Videogame Publishers: No Preserving Abandoned Games
Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2015 9:43 pm
Apparently the publishers have taken notice of archive.org's hosting of abandonwarez with online game play and do not like it.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/v ... d-archives
However, archive.org would have a much stronger case if they actually had original copies of the media. What they have is the typical warez/abandonwarez copies that have been bent, spindled and mutilated. More often than not archive.org would have a much stronger case if they actually had original copies of the media. What they have is the typical warez/abandonwarez copies that have been bent, spindled and mutilated. More often than not they are cracked, hacked, ripped or modified in ways that introduce bugs not present in the original distributions.
Some of these bugs are well known enough to indicate right away when someone has an illicit copy by just reporting a certain bug. Crashes or bugs can occur when a game's script is bypassed to get past some copy protection scheme when it also bypasses the setting of timers. Rip out speech or video resources to keep the size down and the game might crash when it cannot find the missing resource.
And I would certainly not call a copy of a game archival quality when a cracker also adds his signature to the game resources to be displayed during game play.
I have looked through archive.org's collection and found many games that contain files indicating that my installers had been used on these warez versions. If they were truly preservationist they would be doing it like the Software Preservation Society does. The make archival quality images of the original disks. This collection is not available for download to the general public unless it is images of a game that that person contributed.
These images are from reading the magnetic flux of the disks that captures all of the information on the disks, including hidden "bad" tracks for copy protection, such as the Infamous CPC that Sierra used during the AGI era. I covered this in my post about Data Preservation & Imaging Diskettes.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/v ... d-archives
However, archive.org would have a much stronger case if they actually had original copies of the media. What they have is the typical warez/abandonwarez copies that have been bent, spindled and mutilated. More often than not archive.org would have a much stronger case if they actually had original copies of the media. What they have is the typical warez/abandonwarez copies that have been bent, spindled and mutilated. More often than not they are cracked, hacked, ripped or modified in ways that introduce bugs not present in the original distributions.
Some of these bugs are well known enough to indicate right away when someone has an illicit copy by just reporting a certain bug. Crashes or bugs can occur when a game's script is bypassed to get past some copy protection scheme when it also bypasses the setting of timers. Rip out speech or video resources to keep the size down and the game might crash when it cannot find the missing resource.
And I would certainly not call a copy of a game archival quality when a cracker also adds his signature to the game resources to be displayed during game play.
I have looked through archive.org's collection and found many games that contain files indicating that my installers had been used on these warez versions. If they were truly preservationist they would be doing it like the Software Preservation Society does. The make archival quality images of the original disks. This collection is not available for download to the general public unless it is images of a game that that person contributed.
These images are from reading the magnetic flux of the disks that captures all of the information on the disks, including hidden "bad" tracks for copy protection, such as the Infamous CPC that Sierra used during the AGI era. I covered this in my post about Data Preservation & Imaging Diskettes.