| Posted on 10-Apr-2004 00:29 GMT by The CAPS Team | 16 comments
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50 more games preserved. Exhibiting at the Classic Gaming Expo UK in July, and an XML-based offline games database is now available.
See site for more details: http://www.caps-project.org
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| CAPS Update : Comment 13 of 16 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Fiath on 12-Apr-2004 13:14 GMT | In reply to Comment 12 (Kid X):
Preservation is preservation. The Natural History Museum in London, England preserves many wonderful things from times past. You can come and visit them, but you are still not allowed to take photographs to take away with you. Not only this, I once heard that very little of the museums collected works are shown at any one time. They have huge storage resources of things well maintained, but kept away from the public eye which can only be accessed by researches and historians. It doesn't make it any less preservation.
The British Library can only be accessed by people that have published a book. These are the only members, and that is a very small minority. These people still cannot go into the library to make copies of other books. All books are collated, carefully maintained and archived. It doesn't make it any less preservation.
We are the archaeologists, the scientists and the curators in these analogies. We are also most of the funding, and the storage. We are ultimately a technical project. The amount of work needed to preserve every Amiga game in existence (or at least, as many as possible since it may be that some are already lost to the world) takes an incredible amount of time, we have a practically unlimited workload. CAPS is not really a hobby.
The point is that it leaves very little time left for contacting rights holders to gain permission for distribution. Not only that, but there are other very competent projects doing exactly that already, like BTTR, Amiga Sector One, etc.
The best thing to do for everybody in the long run is to preserve the things first. Just get that out of the way. We then have the rest of our lives that we can concentrate on getting them publicly available. The disks will not wait for these permissions to be granted, they won't care - they will rot regardless.
Floppy disks only have a quoted reliable life time of 10-15 years (though by our estimates, we make it about 18 years since we are only just beginning to see serious bit rot in games from 1985 - yes, that means we have a serious problem preserving games of that age). By splitting our time between contacting rights holders and preservation, we are effectively consigning games to be forever lost that we could have otherwise have saved by paying full attention to the task in hand.
Think of this. Only about 10% of games submitted are actually usable for release. Be it through to bit rot, corruption, save games, hiscore saves, viruses, user damage, other reasons for being altered after the original mastering or just duplicates, it doesn't matter. They still cannot be used because they are no longer true to their original form. That is a pretty bad figure.
We have to act *now*. We have the technology to make things right, and we will do everything in our power and time to use it effectively.
In the end, it is best for everybody.
o Making a games download site is pretty easy to do, assuming you have the time and money.
o Contacting authors for permission to distribute games is pretty easy to do if you have time.
Doing what we do takes time, and also a vast amount of knowledge and deep understanding of magnetic recording, let alone the technical competence to take advantage of it. Fortunately, we have people on board that worked in the games industry at the time, and they seriously know their stuff.
These skills are extremely uncommon, which is unfortunately why there has not been, and isn't, anything else like CAPS out there. That is not to say their won't be, but consider that there have been many attempts in the past by very competent people and it should give you some idea of the complexity of the subject. Three to four years of intense research went into making CAPS possible before it even went public.
Now, lets zoom back to the point. Supposing we will always be the only entity that can do this stuff, isn't it better that we just get on with it and let other people get on with things they can do?
This is a community, together we can accomplish anything. As a single entity, CAPS cannot do everything, we do not have unlimited resources, in fact, we have a relatively small amount - we just don't sleep to make up for it. ;)
So I suggest to anybody who wants the games to become more readily available the following:
It is amazing what you can accomplish with some time and commitment. Finding people nowadays is made much easier by the Internet, and many people can be found simply by a few clicks with Google, though it usually requires some persistence. Get the people interested, point out to them how their company can get free publicity by allowing their games to be played today. People like generosity. Factor 5 and Cinemaware are widely respected in this space because they *know* what such gestures do. They generate interest in what they are doing now.
You need to find out the *copyright holders*, this really depends on the contracts at the time, but it was usually for the rights to fall back to the developers after the publishers had "licensed" the content for a commercially viable time. This is a bit like the book publishing industry in that the author always retains rights to the work.
Once you have these people on board, we can then:
1) Get the rights holders to host the content
or, if impractical or unavailable for them
2) Get the community together again to gather the resources needed to host these games. Doing this on normal hosting can be very expensive, but it may be somebody owns a box on the internet that can help.
I hope I have explained our position on this. But let me summarise. Yes, sure, in an ideal world, it would be great if we could do all this. But we can't and won't for the reasons above. We dedicate ourselves to ENABLE OTHERS to help us in making a "full and final solution" which you desire.
It can happen, it just takes passion and commitment to your cause.
If you live within sensible access of London, England, come and have a chat with me about it over a beer at the Classic Gaming Expo UK in July :) where, pretty obviously now, we are exhibiting. |
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