"Media and game preservation is so important, that's why we need physical releases and physical media!" I say, holding a rotting CD in one hand and a dirty, wornout cassette tape in the other
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unless your stuff isn't stored well it's a pretty overblown problem for the most part for the time being. Hell, there are still CDs from the 80's that play just fine.
absolutely. I'm just saying people say that disc rot is inevitable with every cd type and.. I mean, 40 years on it's not quite as prevalent (yet) as people have insisted it is.
True, good point! I have discs from 90s and so. Do you know if carts from old days has these kind of problems? I have some Commodore 64 tapes and Sega Megadrive games.
fun fact: 3ds and switch game cartridges use volatile NAND flash chips that will fail far sooner than the mask ROM used by older systems. everything is shit now and there is no preservation without piracy
I’ve archived something like 4,000 discs onto my home NAS so far, ~98% success rate. Now that data is backed up and parity checked and will get copied to new disks every few years until I die.
do you have NAS
on SSDs or HDDs? Ive heard that SSDs and flash memory in general can lose data during time (especially a new one 9000-layered QLC cells on thin techprocesses), so HDD could survive even longer (or not)
I do think that while digitization is ultimately THE single best way to preserve media, the experience of using physical things is worth preserving as well, sure the disks, cartridges, tapes, etc. won't be around forever but the practice of using and experiencing media in this way can and should be
I just think there is something satisfying about popping a disk or cartridge in and out of it's playing apparatus that can't quite be matched by hitting a play button or booting up a game, it's an experience that should be preserved because it improves our interaction with the media we love
Yup, it's why I have copies of just about everything I wanna keep on both a my PC and multiple drives
if one of them fails I can still pull from something else, some might call me paranoid for it but if that's the cost of peace of mind I'm willing to pay it
Consumer grade optical media (IE- CD-Rs) are almost always produced to be the lowest common denominator media, so when a company like Limited Run says "it's okay that it's on a CD-R" about their expensive "preservation project" (read - product), you know that shit's literally rotting in its case.
I mean, hell, I wouldn't be so sour to the digital age if we were allowed to just own shit. If I could buy a game or a song or an album, and legally there were laws in place to say it's mine, and no company can rip it away from me on a lease, or that new ownership will make me lose the product,
I'd be a lot more okay with that. Failing that, in an age where we can't own what we're asked to buy, and a lot of goods aren't even for sale anymore, yeah I'm going to side with physical media and sailing the high seas. Ball's in the corpos court to fix the issue if they don't like that.
I don't think that preservation is just one thing. Something is best preserved if it's abailable in several formats. Physical and digital both have up- and downsides that compliment each other.
I have legitimately never understood why people think that a (DRM free at least) copy of a game on their hard drive is any less "physical", and as if you have less actual ownership of it than that same data, but stored on a decades old cartridge or disc.
Like if you like collecting the original copies that work on original hardware, cool, good for you! I see why retro game collecting is a fun hobby for some. But it's not really any better of a way to preserve them.
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on SSDs or HDDs? Ive heard that SSDs and flash memory in general can lose data during time (especially a new one 9000-layered QLC cells on thin techprocesses), so HDD could survive even longer (or not)
if one of them fails I can still pull from something else, some might call me paranoid for it but if that's the cost of peace of mind I'm willing to pay it
You can give the company shit but if nothing else, they live up to their name: Limited Run Games (for better or worse)
True preservation is DRM-free digital copies, backed up again and again. And again
I want my quartz disks!