Reconstructing a lost NES game from 30-year-old source code disks

At a glance there are a number of Daydream apps that are removed and unavailable anywhere right now. Likewise mobile games that get pulled for whatever reason.

With all the security paranoia these days, the future of "digital archaeology" seems pretty bleak. Even if you do manage to find the storage media, it's likely to have been encrypted with an algorithm that remains unbroken.

If you're interested in exploring further, https://www.unseen64.net/ has been cataloguing and writing about lost, cancelled and prototype video games since 2001.

There's an unreleased Dreamcast game with a playable near-complete build leaked, called Propeller Arena. It's probably in my friend group's top-4 favorite multiplayer games for the platform, despite not actually having been released. Actually aside from MVC2 (still more fun for us amateurs than MVC3—and kinda looks better?) it might be the most likely game for us to play on the DC, just because the others have newer, better replacements, but I've not seen anything newer that's quite as arcadey and easy-playing as Propeller Arena in its niche (multiplayer propeller aircraft dogfighting, mostly)

To build on this, there are currently unreleased games sitting in collectors' hands and some refuse to dump them as it devalues the game. Dumpers have launched crowd funding campaigns in the past in attempts to purchase these rare games so they can get a physical copy to archive.

I know of at least one that meets your criteria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkaR8ZaObO0&feature=emb_titl...

It happens to non-game products too. Way back during a college internship, there was a third-party vendor that had by far the best algorithm for a hardware product my employer was producing. The product was pretty close to finished, when a former employer of the founder of the vendor sued them under a questionable non-compete contract and claimed that the algorithm was stolen (the company that filed suit had a significantly inferior algorithm based on the hardware product's criteria).

Most of the development had to be scrapped, and a new, non-compete-free team was hired to build a clean room algorithm. There was a firewall inside the company where people on the old team practically couldn't even say hello to the people on the new team. And the new algorithm was decent, but not as good as the original vendor's algorithm.

I watched the video and I think this one is playable but it sure does not look complete, or very much fun.

Not that the published game looks much more fun, but at least there are other cars on the road... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPWzRd5wFqU

There's actually a book about unreleased games, written by Frank Gasking, just about to come out (taking pre-orders as of today).

Myself and other team members were interviewed by the author, some time back, about one of the unreleased games I worked upon (Chips Challenge, NES).

[I have no affiliation with this publication, apart from being interviewed]

https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/the-games-that-werent

An old friend of mine worked on an unreleased SEGA Genesis game for the movie Akira. The ROM was recently "discovered" on the internets.

Pics and vids: https://hiddenpalace.org/Akira_(Prototype)

For consumers, M-DISC media for DVD/Blu-ray might be about the best there is for long term storage.[1]

In the enterprise/experimental world there are things like Microsoft Project Silica[2][3] where they are storing data on quartz slides.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

[2]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

[3]https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...

Have you ever seen those laser glass sculptures you can have customized for a person?

I've always though those would be a good way to store data permanently

> Is it possible with multiple disks and an extant error correction algorithm to prevent data corruption indefinitely, assuming some maximum error rate?

This is the main thrust of the Dynamo paper, yes. You can solve all the technical problems. Put something in a "living system" like Amazon S3 (where data has 17+ clones; and where ops people are there to both replace individual hard disks as they fail, and to gradually port the system over to new storage layers as new technology displaces old), and then—presuming the company providing the service is still there—it'll be vanishingly unlikely that your data will have degraded on a human time-scale.

What's left in the way of "indefinitely", though, are political problems. "How do I preserve data indefinitely" gets into the same sort of hairy problems as "how do I enforce my will on my descendants after I die?" kind of questions, where you start to see people putting forward ideas like immutable autonomous trusts.

The key question being: how do I ensure that the stuff I want to stick around, sticks around, after I'm dead, during a period when literally nobody else cares about it, until a later time when somebody else does care about it?

god i'm old