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Comment by tosh | Hacker News Reader

If there is a way to download the archive I did not find it. Most of the scans seem to be sourced from internet archive uploads.

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That very blog post describes where they got their materials from, most of it comes from Retromags and out-of-print-archive. You can find downloads over at their sites, and those sites usually also upload to IA.

I don't think you can download directly from VGHF as that is not what it's intended for (it's a research tool)

I couldn't even view any "documents". Always said there's a problem.

They tout vghf as a museum, but you're really funding Frank's private collection.

I'm genuinely asking; why do you want to download the whole archive? What's the purpose?

Can't speak for the above, but for me it's a hedge against enshittification and sudden shutdowns. If I had a dollar for every community archive that suddenly went offline, I'd have several dollars.

This is the archive of the Video Game History Foundation. They’re properly setup legally, have overwhelming backing from the industry, and a pristine reputation. They’re basically the Smithsonian, or more accurately the Isabella Stewart Gardner of the video game world.

They’re going nowhere.

AI training?

Preservation through proliferation. Should the archive be forced offline, for whatever reason, it will still persist elsewhere, even if its just rotting on somebody's external hard drive, waiting to be found.

Because it won't be there the next time I go looking for it.

No. This is by design. I do not like it. It's a tactic often deployed by libraries that want to retain some control over scanned assets. To be fair, normally they are funded by tax payers.

The answer is weaponized scraping.

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