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Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

This is why piracy is nearly always the best option.

Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly.

Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs.

Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.

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These fixes were not available in the original. What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are talking about when it comes to preservation.

For most people this is ok, but when we're talking about preservation it's the ability to play the game as it existed at that time with no barriers, and not something upscaled to 4k with widescreen patches and framerate changes to make it feel like a modern game with blocky aesthetics.

>What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are talking about when it comes to preservation.

People are making cycle-accurate emulators for exactly this purpose! Not all emulation is focused on "enhancements"

I'm not talking about fixes or alterations. I'm talking about running an exact copy of the ROM, to play exactly as it did on the console it was released for.

Unintended emulation inaccuracies are a different matter, but (1) they are addressed with 1:1 hardware emulation (if you so wish), (2) where you don't want that (for the sake of speed, say) the fixes are only there to make the game run as it did anyway

Yeah, I agree.

If you didn't buy the original copy of something from 20 years ago and can't get it from eBay, you're SOL in most cases.

Lots of punk albums from small bands made in the 00s fall into this trap.

If you do find it, it's unlikely to be the original mix and might sound louder/have some content missing.

The problem being that availability is a function of popularity and age. If you want something older that isn't a celebrated classic, it can be a lot more difficult to access...

But that's rarely a case. There are people maintain huge packages with thousands of old games. I can only think about maybe one or two titles that I couldn't find on the internet after some search. Besides, if a game is really obscure, chances for a legal release are close to zero.

In some piracy circles and torrent trackers, sharing rare/obscure titles is a way of gaining rep, so at least there, there is incentive in finding and distributing the un-celebrated classics.

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