This whole myrient situation made me realize how futile of an effort preservation projects really are. Entire sets are only archived by a dozen of people on the entire planet because the rest only cares about popular stuff and there's simply no efficient way to archive all that shit locally. 90% of that IBM PC redump set is going to become lost media by 2030.
>>12526040I'm glad they're closing down, fuck zoomers and late arriversGot mine and not sharing :)
Very few people actually care about preservation. Most people use it just an excuse for piracy. I'd even argue that newer games are in higher risk of being eventually lost than retro games.
>>12526040you can either accept that everything is temporary and will one day be gone, or do your part to prevent/slow the decay, Anonyou probably aren't losing sleep over all pulp fiction and dimestore novels lost to time, or the music that only exists as copies of bootlegs, nowhere to be found digitally, that will probably be tossed into the trash whenever their owner passes awayoutside of putting data onto truly archival media microfilm or m-discs, we're always going to be depending on a relatively small group of data hoarders leapfrogging and sharing data across volatile medium that can die or corrupt at any timetl;dr: just enjoy it while you can, Anon
>>12526072>an excuse for piracy>an excuseAs opposed to what? Not playing them at all? Faggot
Curation is not just the solution, but inevitable. At some point tons of hidden object point and click shovelware will just vanish, yet not a single soul will notice. The important part is the preservation of actually good games.
>>12526072Yeah? Like pirating the english copies of Custom Robo 64, Bulk Slash and Princess Crown on the Saturn instead of paying for it, right? Dumb fucking retard
>oh noes I lost access to one source of nointro and redump dumps!You don't know lost media hell until you get into DOS beyond bitch-basic DOSBox game emulation. Hunting down drivers and information is a nightmare, and good fucking luck once you get into all the non-game software that was released.>read about program X that can solve problem I'm having>need version Y of program X>only version W is available for download online, doesn't have feature I need program for>creator hasn't been heard from since 1995>literally everywhere talks about software X being the best of the best, you shouldn't even bother with anything else>only download of software X is a shareware version that locks out half the features, and no full registered version is available online anywhere>find a download link to full registered software X buried in some FTP mirror archive site>link 404's, they say "if the crawler didn't grab it during the scrape, it's too late now, that FTP is dead"That doesn't even count all the fan-made stuff and freeware. DOS is the lost media zone, and more of those obscure FTP mirror archives go down and take various obscure DOS programs down with them all the time. At the very least the Total DOS Collection is finally dumping and preserving the different revisions games had, including the patch disks. For the longest time DOS games were mystery meat in terms of what revision you were downloading.
>>12526040At the very least some versions of the Total DOS Collection are still available on Archive. Not the latest, unfortunately, at least not from what I can tell, and the latest set they do have only goes up to the O's.
>>12526083We heard you the first time.
>>12526040All of it is still available in a different archive and it's distributed via torrents. Even if it wasn't, ur kind of a tard if you don't have full romsets for everything, excluding some disk systems.
post meta changes the game
>>12526040>some blatant shovelware that literally NO ONE was ever going to play in their life might get lost>all the actually good games worth playing will never die because so many people have copies and you can always make new backups of themok, so what's the problem? these aren't rare historical documents we're talking about here.
>>12526040>no efficient way to archive all that shit locally???
>>12528078Games are part of our history so they should be preserved no matter the quality.
>>12526063>hard drive fails>OH ZOOMER AUTISTS PLEASE SHARE YOUR FILES WITH MEEE!!!
>>12528140nobody should be preserving dr jekyll and mr hyde
>>12528078By this logic, rare historical documents shouldn't be saved either because most people don't have any interest in reading them.
>>12528220yes, exactly.we dont need every shitty fantasy story ever written when we already have LOTRgotta take out the trash eventually or you're just a hoarder of junk
>>12526081This, honestly. Garbage is garbage, digital or not. It's why games like the Jak series or the 3d GTAs get decomp projects but shit like Cory in the House or Hello Kitty Island Adventure gets forgotten.
>>12528506>2026>No Cory in the House decomp
>>12526072>Most people use it just an excuse for piracy.Redump itself is ran by a russian pirate, and they changed dumping methods so often that a lot of their files are actually bad dumps, but nobody bothered to do a good dump with newer apps since 2010.
>>12526106>the latest set they do have only goes up to the O's.That's because the sperg that uploaded it to the archive did it in a retarded way and never even bothered to upload the other half of the set.
>>12526081It's natural selection of the digital world. All the most popular stuff will always be easily available. Niches exist but take some effort to find. Some things are so niche that only a handful of people own copies and there may be no real effort to preserve them, so once the drive stops spinning it'll be gone forever.My advice to everyone is to make your own backups of niches you care about. You can copy the mainstream stuff if you've got the space but prioritize things that are endangered.
