Are games to be lost in time?

[Serus]

I'm sure there's a fair amount of late 90s games that are next to impossible to run now. Like that Braveheart game. Not even WinXP VM did the job.

Requiring an older version of an OS is different than being lost.

And where are you gonna install that older version of an OS, a dishwasher?

Obviously, You never watched MacGyver tv series?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Do you think Baldur's Gate or Darkands will be playable in 100 years? I have my doubts.

In 100 years chatgpt-55 will be able to write a full emulator with one request, what's there to doubt?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Obviously, You never watched MacGyver tv series?

More of an SG-1 guy myself.

 

[Serus]

Obviously, You never watched MacGyver tv series?

More of an SG-1 guy myself.

Colonel O'Neill was many things but installing an OS on dishwashers (or at all, what the hell is an "os") wasn't his thing.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Obviously, You never watched MacGyver tv series?

More of an SG-1 guy myself.

Colonel O'Neill was many things but installing an OS on dishwashers (or at all, what the hell is an "os") wasn't his thing.

Just had to ask Carter.

 

[NecroLord]

Old games preservation websites would probably get shut down due to typical copyright idiocy.
As I said, there needs to be a serious preservation method before the Media Deluge comes.

 

[KafkaBot]

Probably something like Transcendence or Golden Treasure, some game with less than 600 reviews despite being an absolute gem. There's a torrent for Golden Treasure on pirate bay with a single seed listed, and a copy of it uploaded 5 days after with 0.

Pirate Bay is an awful tracker these days, especially for preservation. If you want that in torrent-based form, you should rely on private trackers, where both of those games are readily available.

 

[Vic]

Games will never be lost in time because there will always be that one guy who has the whole collection seeding. And yes, on private trackers. But even on download sites. There are so many of them to download and even play old games in the browser like myabandonware.com

 

[Just Locus]

The one thing that GOG has over Steam is that GOG gives you their games all wrapped in a nice installation folder, and you don't have the 'license' to play these games, you own them. I have a ton of my PS3 games sitting on my shelf, and I can boot these games for as long as my PS3 is working, I don't want that to become a 'novelty' in the future, so I appreciate people going onto websites like MyAbandonWare/Internet Archive and making a considerable effort into making sure these games aren't lost to time.

Pirate Bay is an awful tracker these days, especially for preservation.

Not to mention, Pirate Bay is incredibly unsafe anyway.

 

[KafkaBot]

Not to mention, Pirate Bay is incredibly unsafe anyway.

Yep. It is historically important, sure, but no one should use it these days.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Even trackers are at risk in the future tbh. Plenty of younger people who don't know how to use them. I'm guessing that the whole subscription model bullshit for TV stuff (and not only) is partly to blame.

 

[KafkaBot]

Even trackers are at risk in the future tbh. Plenty of younger people who don't know how to use them. I'm guessing that the whole subscription model bullshit for TV stuff (and not only) is partly to blame.

Plenty of older people don't either, to be fair.

That said, I do agree that this is a risk. Teenagers tend to be quite illiterate when it comes to computers because lots of them rely solely on phones, and this also affects their piracy habits - many go to streaming sites when they want to pirate something and never even consider downloading a file, for instance.

I'm generally optimistic, though. Piracy thrives when legal services fail their consumers and enshittification has become a trend pretty much everywhere. The sea still sings and I bet many will heed its call, even if they have to learn something new.

 

[Vic]

Nothing can stop piracy. They have tried and tried again to shut sites down but a new one always pops up.

 

[Just Locus]

[...] Teenagers tend to be quite illiterate when it comes to computers because lots of them rely solely on phones, and this also affects their piracy habits - many go to streaming sites when they want to pirate something and never even consider downloading a file, for instance.

Eh, many pirating websites make it fairly easy to download whatever's on there, especially the repack ones, it's usually availability that's the problem both in regard to obscure games or DRM-riddled ones like DD2.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Nothing can stop piracy. They have tried and tried again to shut sites down but a new one always pops up.

Sure, but the issue is having enough people seeding stuff. Otherwise, it might as well not be on the tracker.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If you want that in torrent-based form, you should rely on private trackers, where both of those games are readily available.

They're a giant pain in the ass though. I was part of one years ago, daemon or something? I can't remember. I think I joined another after that. I had to go out of my way to download shit I don't like every so often so I could upload something that was in demand to keep my ratio up. Seeding obscure shit or whatever you happen to download doesn't work because nobody needs it, or if they do there's already nine million other seeds with faster upload rate than you, so you contribute fuck all. And after all that effort, it was still missing shit I was looking for, which is why I eventually forgot about it, because they had a ridiculous standard of quality for the torrents (all FLAC files and shit like that) so it'd be ages before something showed up there and even if it did I preferred something with a smaller file size.

Besides that, there's the question of even getting started. I saw one recommended while looking for torrent sites earlier and it mentioned needing to wait months to join without a recommendation. At the end of the day, when this shit is so exclusive, it's also going to have a ton of stuff falling through the gaps because it's got too small a user base.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

There’s enough money in having old games, especially in the current age of subscription services where having lots of content keeps people paying every month, that the idea of them currently becoming lost is ridiculous. If it’s financially beneficial to a publishers to keep old games around they aren’t going to be lost to time...and it’s currently more beneficial than it’s ever been.

 

[adddeed]

Im thankful for sites like pcwiki, internet archive and myabndonware. Helped a ton when running old games or trying to aquire some. As long as resources like that are active we are in good shape.
However in some cases i had to actually buy the game from Ebay. Like KA-52 Team Alligator for example, couldnt find a working copy anywhere online.
The problem is that i like playing Win98 games, on Win98 hardware. And as years go by, old Geforce 1s, or Pentium IIs, will just cease to work or be available anymore.
So hopefully fugure windows will have good support and we will still have workarounds making old games work on new hardware.
Websites like VOGONS are vital for this too.

 

[KafkaBot]

[...] Teenagers tend to be quite illiterate when it comes to computers because lots of them rely solely on phones, and this also affects their piracy habits - many go to streaming sites when they want to pirate something and never even consider downloading a file, for instance.

Eh, many pirating websites make it fairly easy to download whatever's on there, especially the repack ones, it's usually availability that's the problem both in regard to obscure games or DRM-riddled ones like DD2.

Yep, I agree, but even then some people don't use those because of the "download" factor. The people I'm talking about often don't even have computers - they do all their gaming on cell phones.

If you want that in torrent-based form, you should rely on private trackers, where both of those games are readily available.

They're a giant pain in the ass though. I was part of one years ago, daemon or something? I can't remember. I think I joined another after that. I had to go out of my way to download shit I don't like every so often so I could upload something that was in demand to keep my ratio up. Seeding obscure shit or whatever you happen to download doesn't work because nobody needs it, or if they do there's already nine million other seeds with faster upload rate than you, so you contribute fuck all. And after all that effort, it was still missing shit I was looking for, which is why I eventually forgot about it, because they had a ridiculous standard of quality for the torrents (all FLAC files and shit like that) so it'd be ages before something showed up there and even if it did I preferred something with a smaller file size.

Besides that, there's the question of even getting started. I saw one recommended while looking for torrent sites earlier and it mentioned needing to wait months to join without a recommendation. At the end of the day, when this shit is so exclusive, it's also going to have a ton of stuff falling through the gaps because it's got too small a user base.

Not sure which tracker you're talking about, but tracker economies have changed significantly and most have "bonus points" that reward you solely for seeding, even if no one downloads from you (and you can then use those points to buy upload credit). The most important private tracker focused on gaming has a great economy that even allows you to treat it like a game, in fact. Also, the top-tier private trackers are shockingly fast and normally get uploads on the day they are released. Some things still fall through the cracks, of course (no library will ever have EVERYTHING), but the best trackers are likely to have everything you need, especially if you're in more than one of them.

The best way of getting started is to get into a certain mouse-themed tracker centered on books. It is quick, easy and the community is super friendly; just build yourself up from there (and you might even get an invite without having to go through recruitment if people like you). Now, is this a pain in the ass? Yes, it is, I won't deny it. Things were easier when Pirate Bay was the center of the tracker ecosystem and you could just download whatever with no hassle. But times have changed and this is what we have now. Also, if I'm being honest, these private trackers are much better than any public tracker ever was once you get good enough at them that you no longer have to worry too much about your ratio.

Worst case scenario, just resort to russian public trackers. Those are still great and have no issues with retention (no idea why).

 

[Falksi]

If Nintendo ever get their way you can kiss goodbye to anything retro.

 

[Gastrick]

As long as the source code exists, it can be printed off in the form of a book, and then recreated some day in the future. The sprites can also be printed off, and soundtrack recorded as sheet music.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Yeah, sure, Nintendo, the company that has an online store full of old game they’re selling you are going to be behind the death of older games.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

So far, the older the games are, the better they are preserved through emulation. The present generation of games is the first one that probably cannot be emulated in the future any more. But this is because the modern games are deliberately designed to not be preserved.

 

[Just Locus]

The present generation of games is the first one that probably cannot be emulated in the future any more. But this is because the modern games are deliberately designed to not be preserved.

I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to spend $130 on a 2TB hard drive to preserve modern games, and have 80% of that hard drive contain two games.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

By the way, I think that the problem of preservation of modern media, applies not only to videogames, but it is more general. Like videogames, that are made to be consumed as a service, also music, books, movies have the same problem, they are now produced to be consumed as a service.
Everything is deliberately designed to hinder backups and preservation.