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[Dictator93]

I am posting in an amazing thread. Still haven't finished reading.

Edit: this reminds me how much I regret tossing my 486 years ago. It still worked... I have no idea what I was thinking. Just like losing my doom poster.

 

[bjork]

This is a very noble project because finding non-cracked copies of some titles is literally impossible now. It's theorized, for example, that no original, non-cracked copies of the Amiga version of Great Giana Sisters exists anymore. Cracks were handy if you hated copy protection schemes (look up 8th word in 9th paragraph of blah blah blah) or wanted trainers installed, but they'd change art or modify parts of the game. Cracks are obvious by their inserted intros.

This is a big reason why I make back ups of my actual titles - to avoid trainers and cracks. That's a neat website. Good cause.

This post reminded me of an ebay listing of Amiga Giana Sisters that I saw recently. Is there a way to tell from the photos if it's the real deal or not?

 

[Krejlooc]

I'm reminded of the many games we can play on modern systems only through the Glide API for modern Nvidia cards. Good thing Artdink released a DirectX version of A-Train 5, since I don't think PowerVR games for Windows 95/98 function in most situations.

All the games I listed got rereleased with native DirectX support, so it's not like anybody is missing out. It's just a curious piece of history. The neatest thing about these cards is that A) They were the first video cards nvidia ever produced, B) They are "Sega PC" cards that came with brackets for your PC that lets you use Sega Saturn controllers on your PC, C) They render quads, and D) the thing is a video card, a 3d accelerator card, a gameport card, and a soundcard, all in one (just having video and 3D acceleration on the same card is super rare).

Funny enough, because of the time this was produced, it'll run the DINO port of Sonic CD without any problems. The later Direct X port had some issues. The DINO port is finicky about the hardware it runs on. Even though the card is mainly garbage for 2D games, it was made during juuuuust the right time period when it works with Sonic CD lol.

I'd like to mention that demo discs for ps1 and onward through Xbox are really a neat artifact of the game industry that I'd like to preserve. Given how little to no physical media may exist soon, they are particularly identified with a narrow band of time within the industry. Just my particular predilection.

I had an entire collection of Sega Dreamcast ODCM demo discs that I stupidly threw away. Including the infamous Shenmue trailer disc. I wish I still had those.

I have a ton of PSX and CD32 demo discs, which is weird because I'm from the US.

 

[MrCunningham]

Sometimes I wish NeoGAF had more technical threads like this. This is really interesting and useful.

Not the subject of this thread, but maybe I'll do a follow up one sometime about physically replacing the drive motor, gears, and laser on many of these old systems. You can buy preassembled drives for many old systems. I have a stock of Sega Saturn, PC Engine, and CD32 drives just in case.

Also pertinent - people have begun developing drive replacements. There is already a dreamcast one and one for the saturn in development. These replace the entire drive entirely with an SD Card reader. This lets you read an SD Card as though it were a GD-Rom (or, when the saturn's reader is done, as a CD-ROM).

It's funny how I was looking at a Youtube video on this a couple days ago and this resurfaces here. There are also SD card readers that plug in through the EXT port on the back of the Dreamcast and requite a boot disc (or whatever) to use them. But the data transfer rate is too slow for running actual retail games from it, and it is really only viable for some of the home brew games.

 

[Krejlooc]

This post reminded me of an ebay listing of Amiga Giana Sisters that I saw recently. Is there a way to tell from the photos if it's the real deal or not?

It's probably real. The problem isn't the validy of the disk or the shell, the problem is knowing if the game's code is unmodified. Trainers and cracks for Great Giana Sisters were extremely popular and distributed in magazines. You would install these over the real discs. So, while there are several real copies of Great Giana Sisters out there, people in the Amiga community have been searching for ages for an original, unmodified copy. It seems virtually everybody installed at least a trainer on their copies. Keep in mind the Amiga version only sold for a short time period before being pulled.

Another extremely popular mod of the time is one that replaced the sprites with Super Mario Bros sprites.

Luckily the C64 version has been properly archived.

 

[JSoup]

I'd like to mention that demo discs for ps1 and onward through Xbox are really a neat artifact of the game industry that I'd like to preserve. Given how little to no physical media may exist soon, they are particularly identified with a narrow band of time within the industry. Just my particular predilection.

This. It's too bad many of the old Playstation Magazine monthly demo discs are hard to come by (but then, they normally aren't expensive to acquire when you track one down).

 

[bjork]

It's probably real. The problem isn't the validy of the disk or the shell, the problem is knowing if the game's code is unmodified. Trainers and cracks for Great Giana Sisters were extremely popular and distributed in magazines. You would install these over the real discs. So, while there are several real copies of Great Giana Sisters out there, people in the Amiga community have been searching for ages for an original, unmodified copy. It seems virtually everybody installed at least a trainer on their copies. Keep in mind the Amiga version only sold for a short time period before being pulled.

Another extremely popular mod of the time is one that replaced the sprites with Super Mario Bros sprites.

Luckily the C64 version has been properly archived.

Ah, I wasn't aware people would copy over their originals with the cracks. That's pretty wild. I had some bootleg of the C64 Super Mario thing for years before I'd ever heard of Giana Sisters, heh.

 

[Dragoon En Regalia]

For those interested in preservation of Japanese PC games and hardware, you should look into the Game Preservation Society's work. They're doing copies of vanilla releases all the time and are trying to win a research grant from the national government. Several domestic collectors and a French man have been working on this project for many years now.

 

[Syph Medwes]

Wow, a really nice write-up, never knew you could use CF cards as mini-hard-drives.

Yea learning that from reading the OP was pretty interesting not gonna lie

 

[Peltz]

Anyone know of a way to make copies of Famicom Disk System games?

 

[Krejlooc]

Anyone know of a way to make copies of Famicom Disk System games?

So FDS games are nothing special, they're just normal QuickDisk disks with extra holes notched into the top for copy protection reasons. Bootleg FDS games are not uncommon, and any QuickDisk writer can write FDS games.

The problem isn't writing FDS games, it's finding media for it that still works. QuickDisks are like 35 years old now. Finding new, working QuickDisks is near impossible, because they stopped producing these disks 25 years ago.

Luckily, Famicom flashcarts exist that can also play FDS games. Only downside is they don't use the FDS audio hardware.

 

[Krejlooc]

For those interested in preservation of Japanese PC games and hardware, you should look into the Game Preservation Society's work. They're doing copies of vanilla releases all the time and are trying to win a research grant from the national government. Several domestic collectors and a French man have been working on this project for many years now.

Doing gods work. It also seems obvious, but the MAME project is also great for archiving and preserving arcade games. It's funny, most people think Video Games are forever, like the way we preserve art and film and stuff like that. Thousands of arcade games have been forever lost to time because they were never preserved. Arcade history in general is very muddy and poorly documented. The MAME project is the best ongoing preservation project for Arcade games.

 

[Laevateinn]

This thread has made me aware that the X68000 is a thing that I have to buy.

 

[Krejlooc]

This thread has made me aware that the X68000 is a thing that I have to buy.

 

[Dragoon En Regalia]

This thread has made me aware that the X68000 is a thing that I have to buy.

Yes, sir, you shall buy that glorified abacus! And then inflate your electric bill using it, lol.

 

[Tetranet]

Very interesting, it's amazing how much technology has changed and how many variations existed before.

 

[Gagaman]

Having just bought a Amiga computer again recently I learnt about dying floppy disks the hard way: bought a lot of cheap games that didn't run. The Amiga I picked up from a bootsale was a Amiga 600, so not as customizable as a 500+ or 1200 but will do me for now. I have a CF card reader for it now but sadly the 600 doesn't have enough default RAM to run WHDload, though it can run some PD games from the CF card like Drip, which is awesome. I also have an Amiga CD32.

Brilliant OP btw.

 

[goonergaz]

One common fault of all these types of machines is that the storage medium they shipped games on are dying en-mass today. Floppy disks - both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" disks - and magnetic tapes are becoming unreliable and finding backup (read: new) media to make a copy with is becoming increasingly difficult. Today, realistically, you should not be playing your original floppy drive and tape games because any time you use these mediums might be the last.

I have loads of old media in particular some old C64 floppy disks and one specific disk is special to me...in my youth I was quite a football manager on a game called 'The Double'. I played loads of seasons and kept stats in a book of all players, matches, times of goals - I even added graphs to include things like 'times most likely to score' etc! I was so 'sad' that at one point (after 5 seasons IIRC) my mum threw out said book without realising it's importance so I started a new book and created a history saying that the old stadium burnt down and all previous records had been lost! lol

Anyway, digression aside, it would be nice to one day return to said game save for one last season...however as stated by OP I fear it will not work so (like the hardware) it all sits waiting for the day I play Russian Roulette...but each day that passes means less chace of success

 

[Mr.Ock]

Great read and amazing dedication, OP!

 

[cantona222]

Great topic. I don't own any games of these formats though. So please preserve them for me and the future generations

I am wondering. Will NES, SNES, Genesis cartridges eventually die sometime in the future?

 

[HolyBaikal]

This thread makes me want to collect lots of old hardware.

Like a PC-98 and a X68000.
I really like Cho Ren Sha on my computer, and I've always wanted to try it on the X68000.

There's lots of other games I'd like to try, too.

 

[NumberThree]

Great thread! I love your solution of having everything needed (properly set up OS and the game) on each CF card. Playing PC games from a cartridge

 

[petran79]

Kudos from me too!

I dont mind playing older games on newer systems, but one serious aspect that is missing in all virtualization software is Direct3D acceleration in Windows 98.
I have to play a lot of old titles in 2D pixelated acceleration

Eg I have Flying Corps and Dungeon Keeper.
Though they were for MS-DOS, they released a Direct3D patch for Windows 9x. Graphical leap was evident and you had also smoother motion.

Unfortunately I only owned an Ati Rage Pro back then, so it couldnt utilize all Direct3D features. But it was a much better experience.

Dungeon Keeper 1, despite the numerous fan made content, can still not be played with Direct3D acceleration. You'll need a non-virtualized Windows 98 PC for this.

Also the General Midi emulation is not correct in a lot of games

Windows XP was the main reason PC gaming had a crisis for a a while.
Developers had to abandon Windows 9x/DOS and move to NT architecture.

For a while I couldnt play any older games at all. In early 2000 I only could use VDMsound to have sound in DOS games.

So backwards compatibility was almost non-existant in the early days of XP.

Doing gods work. It also seems obvious, but the MAME project is also great for archiving and preserving arcade games. It's funny, most people think Video Games are forever, like the way we preserve art and film and stuff like that. Thousands of arcade games have been forever lost to time because they were never preserved. Arcade history in general is very muddy and poorly documented. The MAME project is the best ongoing preservation project for Arcade games.

this recent development deserves mention. a lot of copy protected arcade games are destined to fade into oblivion if they are not dumped

http://daifukkat.su/blog/archives/2014/09/05/nmk004_rom_dumping_progress/

 

[HolyBaikal]

That's really sad. I wonder what those thousands of games are.

Games disappearing forever would be terrible. I kind of wish all video games were saved.
Well.. some video games I really don't much like. And some of them are gross. But.. it would be really sad to lose some of the amazing video games out there.

This makes me wonder about all the kinds of amazing video games I'm missing and never heard of. I have a hard time keeping up with some of the most popular arcade games because there's so many of them.

 

[Peltz]

So FDS games are nothing special, they're just normal QuickDisk disks with extra holes notched into the top for copy protection reasons. Bootleg FDS games are not uncommon, and any QuickDisk writer can write FDS games.

The problem isn't writing FDS games, it's finding media for it that still works. QuickDisks are like 35 years old now. Finding new, working QuickDisks is near impossible, because they stopped producing these disks 25 years ago.

Luckily, Famicom flashcarts exist that can also play FDS games. Only downside is they don't use the FDS audio hardware.

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, the lack of audio from the flashcarts makes it an automatic disqualifier to me. I might as well emulate at that point since audio is the main reason why I prefer the original hardware.... particularly with 8-bit and 16-bit systems.

Plus, I like hearing the FDS load the game. It's part of the charm. Would this work to rewrite the data on one of my disks if it ever becomes corrupt or would the disk pretty much be unusable at that point?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E9MD700/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Also, is that the right size?

 

[Krejlooc]

I am wondering. Will NES, SNES, Genesis cartridges eventually die sometime in the future?

Yes, they will all succumb to bitrot eventuall and stop working. Luckily, using something like Retrode, it's trivial to dump Genesis, 32X, Master System, SNES, N64, Gameboy, and Game Gear games, and you can then use an everdrive to put those dumps onto an SD Card and then run said SD card on your system of choice.

Would this work to rewrite the data on one of my disks if it ever becomes corrupt or would the disk pretty much be unusable at that point?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E9MD700/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Also, is that the right size?

No, the writer you have selected uses PC Formatted 3.5" High Density floppies. The Famicom Disk System used modified QuickDisks. Further, if your disk is reporting damaged sectors, you can't write over them and restore lost data, it's the disk that is physically damaged at that point. They are trash at that point.