I lost all my Marathon disks but I do still have an original boxed copy of Halo for Mac OS on CD-ROM
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Phanatik@kbin.social 10 months ago
Emulating games is important but I would argue that preserving the games is moreso. If you have discs of old games lying around (I grabbed the original floppy disk version of Marathon by Bungie for less than 5 quid), please find out how to dump them into an ISO or some other archive. It's important now more than ever as games tend towards digital distribution and old games are lost to time. The games don't have to be good, they just need to be preserved.
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Phanatik@kbin.social 10 months ago
Oh man, did you have the entire trilogy? I hope you can find them! CDs are incredibly easy to dump, you just need a disk drive and Linux has easy tools for copying the data into an iso file.
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 10 months ago
No they only made Halo 1 for Mac. I played Halo 2 on Windows XP with a hack that unlocked its dependency on having Vista.
Phanatik@kbin.social 10 months ago
I meant the Marathon trilogy. I'd be so keen to get the original floppy disks for 2 and Infinity.
MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’d argue emulating games is more important to the preserve effort. Unless you have some extremely rare one of a kind prototype game (chances are you don’t) most games have already been dumped at the point. What’s important is these dumps continue to get shared. Emulation drives people to find these games and adds one more seeder to the community meaning the more obscure stuff won’t just be dependent on one person keeping the file alive.
Phanatik@kbin.social 10 months ago
I agree for the most part, however, unless someone had dumped the games in the first place, the emulation wouldn't be possible. It's important that people know how to dump their games because they might be sitting on games that haven't been uploaded yet. I mainly use vimm.net to find ROMs and it tells you how complete the collections are and which games are missing.
pory@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Most “retro” games have been backed up but the definition of retro shifts all the time. You don’t even need to go that far forward: the PS3 and X360 have a ton of missing stuff - games yes but especially DLCs and update versions.
The pre-online era was “easier” - find each revision of a Donkey Kong Country cart and your job’s done. Now, every game has 12 versions and casual pirates that “just want to play the game” only bother sharing the oldest and newest ones. There’s content locked behind promotions and account bonuses. There’s patches that alter or remove content (or patch important speedrun tech out of games). And the presence of online in otherwise single-player games is always going to be something inherently opposing preservation of the original experience - you’re not going to ever get the same experience playing Wind Waker HD with Tingle bottles that I did because either the feature is dead or it’s been reimplemented through something like Pretendo. And with a reimplementation, the source for the community posts is no longer casual fans taking selfies with bosses but instead comprised exclusively of tech savvy users who bothered to install a fake Miiverse on their hacked Wii U / emulator.