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Comment by billjings | Hacker News Reader

For organizations like the Video Game History Foundation (https://gamehistory.org/) that are trying to preserve video games in an above board way, things really are as dire as this article describes.

For VGHF to fulfill its mission, it's just not enough that this work is done. "Nobody is prosecuting us" isn't a firm enough foundation for an above board, charity funded organization that makes this work legal and accessible.

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One consideration is that some games implement checksums and other copy protection measures to detect if they've been copied, and then refuse to run - or appear to run normally at first but sneakily punish the player. Preserving these games in a playable format necessarily means you have to defeat the copy protection. I have to imagine that it looks bad to do this even when you have noble intentions.

I think the number of games that include player punishment is astonishingly small. The more prescient threat is DRM and server only experiences.

So many games will never be experienced again after the servers are turned off. I think it’s the community’s job to lobby game publishers to release source code for games and severs if they are sunsetted forever. Convincing the corporate world to let go of IP before copyright expires will be tough, but we’re naïeve to believe that these companies will still have intact source code in 50 years. Hard drives fail, cloud buckets get abandoned and then the bill doesn’t get paid, etc etc.

It’s not looking super optimistic for game archival, but there is _a path_ forward to improve the situation.

> I think it’s the community’s job to lobby game publishers to release source code for games and severs

Very very unlikely (unfortunately), especially for outfits like Nintendo. As long as there are eShops and remasters, there is the opportunity to cash in on old IP. And getting source code for games is one thing - getting the assets are another. Even for the example of Doom that is everywhere, only the shareware assets were set free.

For consoles, emulation and reverse engineering are probably the best and likely only way forward IMHO.

> I think the number of games that include player punishment is astonishingly small.

This is true, but they're fun to read about! https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_anti-piracy_methods

> I think the number of games that include player punishment is astonishingly small.

I remember Game Dev Tycoon released a ‘hacked’ copy of their own game to torrent sites in which you’d always eventually lose due to ‘losing sales due to pirating’, but that’s the only instance I remember.

Did much older games do similar things?

Some but it's pretty rare. Earthbound spawns more and more enemies when it detects a legit version isn't being played and will break on the final boss if you make it that far. It's a bit more common on home computer games I think because the barrier to copying a floppy or CD is much lower than a cart but it's still a lot of effort to add.

This is something society needs to deal with. If not for groups like them eventually the media will be lost. IMO there should be a rule that if something isn’t for sale by the rights holder for X years it becomes legal to distribute copies freely.

Agreed, but that still wouldn't help with games that have primarily online experiences, because things like server programs and content management systems also need to be archived for those -- and these (almost) never reach the hands of the people.

Are the statements about the quality of the copy true as well? I had always assumed, it's digital, so it either works or it doesn't. I know there are problems emulating some games well, but I always thought that was because of shortcomings in the emulator or things like chips on the game cartridge that also need to be emulated.

I'm not sure exactly what statements you're referring to, but consider if you've ever seen a [b] in a rom filename, that means it's known to be a "bad dump". Compare this to roms with [!] in their filename, which signifies a "verified good dump".

Damn. I wonder how many games I fully played through back in the day against a known "bad" dump.

EDIT: Now I'm even more confused as to why some of those "good sets" would even contain known bad dumps.

I think the Good Sets were meant to archive every single dump of every game.

Once upon a time there was a program called "GoodTools" that maintained a database of all known dumps, so you could run it against your ROMs and it could identify which ROMs were known bad. Dumb completionists then decide to collect and distribute sets containing every ROM - including the bad ones - in the GoodTools database, so-called "good sets", which besides wasting lots of bandwidth and storage space (at a time when this stuff wasn't quite so cheap!) also unfortunately helped bad dumps stick around.

It's definitely overstating things. Bad dumps are possible and were somewhat common back in the day when people were spreading ROMs via GeoCities pages and Usenet, but these days databases like No-Intro and Redump have helped make sure that they're rare - you can easily verify your ROMs against known good ones.

Yeah it must be demoralizing to know the community is executing at a level they simply can't achieve. Maybe that calls into question the need for their existence or their mission.

Maybe their rolen is to fail so laws can change.

The VGHF is a part of the same community that builds things like the MiSTer. Just a different wing of it, doing a different job.

A wing that is advocating for changes to the law, by the way. So maybe you should donate! https://gamehistory.org/donate/

I leave that for those who care about above/under board.

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