/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8487520
What makes you think they should be crumbling away into dust at this point? What makes you think those plastics won’t be around long after you’re dead?

>>8487520
The ROM will lose data way before anything happens to the PCB. Unless you're in a very humid environment with salt in the air, most people aren't though.

The PCBs are usually made of fiberglass and are well-protected. The major wear components are the label, the contacts, and any batteries or electrolytic capacitors that might be in there.

My Genesis games are rotten af and don't read. I thought it was my console at first but it convinced me to get an everdrive so life is good :)

>>8487520
>>8487543
Lmao Nintendo cartages are better than Segashit. Who knew.

>>8487547
Good thing the Sega games are better.

So technically no physical game with a rom will last forever?

>>8487520
How old are you, OP? I get you can't actually say because GR2, but...

>>8487558
Correct, no media will though, all you can do is renew it to keep it "alive", usually by copying it over.

>>8487558
Proper storage conditions can help a lot with that.

>>8487558
Nothing will last forever.

>>8487547
You will never be an anime girl

>>8487558
Of course, that's why dumping ROMs is so important. I doubt that I'm going to outlive the cartridges I own, at least

>>8487520
There's no reactive materials in there.

>>8487520

Carts have a life span of at least 100 years

>>8487520
Nintendium

>>8487547
None of my Sega carts are yellowing faggot

>>8487573
We're never gonna meet face to face, so it doesn't matter.

>>8487736
If you were to become an anime girl, then would you meet face to face with me?

>>8487736

Those large eyes and facial features would look freakish in real life.
Only in 2D.

>>8487558
neither will you

>>8487778
So is the defense of collecting overpriced games simply the fact that even though games won't last forever, neither will we?

>>8487520
Better question: how come my n64 cartridges still retain my saves while the game boy ones are all gone?

>>8487854
Because n64 carts have built in flash or eeprom.

>>8487843
Not sure what you're having trouble with here

>>8487843
Yes...? Are you anhedonic or something

>>8487632
>Source:
>Dude, trust me.

>>8487854

Gameboy carts use SRAM, very low power RAM that pretty much just needs voltage to retain the information. Powered by a battery that because pretty much no current can hold it for a long time, many years. But still runs out at some point. That's then they lose their saves.
N64 carts save on memory that does not need voltage to retain the information. So no battery to run out.

>>8487869
possibly

>>8487843
>defense
Buying games doesn’t need defending. Just buy them if you want, or download ever No-Intro ever and emulate if you want. It matters about as much as your masturbation habits, which is to say that nobody cares but you.

>>8487520
>What the fuck are they made of?
SOUL

>>8487558
No, bitrot will eventually corrupt the data enough that it won't work. You can always replace the chips however! (Assuming that replacements exist)

>>8488024
what the hell is bitrot?

>>8488024
Doesn't bitrot just occur if the games are not played for awhile?

>>8487536
> The ROM will lose data
Cartridges typically used masked rom, so the data was encoded in the physical structure of the chip, these roms do not lose data, of course they will eventually fail, but that will take a very long time.

>>8487547
based
>>8487552
cope

>>8488035
It's a side effect of every N64 cart being personalized.

>>8488046
how exactly will they eventually fail?

>>8487520
>What the fuck are they made of?

Silicon, plastic, metal. All quite durable things. Plastic pollution is annoying because plastic lasts for god damn ever.

>>8488035
It's a fancy way of saying the physical material of the storage degrades over time (as do all materials), which eventually results in data corruption.

>>8488042
Perhaps, if the heat and/or current makes the circuitry less brittle. It's not a simple equation.

>>8488054
Apparently ICs have a great deal of mechanical stress due to having different layers bonded together, eventually the device will fail due to stress migration.

>>8487520
Nintendium

>>8487520
The electrolytic capacitors will die first.

meme thread

>>8487520
PCB is made from fiberglass it literally never breaks down naturally.

>>8487543
My Genesis carts still work fine, have you tried cleaning then with isopropyl alcohol?

>>8487558
>>8488024
Disc rot is much more worrisome than bitrot

>>8487547
This is a rather sad reality for sega hardware. They really cheaped out on build quality in order to stay competitive with Nintendo's prices, which is why so much sega shit needs to be repaired by the owner these days. Game Gears are the most obvious example, but Dreamcasts are another example of this problem.

>>8487878
That's almost correct, many N64 games still use batteries and SRAM. Ocarina of Time uses a battery for example, whereas Majora's Mask doesn't and uses FRAM instead.

>>8488843
Don't SNESs have self-destructing CPUs due to shitty power filtering?

>>8488710
Plastic also only breaks down when exposed to UV light.

>>8487520
That little cap or resistor is more likely to go than the chips. Also, wear on the contacts if you swap carts a lot. The real issue are the processors on the actual systems, especially as the system's get dirtier power over time with power supplies and components on the boards wearing out/dying. Also, shitty chink replacement PSUs delivering shitty power. Systems after the 3rd gen are really going to get hammered by this. Which is why emulation and FPGA are so important for future prospects.

>>8487520
They have, you just must have not noticed it. I have it on good authority from several poor angry children that it's happening all the time.

>>8487558
Correct. Whether the universe ends with a bang or a whimper your carts will be lost.

i dont think i can handle the fact that my crt and consoles are eventually going to be trash

>>8489170
Your CRT will certainly outlive you.

>>8488843
>blocks your path
Nintendo is the absolute king of cheap hardware, but they also tend to design things to survive 5-year-olds.

>>8489178
what about phospher rot

>>8488804
Yes, they are literally rotten. 10 out of my 12 games don't work.

>>8489178

>>8488048
seethe shittendo fanboy

>>8489178
Yeah, but the CRTs are cheating.

>>8489409
Stop storing your Mega Drive games in a septic tank

>>8487878
Why dont they just use flash ram for everything if it doesnt require a battery and lasts way longer?

>>8490330
Because it was expensive for those purposes back in the day, zoomer

>>8487558
Its incredibly difficult to store information for more than a few hundred years. This is why Scientologists have multiple copies of their holy book etched into metal plates in several secure storage sites around the world. For the rest of us, we just keep making copies of copies and hoping errors don't build up.

>>8490817
>hoping errors don't build up.

Aren't checksums for that?

>>8490857
Yes, but you are assuming that all data stored is worth treating with that level of maintenance and redundancy. For the overwhelming majority of data, its not worth the price or effect. Video game romsets will be fine though. Your mom’s facebook pics? Eventually will be corrupted assuming they aren’t burnt to the ground during social unrest or natural disaster.

>>8487762
Good thing 3DPD doesn't matter.

>>8490857

Checksums can only tell you THAT an error has occured, not WHERE. Where they are used the the solution is to typicallly request the packet/block again.
There ARE correction-cabable codes (Error correction codes, ECC), but with error correction codes the thing is you have a tradeoff between protection bits and actual payload bits, the more secure the less space you can use for actual data.
Also nothing prevents the protection bits themselves from being corrupted, so the code has to be able to detect its own corruption a well.
ECC are already used with CDs and DVDs etc to correct bit errors from scratches or dust when the laser cannot read sth for a short burst, but when errors pile up errors in the correction bits and bytes pile up as well. That is the main problem when making copies of copies, the correction degenerates as well.

>>8491030
Some data are really not worthy. "Pics" might be really a good example, since you mentioned them. I've met people who lost their pictures (in one case, it wasn't even lost, just in a different folder) and they were all "oh, noes! My pics! What will I do? Life's over!" One week later and they had already taken tons of new pictures and life just went on. Granted, not all pictures are worthless selfies, those which are important should be well preserved, but - since they are fewer - it's easier to checksum them all after a backup creation or restoration.

Anyway, checksum *every* data is not only demanding, but also unnecessary. It's like storing your dirty socks into a security vault. As long as important things are being secured, the rest can take the risk. I have some romsets well-preserved, but just for the systems I really care about. I have other romsets too, but those I'm not sure are well-preserved. They seem to be, but who knows?

>>8491060
I agree. And all the data worth preserving will still be lost given enough time via civil unrest, coronal mass ejection, totalitarian censorship, hiring 1 literal retard who fucks it up from negligence after the last 100 guys did their jobs correctly.

>>8490330
>lasts way longer?
Think for a second anon. Why would that even be a concern for Nintendo?

>>8491060
You seem knowledgeable, so teach me if I'm doing something wrong. I have my dump, it works fine, as intended, checksums match. I backup. Check their hashes. If they missmatch, I do as you say and request the faulty ones again. Now they match. Don't I have a perfect copy on a new and healthy media? Isn't my job just to make a proper backup befofe the media falters?

>>8491079
Yeah, that's another problem with unclear solutions. What I can say is: if a data is important to you, and you can backup it, then do it yourself, with at least one of the backups being offline and well-protected. It's not much, but if many people do it, we can protect a good chunk of content.

>>8491051
You seem knowledgeable, so teach me if I'm doing something wrong. I have my dump, it works fine, as intended, checksums match. I backup. Check their hashes. If they missmatch, I do as you say and request the faulty ones again. Now they match. Don't I have a perfect copy on a new and healthy media? Isn't my job just to make a proper backup befofe the media falters?

>>8491079
Yeah, that's another problem with unclear solutions. What I can say is: if a data is important to you, and you can backup it, then do it yourself, with at least one of the backups being offline and well-protected. It's not much, but if many people do it, we can protect a good chunk of content.

So assuming the earth has 1000 years to go, all of the games in this timeline will be long rotten and apart of history hundreds of years from now huh?

>>8491269
>Don't I have a perfect copy on a new and healthy media?

In the certainty the checksum provides. A checksum is always a hashing, mapping from the space of all possible bitstreams the length of your checked data to the n-bit residual term, with for example CRC32 that would mean 2^32 - 1 or roughly 4 billion values. It is pretty easy to DELIBERATELY modify the data so it still has the same CRC value for example. You hope that the probability that random errors lead to an identical checksum is extemely small. This is your certainty that your data is intact. You could try two different checksums like a CRC one and a hashing algorithm like a SHA one, if both deliver the same result as for the original data the probability that your data is faulty should be astronomically small.

>>8488007
Mcfucking kill yourself

Any cartridge over 25 years is prone to failure. It's a matter of when, not if.

>>8491420
Thanks! I have just a superficial knowledge of the matter, so I'm often not sure. I think bigger is better, so I always go for, at least, SHA-256 when hashing. Is this a good practice? It takes way longer, but my backups aren't huge, so it doesn't matter much.

>>8491695

Sounds good

CRC is mostly used simply because it is super fast, since it can be implemented in a feedback shift register, this makes them perfect for being used on smaller blocks, they are typically used for smaller portions of data like packets, this also has the reason that IF a failure is detected the block as already mentioned has to be delivered again - and therefore with smaller blocksize that is much more convenient (imagine CRC-hashing a downloaded 1 GB file and only THEN detecting a mismatch - and then having to download THE WHOLE THING again). Smaller blocksize also means that the mapped from space becomes smaller and so the relative safety of the hashing increases. It is not made for detecting deliberate manipulations but random bit errors and with small packets therefore is the perfect choice.
The much slower cryptographic hashing methods are therefore only used when the security aspect is needed.

For integrity checks they seem like a good choice though, they are designed in a way that even the slightest (bit-)change in the stream spreads over the whole block and through the avalanche effect lead to a completely different result and the larger size of the residual term means a larger number of values and therefore less probability for a random collision.
Of course by simple logic we can deduce that unless your backups are not 256 bits or less in size themselves there would always be possible errors that lead to a collision (a collision in this case means you don't detect the faulty data as having errors since it has the same hash) considering most people would not bother to verify the integrity of their backups via hashing AT ALL doing that with a very high probability ensures your backups are 1:1 copies.

>>8487558
Only God lasts forever young zoomer.

>>8491794
Thanks for clarifying! The data I backup is mostly static, and the dynamic ones are small (all of them are still less than 1GB, even after years of accumulation), so I backup once in, like, every few months. It doesn't hurt to leave an integrity check running overnight. However, I've not always did that, and things used to go smoothly, save for optical media backups. I prefer to make those copies on external hard drives. Are they good enough, provided you replace them in the proper timing?

>>8487520
They were made before everything was made to break

>>8487558
They'll last long enough

>>8491628
>Source: my ass

>>8491812

Optical rewritable media - be it CD or DVD are regarded as having relatively low durability. Of course that is just that worst case value again which you by personal experience will be able to deny. CD-RW according to wikipedia have an expected data durability of 5-10 years - I DEFINITELY have CD-RWs from more than 10 years ago which still work perfectly fine, so yeah...
The magnetic platters of hard disks on the other hand is physically very durable, the biggest danger to the saved bits is the Earth's magnetic field slowly remagnetizing them. But overall they are regarded as better than optical media. The biggest problem with them is of course that a CD is standalone whereas the drive needs all it mechanical parts like the motor and the firmware which are additional points of failure. HOWEVER, if the data is really important in case the drive itself failed the platters themselves could still be read by professionals so it's not a complete loss.
Overall harddisks are still regarded as the better choice for backup than optical media. I backup on external harddisks as well, although that also has the reason that I like to do complete 1:1 mirrorings of the whole system via dd for which an external drive is of course much more convenient.

>>8491907
Thanks a lot for your patience! I learned quite a bit with you! Thanks again!

>>8489184
I fixed mine years ago by re-tightening the connector manually, and then by never pressing the games down (which is what actually bends the pins out of wack in the first place).

Between telling kids to push the carts down and telling them not to use isopropyl alcohol to clean the cartridge pins, it's a miracle they didn't sell more NES to families who couldn't figure out why the Nintendo stopped working. Nintendo of America not only fucked up on the redesign but doubled down on making sure you fucked it up as much as possible every time you used it.

>>8490817
>Its incredibly difficult to store information for more than a few hundred years.
Yes. This is why we have literally millions of documents hundreds, even thousands of years old.
>For the rest of us, we just keep making copies of copies and hoping errors don't build up.
Me and countless others have been using metal for cold storage for years. Anyone with a giant "lazer" does this all the time and every cryptofag who doesn't but isn't retarded has someone do it for him.

>>8492375
>Yes. This is why we have literally millions of documents hundreds, even thousands of years old.
You are over estimating both the quality and quantity of written material to have survived this long by several orders of magnitude.

>>8492761
Retard

>>8488843
>Dreamcasts
That's usually the disc laser, and it will happen with every CD based console because disc lasers are unreliable trash even today.

>>8492761
>quantity=quality + quantity
The only thing I might have been overestimating is your intelligence, when I assumed you could tell the difference. Zoom zoom.

>>8491907
That is true of the cheap DVD-R/CD-Rs you can buy at the grocery store, but there are archival quality discs that have higher quality dye that last 50-100 years. If you want to spend the money, you can get into M-DISC blu-ray and those supposedly last 1000 years. I wouldn't scoff at that either because the US military has invested billions into M-DISC. The big pro to archival quality optical media is that it can survive a Carrington event/EMPs.

>>8493730
Not the person you are responding to but I use “m-disc” blurays for cold storage. I do once a year backups. If something is corrupted then hopefully the previous or future backup disk won’t be. But I will mentioned that “m-disc” blurays aren’t real m-discs like the DVD m-discs. All that army research you’ve seen doesn’t apply. The m-disc blurays are still good choice, because HTL blurays already had 100+ year storage ratings which is enough to keep my data alive until my death, which is all I really care about. But if you absolutely must have the mulatto pansexuals who rule the earth in the far future see your anime collection, you must use the 4 GB regular single layer DVD mdiscs.

>>8489636