A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Fact is, not all games had the entire contents of the cartridge on one single IC. In fact, I would wager my next paycheck that a fair few do not. They're split across multiple chips.

Worse still, different cartridges had different ways of mapping the contents of these ICs onto a given console's bus. Doing a straight-up read of addresses 0 to N can't and won't give you the full contents of the cartridge in any one of numerous rare edge cases.

What this tells me, more than anything, is that you folks are only interested in backing up the more popular games, the more common games, the ones that are largely in little jeopardy of being lost to bit-rot in the first place.

It's important to keep in mind that this is one tool out of a growing toolbox. Every tool can have its use case. We're not afraid to dump ROMs. I would actually say it's the opposite: we're more worried about those in jeopardy of being lost to bit-rot, which is why we prioritize.

We've been focusing largely on our at-risk media. We embarked on a pilot project of dumping 100 floppy disks with a Kryoflux, which quickly expanded to dumping over 1700. These aren't retail floppy disks either, these are strictly from our archives.

I really hate to so consistently be That Guy (believe me, I do), but isn't the Kryoflux ostensibly a closed-source solution that relies on closed-source tools and proprietary formats, where there are equivalent tools that are far more open?

Again, the Kryoflux is a tool, but is unfortunately one of the ones that makes sense. right now We also have an Applesauce, which unfortunately didn't exist and was one of the limitations that I highlighted with the Kryoflux.

That's fair. On a similar note, have you all been in contact with the Domesday '86 people re: preserving laserdiscs? They've developed a 100% open-source solution, the Domesday Duplicator, which effectively captures laserdiscs as high-quality as physically possible.