or almost complete, but 100%.)

Finally, there are nostalgia purists out there, who will miss the buzz-click of the drive working (yay to UAE - or maybe just WinUAE - for adding in the sound effects.)

The only way to have the complete and 100% compatable experience would be with original hardware, including the floppy drive, with physical magnetic media floppy disks, and not a RAM card you stick in a memory slot.

So, from my point of view, it seems that for preservation to be usefull, there must be write back capability. I have a game, I want to preserve it for when the floppy finally fails (which it will some day.) I make an image of the disk(s). Now, it finally fails, after 2 weeks, 2 years, whatever. However, I have this nice image I preserved for this day. Only, if "I" cannot do anything with the image except look at it sitting on my PC, what good is it? Well, I can take it to a friends house and play it on his PC, if I can talk him into loading an emulator (they won't run on my 486 sx33 - Heck, they won't run on my P2-233 system either).... Ok, that's not an options. Next, I see this nice fake floppy that will run the image off a SDRAM card (I have some of those for my camera.) Only, I cannot get one as nobody sells them any more. So, there goes that option. So I'm left with this nice image that sits on my PC, not even looking pretty.

I don't mean to be negative, but I personally feel that writing should be a major project point. Not something you plan to maybe do, but something you are deffinately going to do. It should be a deffinate step 2. Step 1 - Be able to read reliably & accurately, the raw data. Step 2 - Be able to reliably & accurately write that raw data back to a disk and the disk work. There, now you have a solid preservation method that fulfills the function of preservation - that is to save something perishable in a usable manner. Step 3 - (label this as a bonus if you want,) be able to interpret the raw data into a form usable by an emulator be it hardware floppy emulation, or software system emulation. Over simplified, I know, but this is just the basic project points, not actual implimentation here.

I don't personally think #3 should be a "bonus" either, but for the sake of preservation it is not absolutely necessary. I also don't see any problem with working on #2 & #3 simultaneously as they are different enough that they don't have to be done by the same team. Ok, don't know much about the SPS, are there enough people to have broken things down into teams? Push comes to shove, I personally don't see a problem with doing #3 before #2 either, as long as #2 comes along eventually (preferably very quickly.)