Let's talk about the orthogonality between "we support digital preservation" and "we don't support piracy", as I understand it from looking back on the history of MAME.
Näytä tämä ketju
-
In a given arcade, how many of those games did you actually play? How many of them did other people play? Apart from outliers, how many of those games were actually fondly remembered by, well, anyone?
Näytä tämä ketju
To put it into perspective: A quick grep through the MAME codebase indicates nearly 22 thousand instances of the GAME() macro, which is used solely by pinball machines, electromechanical games, and arcade games - exactly the ones that would be in an arcade. How many can you name?
-
-
Now, to tie it back to the original point: How many of those games, do you think, had archives of the game's data kept by the company that created them? More broadly, how many of those companies even still exist?
Näytä tämä ketju -
What I can tell you is that that number is alarmingly closer to zero than the average person might expect. Even major companies like Namco, Sega, Konami, Taito, Capcom and others had abysmal archival practices. How do we know this? Read on.
Näytä tämä ketju -
In the early 2000's, both Konami and Taito issued retro arcade compilations on the PlayStation 2. One of them clearly used a build of MAME, based on unique string identifiers. Another used ROM sets that were clearly originally dumped for MAME. But how do we know that?
Näytä tämä ketju -
We know that because the .ZIP archives of the individual ROM dumps literally still contained the "readme.txt" files that were included by the people who dumped the board. So why, then, would these companies that literally *made* these games, go and use a 'pirated' copy?
Näytä tämä ketju -
The only realistic answer is that they did not, themselves, still have their own data archived. Now, this is not the case for all companies. Nintendo in particular are *meticulous* about preservation. Some Virtual Console releases were better dumps than the available ones.
Näytä tämä ketju -
At the end of the day, the fact that the existence of MAME, even in its infancy at the time, had encouraged people to maintain a global "redundant backup" of the data it documented, was how these companies still had their data available when they wanted to re-release it.
Näytä tämä ketju -
This absolutely isn't intended to go all holier-than-thou on other projects, or other preservation teams. There are ones that are amazing, like the CD-i community, and the Internet Archive folks.
Näytä tämä ketju -
Hidden Palace as well, they do deep-dives into what they get, then release it. Amazing folks. All the same, there are many who hold things to their chest for months, even years, until they get a chance to use that data for their own self-promotion.
Näytä tämä ketju -
Ultimately, if your so-called preservation team is one bad day, one failed hard drive, one missed domain re-registration, or one cloud backup away from not having anything at all preserved, re-think what you claim to be dedicated to, because it isn't what you think.
Näytä tämä ketju -
At the end of the day, if you claim to be involved in preservation, you should ask yourself one very important question:pic.twitter.com/YngpUOMRav
Näytä tämä ketju -
Just as a final post-script, a point that I omitted: If you're just building up archives of boards, of discs, of floppies, you're not preserving anything. Bit-rot is a thing. Disc rot is a thing. Magnetic coercivity going down over time is a thing.
Näytä tämä ketju -
Unless you can be absolutely sure that your archive is documented, with wide hashes, and backed up across countless machines such that nothing short of an apocalyptic event would make it unavailable, it hasn't been preserved. Release, or become equally lost.
Näytä tämä ketju
Keskustelun loppu
Uusi keskustelu -
Lataaminen näyttää kestävän hetken.
Twitter saattaa olla ruuhkautunut tai ongelma on muuten hetkellinen. Yritä uudelleen tai käy Twitterin tilasivulla saadaksesi lisätietoja.