I don't know what's the problem of sharing here or anywhere. If the contributors want, they can ask for other floppies. Maybe we don't have right now the best system, but the thing is there is nowhere else with a project like this.

You name TOSEC, but they seem dead, and the only copy of their collection I could get isn't too impressive.

As for sharing. I think that for beginning it would be nice preparing a torrent like I talked with Creosote. It would show we are really making a collection that won't be hidden and hoarded, but that will serve to preserve these games.

Sounds good to me and the last part is exactly my point

Last time I checked each of us was free to do whatever he wants. We can start projects as we like. You can contribute images or not. Freedom of choice is great, isn't it?


That was the original announcement of the project on the site's front page, so yes, I'm sure.

I don't see people rushing in to support the 'need' for any kind of direct distribution so far by the way. Very strange - I thought there were approximately one hundred million billion people waiting for just that.

yeah but I don't want to end up with a dozen similar projects that are all incomplete as hell like the video game databases out there



Oh come on, that's just a ridiculous statement, how many people do you think are reading this conversation? Yeah, I thought so. Plus, actually 50% of the participants of this topic (which would be Wandrell & me) support this "need" for distribution. I don't exactly understand what you mean by direct distribution, any form of distribution that is actually a distribution of the full project is fine with me. I don't care if it's done via direct download or indirect(?) torrent etc.

About as ridiculous as 'lecturing' other people what they should or shouldn't do with their personal websites, don't you think? Fact is, so far you're the only person to make his contributions dependent on any such circumstances. I'm not saying there won't be others - yet it isn't as clear and obvious what 'people' want. And that's the only single small argument remaining, because quite frankly, all your attempts to talk about 'preservation' in general have fallen flat on their face as far as I'm concerned (see my earlier reply concerning the IGDA matter).

There is one major difference between Wandrell's and your state in this thread: Wandrell doesn't make his work on the project dependent on whatever fluffy 'concept'. In my line of work, there's the saying 'show us the code', meaning something along the lines of 'put your money where your mouth is'. Wandrell suggests things for completely different reasons than you do - and he's willing to 'suffer' the consequences, i.e. to take action himself.

So now it seems to be on me to summ up a bit:

Mr Creosote is willing to share the images with everybody under certain circunstances i.e. somebody sets up and maintains an server or torrent.

Hydr0x and Wandrell seem to be interested in sharing everything with everybody who wants it.

Now my main problem is the fact that some of the games are still sold or somebody has still the rights for the title.
How should this be maintained outside an webpage? At the moment this can be handled easyly by "killing" the download link. Shure there are copies allready spread all over the world but we are talking of an single game. A Torrent would be an big collection of games which might be protected and can be pretty good traced back to it's creator. In my opinion an big disadvantage.

I don't know how much you guys concern about legal things... But I shure do.

It would be, if that's what I had done. All I did was propose changes to the way the disk image project is organised and share my current concerns. If you think that's the same as demanding the website to be run a certain way then I don't know how I can help you cause it isn't. All I did was provide positive hopefully constructive criticism.



out of how many til now? 6? Of course I'm not representative, but neither are the handful of people who chose to contribute. So 100% of the current contributors were okay with the "circumstance", big surprise. I might be the only person who didn't contribute yet (although there is in fact one image by me) because of them but I might very well also just be the only person who spoke up and a dozen people out there just didn't contribute and didn't bother to tell you why... You don't know, I don't know. But if I have a reason not to contribute yet which universal knowledge do you claim to have to know that noone else had the same reasons for not contributing?! It isn't me who claims he knows everything like you try to make it look (as in: I know others out there feel them same), it's you (as in: I know you're the only guy who feels that way and basically I know you just want to leech our stuff)



I replied to that IGDA reply of yours but you chose to ignore that. If you don't believe I'm in it for preservation, well then I can't do anything about that. But actually it doesn't even matter, all that matters is that I'm proposing ways to (imho) improve the project.



Ah but that's one of those thought-terminating arguments (=Totschlagargument). Deliver goods or you're not worthy of an opinion. And it works the other way around too. Deliver downloads or you're not worthy of my contributions. << That's not what I'm actually thinking, just trying to make clear how "useless" that argument of yours is. What is it that you want? That I upload my images despite my concerns? That I proof worthy to discuss these things how? I'm not sure what exactly you're looking for here.



mh weird, and what reasons would his and mine be?



what kind of action? see above. I already told you I'm not capable of handling more projects (I'm already part of three bigger preservation related projects...) but I'd be willing to contribute my images to any project I "have a good feeling about"

@T-Pow

I agree legal problems have to be dealt with. But you guys are way more experienced with that than I am.

So if you are in three big projects you could maybe help me. I'm still having some defektive disks. For a list follow this Link:
http://www.goodolddays.net/forum/topic.php?id=2192

this is going on circles, and there is more than one solution to the problem.

For example, why don't you make a torrent on UG with your images? Your ratio there increases (and you have a too low ratio, so it would help), anybody can access those images so they spread and don't get lost and everybody is happy.

Which is exactly what I said:

Thank you for agreeing.


Let me quote your reply to that again so that we all know what we're talking about:


That statement is so ludicrous I thought it speaks for itself. They have to respect copyright issues... but we don't? You just posted:

Stop jumping around and stick to a point, please! The fact remains that you tried showing IGDA as an example of what you mean by 'preservation' - I pointed out that all the goals listed there are already met (and surpassed, since the images are shared freely) here.


Which is exactly what I pointed out in our private conversation a few days ago. I just used the term 'Teufelskreis' ("devil's circle" - meaning there's a circular dependency from which there is no escape) then. Great that you remember it!


The difference, as pointed out several times by me and others is this:

While you just say IT NEEDS TO BE DONE, but aren't willing to do anything to make it happen (while not even giving proper reasons aside from 'it might give me a better feeling'). No matter whether you have good reasons for it. Fact is, you're not helping to make it happen. I listed your suggestions in my overview last night - and 'tagged' them as needing someone to take care of it. Because nobody has expressed the slightest bit of interest to do that work. Which means those suggestions are dead fish for now. Pity.


His main reason (I gather) is attracting more people to contribute to a project he's already committed to. Your reason is to shape the project in a way which could make you commit to it. That's a totally different perspective on the outstanding issues.

Wandrell makes a good point (and in fact, T-Pow has asked you the same question before): Why don't you just set an example and make your vast collection publically available without any restrictions? This won't scatter efforts in any way, because the files could still be easily included into any other future preservation project which you might or might not be part of then.

I didn't say floppy image related projects But I took a look at your list and I do have Aces of the Pacific, can't remember if it's German or English though. I'll upload the 3 disks later, if CRC of disk 2+3 match you know disk 1 is correct too

@Wandrell

Well, I'm still in the process of dumping and my collection of games is also growing so I'd have to update such a torrent all the time. It also wouldn't really help my ratio, the other torrent I did was around 250MB iirc and got snatched almost 20 times but still I only had upload about 260MB, my connection is too slow and gets treated with lowest seeding priority by the tracker. Not that I need to improve my ratio anyways because I have no plans to download anything else. Only reason I even joined UG was the MS-DOS game project.

Having to update a torrent is no problem. I've seen people makind addendas to theirs after a time. And everybody would understand it, just look at the guy who added a lot of floppy images a time ago. He made a torrent for each game, each two days or so.

He tooks his games, made the images and created a torrent. He had more images later? He made another torrent. And everybody thanked him.

I think it would be a great thing if you could make a torrent with what you have. It's big enough already. And after some months, if you got more images you could make another torrent.

As far is can remember Dynamix produced only english versions in that time. But if i'm wrong an german version is also OK because I am German.

@Wandrell, I'll think about it

@T-Pow

here you go

http://rapidshare.com/files/218591853/AOTP.zip.html

Thanks a lot it is indeed the english version and it works fine. Another one off the list.

you're welcome

So, I've been copying more and more games and have run into three questions:

1) Copy Protection

Does anyone know whether WinImage (or DD, they basically do the same) is able to copy all kinds of copy protection methods (like unformatted tracks)? And how can I find out if a game is copy protected. Is it possible a WinImage error is actually just a copy protection!?

2) 360K (DD) disks

After having copied quite a few 5.25 disks I realized ALL of them are DD 360K disks. This is pure coincidence, right? I saw your list contains quite a few HD disks. Even games from 1992 on 5.25 were just 360K. Could it be possible that my drive misreads them and only reads the first x tracks? I don't think it is, just want to be sure

3) Faulty disks

Quite a few disks (~20%) have errors. Is there any way to fix these? I have a tool named DRevitalize which claims to be able to fix bad sectors in certain cases and I gave it a try with two disks. In one case it fixed(?) all bad sectors, in the other case it fixed none. After the fixes the first disk was copied by WinImage without errors. Can I assume the image is actually correct or is it possible it was altered by that tool and differs from a 100% OK original disk?

Some copy protection schemes can be read, some not. So far, Lemmings 2 is the only example I know of which can't be read with regular dd. I.e. it happens, but it's very uncommon, as most copy protection mechanisms don't work on block level, but one or to levels above.

I don't know of any safe and easy ways to find out if or how a game is copy protected.


Could be coincidence, yes. I think 360KB is the most common 5.25" disk format. 720KB (QD) is very rare, and at the time 1.2MB (HD) came into common usage, 3.5" was already more common still.

I don't know about Winimage, but to be sure, you could try explicitely telling dd how many blocks to read. Another simple (but not completely safe) way to determine the actual size would be to just check how much data there is on the disks...


You can't ever be sure if you don't know the internals of that program. I guess that would be a case for a 'redump' style comparison of the resulting disk images.

Other ways: dd_rescue is already mentioned in the FAQ on the site, T-Pow suggested VGA-Copy at some point. Basically, any program which doesn't just give up copying on the first sign of trouble, but retries in several ways could work.


So any updates on the torrent? Wandrell?

Well, I've downloaded the TOSEC set and a few dozen other disk images from various sources. I haven't renamed those yet though. There's also a user on cgboard who has >200 own images which he might share and another user (who has some of the rarer stuff like early CRPGs etc.) is (slowly) dumping his stuff. I'm about 90% done with dumping my games but I'd like to try to rescue the 20% with faults first. If I combine all of that it's quite a nice torrent I guess. Of course merging your collection in would be even better and possibly scratch the 1000 mark?!

As I'm on university again these last weeks I've been having work nonstop. But I hope this and next week I can sort around the torrent. I want 100 or so images that can be added to any webpage (that means, the same we would add here) as a show of good faith, and as a way to give publicity to the project. Anybody could upload them to their page, and we show we are caring.

After that, it would depend on how it fares.

As for hydrox's proposition. If at least all of the parties involved can get the merged collection, that sounds great. Oh, and we already got the TOSEC set a while ago, but maybe it was an old version (if they did any new one).