My contribution to the classic gaming community

[Keatah]

An experiment in data preservation.

 

I have an emulation collection that I believe would survive any man-made or natural EMP. It is also a time capsule. We open it about every year, mid-summer or thereabouts and update and verify everything from the drives and optical media backups as well as perform operational tests on the computers.

 

It consists of a honk'n lead lined steel box about 2 cubic metres in size. Though due to the +5 armour steel and lead construction(1) and internal crush-resistant trusswork(1a) it is considerably smaller inside. I didn't weigh it yet, but it takes the 5 of us to barely slide the damned thing. I want to put this a metre or so directly below or to the side of the wine cellar.

 

The contents consist of a 2 laptops, netbook, some controllers, various usb converters and interfaces, spare batteries, 2 folding solar panels and inverters, other power adapters, usb hard disks, box of bare hard disks, electronics tool kit, backups of the flashroms(2) used in the drives and laptop, and simple straightforward printed-on-paper documentation on how to access everything and perform troubleshooting if needed. Each of the 2 exact copies of each drive is positioned differently within the capsule, one horizontally, the other vertically(2a). Condensation and thermal protection has also been considered. A 3rd set of drives is encapsulated in a silicone material to shield against water and would survive hundreds of meters below sea-lever, we’re sure. These drives can only be run for a few minutes at a time since they have no airflow, they would take forever to re-load. It would be more cost-effective to trash them and replace them; since replacing the sealant block takes a weeks on end. So we only do incremental updates.

 

My personal favorite highlights consist of Intellivision, Astrocade, Atari 400/800/8-bit, Odyssey2, Trs-80 model 1,2 and 3, Colecovision, Vectrex, Microvision, Aquarius, Adam, C-64, Vic-20, 2600/5200/7800, Kim-1, Timex Sinclair, Apple-//e, ][, ][+, ///, Amiga 500/1000, Ti-99/4a, PSX, Nes 8-bit, SMS, various x86 and DosBox(3), All M.A.M.E. games, All M.E.S.S. systems and gigs of software and extras for each(4).

 

I personally guarantee that classic gaming and computing *WILL* live through the toughest post-apocalyptic environment you can possibly imagine, and beyond. If this one cache is destroyed, somehow, there will be other copies available. But until more funding becomes available, the stuff will reside in plastic baggies stuffed into a cardboard box that was(is) shipped cross country and overseas. The security comes from there being multiple copies at a long distance way away from the main archive. No other epoch has seen code this well protected.

 

This is my contribution to the emulation community.

 

 

 

Notes:

(1)The lead plates are intermeshed with each other and cut in such a way that that a particle on a straight trajectory will see no gaps or holes to sneak through (my crowning achievement! haha)

 

(1a)A Leach 2R stalls on this.

 

(2)I keep hearing that flashroms are only guaranteed for about 10 years data retention. Though I have yet to see some of my earlier electronics with flash memory fail.

 

(2a)For added protection against varying radiation angles of incidence and in the event there would be physical damage or shock.

 

(3)Made up of many many gigs of old-skool stuff and some modern day things too, covering all genres. Not only games, but applications too, ranging from creativity to the obscure, scientific, medical, astronomy, accounting, etc.. the list goes on.

 

(4)Using the Atari 800 as an example, this system's section alone is 39 something gigs and demonstrates what is included in each system's cache - being made up of book scans, rom/prom/eprom images, disk images, tape images, program listings, advertisements, programmer's notes, my own bbs files and history, several FTP websites worth of disks & docs, various emulators, pcb scans and layouts, databooks for the chips, source and binary codes for emulators and games/apps/oses (where applicable), reviews, magazine scans and text pdf's, audio and video interviews, box scans, manual scans, cheats, cartridge scans, pictures, message board dumps, prototype info, schematics, hardware projects, fpga jedec files. Also included is a misc section for files related to each specific system that doesn't fit the above categories.

[+GroovyBee]

This is my contribution to the emulation community.

:lol: But we don't know where you live in case it all goes horribly wrong .

[Keatah]

Information will be made available no worries pal

[128bytes]

Why don't you find an old 1960's era bomb shelter in your community and use your installation to outfit it as a classic gaming center/teen center? Now THAT would be a great contribution to the classic gaming community! Preserving all the games is much better in conjunction with teaching their awesomeness to the next generation