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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

You're right. They might regret it financially if they could plan past their next meal. In the case of locusts it results in their decline.

Music industry has been... not great with licensing and archives. There are recordings of Lightning Hopkins that only exist because of the Smithsonian Archives. And there are re-issues of that music today that only exist because of independent labels sourcing from those archives.

If the music industry had had its way they would have been done with Hopkins years ago and his music would have been forgotten, having moved on to the next crop.

Books are good at republishing. Film has been decent at it but suffer from licensing issues. Video games are probably the worst at archiving and maintaining access to libraries of prior art.

Locusts. Good analogy.

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shout out for the house of the underdogs!

anybody else remember abandonware games??

Home of the Underdogs, or HOTU.

I was active in their forums back in 2004. I still remember all the fuss when the admin/owner (going by nickname Underdogs) was "outed" to be a woman (she helped out herself, it wasn't a hostile thing). 2004 was a time when people could still be surprised that a woman was leading a major online project... wow. The past is indeed "a foreign country"!

Pepper Ridge Farms remembers.

In defense of video games, in a lot of cases technology has churned so much that it's prohibitive to maintain older games, and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.

AI will improve this situation on the graphics side, perhaps with some sort of game container that emulates older environments well (Proton, anyone?) we'll see more re-releases.

Games that old are super easy to archive on a technical level. Take the 4MB or less and save it somewhere.

And "sell small files for $1 or $5 without spending much money to set up the store" is a solved problem.

Sorry, but you are just talking. The problem with video game preservation is that the IA isn't able to get the same library exemption that they got from the Library of Congress for archiving. The LoC doesn't yet consider video games an artform that can be preserved in the same way as books and other media.

There are thousands of folks that both want and want to do this work.

>the same library exemption

Reference please? Genuine question. As far as I know, libraries have very little in the way of special privileges outside of some specific rights in the analog realm which don't really apply in digital where first sale doctrine also doesn't apply.

https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2024/

I see nothing in there giving a carte blanche to libraries, however they care to define themselves, to have any generalized exemption from copyright law.

Look up 17 usc 108.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

What's with the goalpost moving? Click on "Final Rule"[1] and the PDF goes into copious detail about what exemptions are currently in effect. Obviously there is no, and will never be, "carte blanche to libraries, however they care to define themselves, to have any generalized exemption from copyright law". There are specific, temporary, limited exemptions in effect.

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-10-28/pdf/2024-2...

How does AI have anything to do with this? Are you just talking about emulators? Those already exist, and the main opposition to them is the companies that own the IP. Many companies would rather let games languish than let their community do the "prohibitive" work to maintain those games for free.

> and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.

It's not about what people find pleasing today, it's about archiving and preserving an important part of our (digital) history. Videogames of the past were a big thing.

And videogames, much like music, must be playable to be truly preserved.

Imagine someone going "I don't get why it's worth preserving ancient Egyptian artifacts, people these days don't enjoy that kind of thing anymore".

> in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.

One of the most prolific indie developers of recent years (David Szymanski) has basically all of his games looking like they came out of PS1/early 3D accelerator days. And he isn't alone, there are many games that have midlate 90s / very early 2000s looks. There are also a ton of horror games that use exaggerated PS1-styled graphics with bit crunched filtering, strong dithering effects, etc (wobbly low poly environments where you can barely make out what you are looking at are giving horror vibes basically for free :-P).

This is something i've been saying for a long time now: if you can point at a game and say "this looks like a PS1/PS2/3/4/5/NES/SNES/DOS/Win95/etc game" then this means there are enough visual characteristics to define such games and thus you are really pointing at a visual style - something that people will use at some point in the future even when the technical limitations that birthed the style aren't there anymore (which means that some games may give the feel of that style but not really be bound by the actual limitations).

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