<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>I'm not sure how much interest there is in this, but I'll carry on regardless. :)</div><div><br></div><div>In my previous post, I summarised what I thought were the technical challenges faces in preserving games stored on floppy disk media. I them split those points into two categories, which I will now detail further.</div><div><br></div><div>a) Reading the disks in the first place</div><div> </div><div>Getting hold of appropriate disk drives seems to be easy enough for the majority of disk types, the problem is getting the raw data off the disk. Floppy disks are an analogue storage medium, and data is not directly stored as 0's and 1's like on Compact Discs and flash drives, but as magnetic polarity changes ('flux transitions'). The problem is that you cannot generally read these flux transitions through a computer, as there is hardware in the way way to make accessing the data "easier" (and did it's job well, but now is a problem for preservation). This "raw" form is the ideal thing for preservation. Once you have this, you don't care about disk formats or copy protection - you are just doing a raw read of a disk - and it all comes along for the ride.</div><div><br></div><div>You might think that if the computer can read the data, there shouldn't a problem. Unfortunately that is not the case, the only way to get a computer to read particular things is to write it in a special way on special hardware, a concept that underlies many copy protection techniques.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>b) Knowing that what you have read is correct</div><div> </div><div>Secondly, there is knowing whether the disk image you have made is correct. There is little point of trying to preserve games if you cannot be sure whether those disk images are okay or not. With most types of storage media we use today, this is not a problem - the data is checked as it is copied. But games on floppy disks are a special case, you often do not know where the checksum/integrity information is stored on the disk, and even for known disk formats, games developers applied copy protection that deliberately wasn't covered by the integrity data. The disks are old already, the data may already be broken, and you won't know if you need to find another copy without being confident in your disk images.</div><div> </div><div>You cannot play the game to check it, the corruption may not be apparent until, say, level 14. Also, how do you know the copy protection passed? It is not always obvious. Borrowed Time on the Commodore Amiga has very nice protection, if it fails, you can't find some items to allow you to proceed in the game, they simply don't appear - and that is not the only example.</div><div><br></div><div>It gets worse, what if somebody modifies a game disk (virus, accident, malicious intent, save games)? There will be no corruption, but it certainly is no longer an authentic copy suitable for preservation.</div><div> </div><div>I firmly believe that any disk images produced also require some sort of checking to be confident in their preservation status. I'll drop a small note here that The Software Preservation Society check for all of above for every single game preserved (nearly 3000 so far).</div><div> </div><div><br></div><div>I think all that covers the points raised in my last email.</div><div> </div><div> </div><div>With these sorts of difficulties, it is no wonder that game preservation (for computers at least) has historically been in such a poor state. </div><div>In my next post, I will detail some new developments that I believe makes the future brighter for everybody.</div><div> </div><div>If anyone has any comments on any of this, please feel free to chime in with your thoughts.</div><div>Kieron</div></div><div><br></div><br><div><div>On 13 Feb 2009, at 23:05, Kieron Wilkinson wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div> </div><div><div><span class="304284813-13022009"><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff">Since I have been away for a while, I was trying to get a feel for how things have changed, and I thought this was a good place to start. I guess there doesn't seem to be many people here involved with that side of things, perhaps it is still very much an ad-hoc process.</font></span></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"></font><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"></font><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"></font> </div><div><font face="Arial"><font color="#0000ff"><font><span class="304284813-13022009">As I said before, </span>there does seem to be a number of common technical problems in preserving game media.<span class="304284813-13022009"> Here are the ones I can think of:</span></font></font></font></div><div><font face="Arial"><font color="#0000ff"><font></font></font></font> </div><div><div><span class="304284813-13022009"><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff">1) Devices required to read the disks</font></span></div></div><div><font face="Arial"><font color="#0000ff"><font><span class="304284813-13022009">2</span>) <span class="304284813-13022009">The different and custom </span>disk formats<span class="304284813-13022009"> in use (I don't mean the physical disk format here, but how the software data is structured on the disk)</span><br><span class="304284813-13022009">3</span>) <span class="304284813-13022009">The p</span><span class="304284813-13022009">resence of any d</span>isk-based copy protection<span class="304284813-13022009"> (the whole purpose of which is to hide itself)</span><br></font></font></font><font face="Arial"><font color="#0000ff"><font><span class="304284813-13022009">4) Degradation of original disks, leading to corrupted reads<br></span><span class="304284813-13022009">5</span>) Authenticity (ensuring disks are original and unmodified)</font></font></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"></font> </div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"></font><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009">I'd like to cover these points as two distinct problems...</span></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009"></span></font> </div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009">a) Reading the disks in the first place (points 1, 2 and 3).</span></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009">b) Knowing that what you have read is preservable (points 4 and 5, but also involves 2 and 3).</span></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009"></span></font> </div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009">I don't want to go into too much detail in one post, so I will leave it at this for now, and follow up this two issues separately later.</span></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009"></span></font> </div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009">If anyone has any comments on any of this, please feel free to chime in with your thoughts.</span></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#0000ff"><span class="304284813-13022009">Kieron</span></font></div><div><br></div></div></div></blockquote></div></body></html>