/vr/ - Retro Games

dunno. i imagine it's like music some bands hang on to the masters for decades, some bands don't. every once in a while a remaster will come out that sounds leagues better than the original because they were able to work with the original recording.

i imagine nintendo has all their original code, or whatever. but i doubt anyone has the code for battle garegga.

>>8551458
Invert the question: is there any company that does a better job at preservation than fans? Fans are at least as good as any game company and usually better.
And another part of preservation is actually being able to play these games after they've been preserved. I doubt you can find a single official emulator that is better, more accurate, and more featureful than the best community emulators for that platform.

It's more a case that until recently, games were made, shipped, and forgotten about. No one really thought there would be such a market for remasters years down the line. Who wants to play a super high quality version of FF7, when FF10 is surely out by that point and people have moved on? Oh, people do want a super high quality version of FF7, and we trashed all of the CGI renders? Whoops.

Whenever there's a newish art from this happens. A lot of early film is lost, a lot of early TV is lost. I'm sure years from now when people want to watch old Youtube videos or flash animations, they'll suddenly find that they're gone forever, because no one thought to save a copy of them. There will probably people who look to archive old Tweets and 4chan posts, even.

>>8551458
the shit with "downloading from ROM sites" is partially a meme. the meme spawned from nintendo using iNES format roms instead of headerless dumps in their virtual console stuff, which does not necessarily indicate that they just copied from a ROM site. the theory was basically debunked after the gigaleak.
However, it has been found that some GOG releases are just using cracked shit, sometimes from scene releases. Now that good, 1:1 dumps are the norm, lazy companies could totally get away with just downloading from Internet Archive and rolling out a build of MAME. I bet those ACA Neo-Geo releases are just that.

>>8551458
Fans are preserving the games, but it's the physical media collectors doing it, not rom dump faggots.
"Preserving" video games with rom downloads is like preserving a classic car by uploading photos of it while the actual car sits on the lawn and rusts.

>>8551458
SEGA literally used ROMs on the Snash Pack collections, but I'm unsure if that was just the outsourced developer.

>>8551458
Well, in the distance future digital will take over and discs will become obsolete. Any current disc you have won’t work because of disc rot and most if not all form of cards, cartridges will not work. So yea Roms on the internet will eventually become the only way to play old games.

I'm have full rom sets for most cartridge consoles and the GC and Dreamcast. I try my best to support the Bros on /t/.

>>8551585
Not the same.

>>8551458
It's hard to say, the thing is that no company would ever admit to doing this so we'll never have any definite proof, however there's been evidence pointing to this in a few key cases - one of the most notable being the ROM used by Nintendo for Super Mario Bros on Wii VIrtual Console (and I believe all other releases) exactly matched a ROM found online. While this doesn't 100% prove it, it brings up the possibility that Nintendo could have lost the original ROM for Super Mario Bros - and if that of all things can be lost it goes to show how important fan preservation is.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us

Even if Nintendo, or any other companies never lost their files however fan preservation is still important for other reasons. Games being lost to licensing issues is one of them - Goldeneye 007 will probably never see a rerelease even on a virtual console because of this. Scott Pilgrim vs the World: The Game was completely inaccessible to people for 6 years and was only playable if you had an Xbox 360 or PS3 that already had it downloaded before it was taken off the store in 2014. Marvel vs Capcom 2's Xbox 360 version is also forever inaccessible even though it's the only console port of the game with online play that ever got released.

Companies not releasing the game overseas despite having tons of fans already playing fan-translations is also another reason to support emulation - Secret of Mana 2 only had an official English release as recently as a few years ago, and Mother 3 still does not and probably never will have an official English release.

>>8555059

Companies have gotten far better about preserving their games in the last few years, with companies like Capcom releasing most of their old games in collections on modern consoles. You can play the entirety of the Devil May Cry series and all of the RE games after PS1 on PS4, Xbox One, AND PC which is just excellent. Sega also releases some great collections. However some key companies like Nintendo and Konami do a really shit job at making sure their legacy games are on modern consoles. Silent Hill HD is god-awful, and the N64 Emulation on Switch is hilariously terrible, with tons of added input lag and missing textures everywhere, which is bizarre considering the N64 emulation on Wii was actually really good.

Yes. There's just too much corporate bullshit that gets in the way of preservation that random anons don't have to adhere to

For example, every fucking rerelease of Crazy Taxi that butchers the soundtrack because they don't have the rights to use the music anymore. If you were totally reliant on Sega keeping Crazy Taxi available you'd be fucked. But the myriad amount of ways there are to play the original release with the original soundtrack intact makes it so you don't have to

Copyright is bullshit

>>8555065
>Copyright is bullshit
Everyone thinks this until they make something worth stealing

>>8551585
anon you can't make a metaphor out of whatever you want, you and me both know why that shit doesn't make any sense. Stop that silly ass.

>>8551458
Perfect example

M2 was rereleasing the original puyo puyo game on the switch in collaboration with Sega.
One of the things they wanted to add was the very rare English version of the game

All roms of it online were questionable and couldn’t be confirmed for legitimacy.

Sega did not have the rom

Sega did not have record of the game EXISTING

So they had to reach out to a collector who happened to have an original board, and that’s how they got the rom for the rerelease.

>>8555059
NES developer here, companies often have the advantage when it comes to preservation due to the fact that they almost always have the original paperwork/ build ROMS filed away somewhere. The problem ends up being if the company survived into the modern era. Stuff like company acquisition, bankruptcy, forclosure, or even just an office change can end up with losses. Less popular franchises are more likely to become lost.

>>8555059
It depends on your version of original. The "original" data from the NES Super Mario Bros would still technically be within production carts and FD's. We've seen Nintendo pull out some of the super early concept sketches for marios sprites before, so the idea that they lost some long forgotten code from that time seems like a stretch.

>>8555064
Agreed, popular companies are getting better at preserving their history. The main argument for fan preservation is the little guys who might have been lost to the void otherwise.

>>8555101
Intresting, Sega had a pretty rough translation from a major player to a third party studio so I would expect that they lost some history allong the way.

>>8555065
>Copyright is bullshit
I think copyright isn't enforced enough. People who draw porn have ruined the online art scene and I wish they were flayed alive.

>>8551458
do you keep the draft of the drawing you create for another person??

>>8555113
This 100%. The danger is not that Nintendo is not preserving its history. The danger is that Nintendo gets bought by someone, and that someone does not give a shit and throws all that stuff out.

I know this will NEVER happen to Nintendo, but its happened a LOT with smaller companies and dev studios.

Some of the bigger houses, like Midway and others, supposedly didn't even save source code for everything. Friend of mine who worked there said he had the sources to things, but the company never kept them in the 90's.

The other reason fans do a better job is because fans can preserve stuff for free and not have to make money on it. No one at EA wants to try and make money off of old IP few people remember, only new IP and football games.

>>8551585
Anon, retro collectors post pictures of their physical collections while the discs are rotting in their cases while the ROM dumpers share their games around for others to play in larger numbers.

>>8551585
You cannot drive a picture of a car.

>>8555335
>>8555336
>>8551585

I'm specifically talking about people dumping roms as saving this stuff. People who horde the shit in their basement do nothing for the industry.

Dumping roms is ESSENTIAL for preservation. Emulation is super rad, and 99% of people in the world are satisfied with an emulated game. It's only the 1% dorks in here who care about MISTrs.

If not for pirates and rom dumpers, the Atari ST would have almost 0 software left today. None of the original disk images are out there anymore, but the pirate disks are, and they cataloged everything for that system, while the original developers and publishers went bankrupt and didn't save a single bit.

>>8555349
>Dumping roms is ESSENTIAL for preservation.

/thread

>>8555349
>Dumping roms is ESSENTIAL for preservation.
This, for 99% of things once it's in the hands of the people, online, it's taken care of. A company can't and won't just give it away

>>8555336

>muh intellectual property

The Enlightenment was a mistake.

>>8551574
>the theory was basically debunked after the gigaleak.
Elaborate?

>>8551585
You'd prefer the guy preserving the car disassemble it for "maximum documentation"? Tons of people will look at the car; everybody won't get to drive it.

For whatever else one can say about them Nintendo are pretty good with preserving their stuff; they have Famicom source code still in the archives.

poor Irem probably lost a lot of archived code when the Fukishima earthquake wrecked their headquarters

>>8551458
Yes. Nintendo had to download SMB, SEGA had to do the same with their System 16 games too and there's been other examples.

>>8555349
yeah you end up with stuff like a 50 year old Britbong posting on a Yutube comment section like "bloody hell I did this Spectrum game when I was 19 never imagined seeing it again after all this time"

>>8555847
They can't because Nintendo was caught red-handed.

>>8555983
Guru Larry?

>>8555847
>>8555987
not that anon but iirc it was something like nintendo having hired a dude who was most experienced with headered roms and he simply slapped them onto roms from nintendo's archive because it was what he was used to

we knew about that beforehand but the gigaleak showed that they had development material and builds ranging an insane amount of time back including games that never even materialized for their first couple of consoles that they lent out on hand to even outsourced developers, thus making it a ridiculous assumption that they would have to look elsewhere for ROM material

>>8551458
>Is it actually true that fans do a better job preserving video games than the companies themselves?
Yes
>Are there actual cases of companies accidentally destroying their games that they had to download them from ROM sites or is this just a meme?
No

>>8556065
>having hired a dude who was most experienced with headered roms and he simply slapped them onto roms from nintendo's archive because it was what he was used to
That is bullshit straight from N's ass.

>>8551568
This has already happened, textfiles.com has something like 4 million 4chan threads from the 2000s (text only)

>>8551585
As someone who owns probably over a thousand physical games, this is bait

We need both. Especially in the case of things with limited printings, but the physicals are susceptible to damage.

Physicals are still important and we should keep them around as long as we can, because they are more likely to survive a period of apathy, and if the law cracks down harder on emulation at some point wee can return to the physicals to rebuild our online libraries later. But the number of physical copies of anything decreases regularly as things are lost, damaged or destroyed. We need a two-pronged approach

>>8555335
Disc rot is a meme

>>8556251
yea we live in an eternal world where nothing ever dies...

>>8556340
Everything is immortal, even you!

Not anymore, AAA games on PC with Denuvo aren't getting cracked, current gen consoles still not completely broken. Shit is going to be lost.

>>8556492
I'm It usually takes years after release to crack a console. It's not getting any easier either.

>>8551458
Yes
PIC FUCKING RELATED

>>8551585
dangerously based

>>8551458
Rare has shown evidence that they preserved a lot of their stuff on twitter. Seems like the Stamper brothers realized early on that their software could be valuable for the future and since they were in charge they had the clought to make sure the stuff was preserved. It wasn't fool proof as they indicated that possible one of the hard drives failed on an old sgi rendering machine.

>>8555065
The music get changed then in a later version it gets restored in crazy taxi all the time. The current mobile version has the og sound track.

>>8551553
Companies used to make good emulators but why bother now. The model 2 emulator on ps2 was good for sega rally and ps1 even had some arcade games emulated in collections.

>>8555847
The gigaleak contained master ROMs for every Famicom/NES game.

>>8551539
>imagine nintendo has all their original code

Didn't they use a SMB1 rom from emuparadise or something for the wii?

>>8551585
Classic cars are
A. Restored using custom made fan parts(because the parts they need can be out of circulation for up to a 100 years)
B. Made to be driven/raced. So that people can experience how the vehicles sounded or drove. The only people that don't are museums and they don't give a shit about the internals.

Emulation is a necessary part of preservation.

>>8551458
dude they literally lost the source code for final fantasy 8

>>8555064
Still no RE:CV on PC. Which I find highly strange considering they re-released it on PS4/XB1

No one is ever going to have the source code to Anglo-Saxon Assault for PC. No one but me, that is. No one would want to play that game anyways…

>>8558637
No one kept the code to anything, which is why every FFVII is a port of the PC version with it's shadow render mistake and audio cue errors and every re-release of FFI - FFVI are almost all built from the ground up

>>8551458
>Are there actual cases of companies accidentally destroying their games
Atari in the 80s.

>>8556340
Yeah that's definitely what I said, very genuous response