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This is why sites and services like Archive.org, MyAbandonWare and Myrient are absolutely vital, and why IP owners generally suck balls.
Emulation is a moral imperative.
I’ve found this to be a pretty good resource for abandoned video games: https://www.myabandonware.com/
Most classic video games are on my computer, so this study was wrong.
The study acknowledges that piracy is a way to play, but it isn’t legal. Basically we need an equivalent of the Library of Congress for video games, which is a reasonable request and conclusion. There is no way to play without ripping your own cartridges, and even that is still legally gray. See https://youtu.be/yj9Gk84jRiE
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/yj9Gk84jRiE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Sexy bot
All noted and agreed, I was just being superficially snarky.
Mobygames is the place for abandonware games.
I also remember people made a more-or-less complete archive of US Playstaion 1 games and distributed it via Usenet IIRC
That NES controller cable hurts.
Still have a bag of old snes and n64 carts in my closet along with at least 1-2 snes and n64 consoles from my childhood.
I would go to garage sales with my mom as a kid every weekend and I still do sometimes looking for clueless people throwing out old consoles.
I still have all my old N64 carts too. Worried that the internal batteries are dead and my childhood saves long gone.
I’ve kept all but my 3DO since 1986 and games. My Sega Master System is the oldest though I have a refurbished Atari 2600. Others include the NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, XBox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, WiiU (my kid used to have a Wii but sold it), and Switch. My wife hounds me because most she thinks are for display but they still work. I have countless games for all of them.
I got lucky and got my NES serviced by Nintendo shortly before the release of the Gamecube, when they were still servicing all their old consoles. Soon enough the Wii released, and when they started releasing old games digitally, they stopped servicing their old consoles.
I’m still glad my NES works great to this day.
I will say my original Legend of Zelda is difficult to get working.
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eh, just pirate the game. if it’s not available anywhere then it probably wasn’t worth having in the first place.
I agree with your first statement, but not the second one.
Same. Companies like Nintendo have repeatedly proven that they have zero interest in preserving their old games. In fact, they often do the exact opposite, and work to stop people from preserving their own (legally owned) game libraries. But Nintendo also has zero interest in re-releasing those older games. So the only way you’re able to realistically play them is via piracy, since the actual company that owns the rights won’t release them for sale on a legal platform.
Or, in some cases arguably worse, only re-releasing those games on subscription-based services.
NCAA Football 14 fans making angry noises.
They’re video games, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.
So why should the Library of Congress exist? Why should the Internet Archive exist?
“They’re books, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.” “They’re web pages, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.”
There’s value in record-keeping. People can analyze it on a technical perspective (like a literary analysis). People can enjoy old games (like reading a book from the 1500s). People can analyze trends in the industry. There are endless reasons why record-keeping could be useful, and you can never plan for all of them ahead of time.
Oh yes, let’s worry about saving the intellectual capitol of paper boy, frogger, etc. It’s meaningless bs that’s why it doesn’t matter.
There are far more valuable stories than those being told in video games.
Even those examples have value. Knowing their history can do wonders for future gameplay design.
So if we have the means to archive them, why not do it?
Well I’m sorry you can’t fathom that there is potential future value in old games. I even said that we can’t know the future value of something like this, so the safest thing to do is to just preserve them as well as we can.
Do you disagree with all of the explicit examples of ways it can be valuable that I laid out? Or do you simply want to assert the games are “meaningless” and ignore every way in which value can still be derived, or could be derived in the future, from them?
I suspect you haven’t actually thought this through and are just being antagonistic for fun; that’s how it comes off, anyway.
