US copyright law 'forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods' for game preservation, say historians who are 'disappointed' after being denied a DMCA exemption
US copyright law 'forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods' for game preservation, say historians who are 'disappointed' after being denied a DMCA exemption
The Video Game History Foundation had proposed rule changes that would make it easier for researchers and archivist to legally access old games.
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Reminder that the reason that GOG is DRM-free and offers offline installers is because it was started by former pirates (in a sense).
If there is a game you love, buy it from GOG and archive the offline installer. If it isn't available on GOG, pirate it. The number of games that have disappeared is too damn high.
I'd also like to add that the yakuza series used for this picture are great games that now come with DRM, unless you buy them on GOG.
I bought a big bundle of the games through steam on sale and Yakuza: Like a Dragon came with DRM on steam. Buy on GOG, its the same game but DRM free.
I should have waited for the GOG sale, now I might pirate it to play the game I bought without DRM.
I feel like I should know this, as a I've been a pc gamer and extra legal aquirer for several decades... But I'm not actually sure what DRM means?
Digital Rights Management, refers to software or hardware that limits access to something unless the user has authorization/licensing.
It's why you can't copy someone's game folder from steam and run it, or burn a PS2 disc and play it on an unmodded console.
Well for games it kind of depends on the specific DRM used and how exactly the game utilities it. DRM means digital rights management but there is a wide variety of DRM and ways it's used.
Some DRM might limit the amount of computers software can be installed on, some might verify the contents to ensure none of the files were changed, some might authenticate with a server before starting up, and some might have kernel level access to read your RAM and log your keystrokes.
I need to get a couple more external drives and make at least one Faraday cage to keep one in.
All my installers are on a 1tb hdd that sits in my dresser. Made it a lot easier to put my games on my new laptop since they were installed before I even got to hooking it up to the internet.
Beware of bit rot, hard drives are meant to be powered occasionally to hold data. Using a recycled computer as a NAS is a great low cost solution.
powered occasionally to hold data
A bit more detail: simply being powered on won't necessarily stop that.
You want something checksumming the data and making sure it's not silently rotting off the disk.
ZFS does this, something like snapraid can do it too, and there's various other methods of making checksums you can validate data integrity with and be able to repair minor corruption. (PAR files, for example.)
A real-world example of this kind of oops is everyone's favorite Youtube Tech Personality(TM) LTT who lost a fuck-ton of data due to not scrubbing data on a ZFS array and had to go through months of restoration to get most of it back, so uh, yeah, make sure you've taken steps to detect and correct the bitrot that's going to happen anyways.
Just as an addition, nothing against ZFS it is a great FS, but BTRFS can this too.
Yeah, that wasn't meant to be remotely comprehensive: there's a lot of ways you can do this ranging from the filesystem to what kind of archives you're storing, to programs that make parity data for validation.
...also, since I haven't started a flamewar yet today, I don't think I'd personally use BTRFS. It's still too new, has had data consistency issues too recently, and just plain doesn't have the kind of historical performance record for something I'd want to use for archival purposes.
Come back in another decade and we'll see how it's been going.
All fair and good arguments, so no flamewar today. Sorry 😜
I know SSDs need to be powered on occasionally due to how they store data, which is why (also due to cost lol) I have most of my stuff on HDDs, though I know those can have issues if you leave them out unprotected.
Not much more I can do without spending a lot more money than I have already. But so far I've never needed to get my second backup.
Which reminds me I need to re-backup the second drive...
You only have 1tb of installers?