
Videogames at the Library of Congress – An Interview with Dave Gibson - mdlincoln
http://www.nodontdie.com/dave-gibson/
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pomfpomfpomf3
What is the point of a library if "plebeians" cannot access its contents?

1.5 years ago, in 2014, they received a copy of an unreleased PSP game, titled
Duke Nukem Critical Mass:
[https://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/08/dukes-
lega...](https://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/08/dukes-legacy-video-
game-source-disc-preservation-at-the-library-of-congress/)

Reading the blog post, it seems they are not competent enough to actually run
it, and the best they could do was to open the main executable (BOOT.BIN, the
decrypted version) in a hex editor. Some commenters even tried to help them
run it, of course without any reply. 1.5 years later, the files are still not
available to download, and that disk is basically rotting away somewhere in
the "library".

Please, if you are a game developer, and care about game preservation, don't
submit your games to that library. Instead, upload them anonymously to a
torrent tracker of your choice. The internet will do the rest.

copyright laws suck.

~~~
caseysoftware
I worked on the project at the Library of Congress that led into the
Audiovisual Conservation Center in Culpepper that the article cites. Our
sample data was Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, wire spool recordings
from WW2, and LPs from the 60s and 70s.

You are correct that it is _not_ a lending library and was not intended to be.
The LoC is designed to be a preservation group, closer to a museum than
anything else.

Also - you correctly note - about the problems in "preserving" games (or any
media) long term is the ability to see or play them. That's one of the
problems I was working to solve. And at present, it's still not solved. The
_only_ approach we found for media - video, images, audio - was to have a high
quality master in a lossless format and then store the original physical media
is a safe location free of corrosive materials (like oxygen).

When a better format would come out, you then had the option to convert the
high quality master (2nd choice) or to go back to the original preserved media
and try to get another master (preferred). Of course, that assumes you
preserved the physical media properly...

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onetimePete
The problem is actual getting those games preserved? Systems fade out and
vanish, the hardware went extinct, and the graphics drivers- basically lets
plays is all that will remain from the most video games. Its sad, but
backwards compatibility is bad for business.

