- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- games@sh.itjust.works
Of course they’ll be used for “recreational purposes”. How do they think museums are supposed to work?
Educational purposes? But yeah the difference is thin in my opinion
I wonder at what temperature do preserved video games burn?
Fahrenheit 999, then the score counter ticks back over to 0
198451° degrees
And this is why I sail the seven seas and have zero reservations about doing so.
Do you seed, though?
Nah I hit and run like a bastard
This makes you no different to a gold hoarding dragon.
⚔️ 🐉 ⚔️
Sailing bastard
Seed your mum
Yep.
Toproms collection. If you can hold it, give us a hand.
I’m sitting on the RetroAchievements collection over here. It is my single most seeded torrent, by leaps and bounds. I went with RA, because it means I can throw any of them at RetroArch and the RetroAchievements integration will work without having to fiddle with game versions. It also has a surprising number of ROM hacks and homebrew.
Ay, elaborate a bit because I see a lot of unofficial RA collections and the official one on archive.org doesn’t list a magnet or torrent file.
Are they seriously just hosting their most current archive in one place?
deleted by creator
I m sry but the title of this post cannot be true unless it’s sarcasm because it sounds really stupid, what else games are used for!?
When the programmers of these old titles are saying they’d rather have people keep playing them even if they’re only available on archive site, I say screw the publishers.
Of course!
Wow, imagine money just flowing into your account because you own the likeness of something.
Of course they’d get riled up if it sounds like that might be affected. They’d have to make something new instead of reselling their hits from 25 years ago and licensing their IP for movies and
immortal wastemerch.
Not The Onion version: “‘People might actually have fun’: Publishers squash video game preservation movement”
If folks today learned that games existed which could be played offline, had no dlc, no microtransactions, no skinner boxes. And those games were actually fun, clearly the whole industry would collapse lol.
Damn right that old video games would be used for entertainment. I have old books, which predate me by decades, that I still read. I watch old movies on DVD’s. I see no reason why games should be any different.
I’m lucky that ever since I’ve been a gamer, I had a PC. Hardware is thus not a problem, and in my case, so is emulation, via VirtualBox. I kept the install disks and license keys (if applicable) for all operating systems I’ve used, so now I have several virtual images I spin up when I want to play a certain game. And I’m finding that I’m still spending most of my time with the older titles…
This will not help anyone who’d like to play their old favorite from the NES or Dreamcast era. And it’s too late to advise only buying games that are platform independent. So kerp up the good fight. In the past you purchased games to own, not a “limited license”. You are entitled to kerp using your entertainment product as you see fit.
I read an old book, and it didn’t need batteries, nor had it microtransactions, nor advertisements, nor did it need updates. Worst of all, I got it for free at my local library. The terror!
Trump: “lol, you mean you used to.”
I always enjoyed the ads in some youth books, like the “one chapter teaser” of the next adventure in the local translation of “Famous Five” by Blyton
Yeah, but those X-Ray Specs worked about as well as anything bought from an Ad thase days
We never had that kind of ads in our books, they came in catalogues I sadly never got to order from even if the "make your own radio"kit with crystal always looked awesome
Those radio kits with the crystals actually worked, I remember building one with my pa. I forget the principle behind them
Sounds like I should try to find a kit before they go all DAB
Ha! I used to do that, too. They also had video tapes at mine, and audio. You could do all sorts of things there. It was publically funded, as it should.
Yeah because I go to the library and complain and scowl the whole time I’m reading. Occasionally I make sure to belt out “I’m not enjoying this! I only do it for preservation reasons!” bunch of greedy fucks.
Note that this really only affects researchers/historians who were hoping to have a copyright exemption for controlled digital lending. This would let them virtually borrow a copyrighted retro game ROM file (from an archive such as the Internet Archive) and play it via emulation through the browser. I have actually played a few retro games on IA using their browser emulator and while it is playable it wouldn’t be my first choice.
For retro game enthusiasts who weren’t aware of these browser emulators not much will change. You still have the same exemptions covering abandonware for personal use and for playing multiplayer games where the publisher has shut down the servers. No, you’re not entitled to the publisher helping you run those games but you are protected if your goal is to reverse engineer the game code in order to create your own fan-made server. Several old multiplayer games have open source servers for this!
Also if you’re playing on original hardware then of course you’re still fully in the clear to buy used cartridges, make backups of them, play them all you want. Yes, some rare are super expensive but a lot of that stuff is due to people collecting sealed and graded games which really has nothing to with actually playing games. You’re not going to spend thousands on a sealed game and then crack it open to play it when you could just buy an open copy for far cheaper or even download a ROM for free.
Anyway, yes, these publishers are idiots pushing out crap games we don’t want to play. That’s fine. If their goal was to kill retro gaming to try to force us to buy new games then they’re still a thousand miles away from that!
Yo ho…
Just use it for llm training and it’ll be OK!
It feels like companies are worried about people not wanting to play new stuff if they have decades of old stuff available. Just like movies right guys?
Watching a movie from 1979
Uhh yea… right.
The hoops i had to go through, to backup my old end of-lifetime-DVD’s on linux. Not to mention the people who figured that stuff out.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of art to enrich society. Making money for copyright holders is a means to an end, not the end itself.
We need a new copyright law that shifts media to public domain if the copyright holder no longer makes it available.
In an ideal society sure, we don’t live in an ideal society
Then whats the purpose of existence if not to strive for a more ideal society?
I think your comment is the most succinct summary in and of itself. It exists like a perfect quote from Greek philosophy. I was purely pointing out the broken issue of copyright as it exists.
The point of existence is to struggle for better existence in some schools of thought as you’ve summarized.
In others, it’s to realize that by struggling through cycles of existence you are not aware of the trap of existence, like Zen Buddhism.
In traditional Abrahamic schools of thought it’s to honor God enough and follow your creed that you get rewarded after you die.
I think the way I feel about existence is more Nihilist. Something like https://youtu.be/E_qvy82U4RE
I was where you were, a nothing matters, what’s the point nihilist. But I learned that I had skills and talents that could help people. Ended up going to law school and now I helping folks.
I believe every person can put their pants on in the morning and go out and make their local community just a little bit better. People get caught up in macro morals but just giving your neighbor a plate of Thanksgiving goods goes such a long way.
Yea, I always liken nihilism to being an asshole, because you reap the rewards, however small or large, of peoples’ labour who didn’t think that way. The least you can do is pay it forward, so it’s more an obligation then anything else.
Oh hey don’t get me wrong. I switched my job from an ad agency to an emergency management SaaS company that was crucial during COVID to ensure vaccines went out to people when they should have and continues to have beneficial applications. I took a big pay cut, but the work is far more fulfilling.
I’m by no means saying we should treat our lives as if nothing matters, and I apologize that it came off that way. I think moreso my message was that there’s no great creed or so we can look to for guidance. Wake up every day, do your best to help others, then sign off of the toxicity that is most social media and do your best to treat yourself and those you care about with love. Go to sleep, and rinse and repeat.
But just don’t expect some magic eureka moment of where it gets easier. We’re all just struggling, and unfortunately I don’t think the forces we struggle against like greed will ever go away.
Cheers, thanks for the discourse, and I hope you find yourself with increasing happiness as the days flow by
You too!
Damn, I enjoyed reading this wholesome conversation.
Profit for a ever dwindling number of individuals. /$
Sure you can buy this - for just $1000000 you can watch this movie on Amazon.
Technically it’s available.
This is why the word “reasonable” comes up in a lot of laws. “What counts as reasonable?” You ask? This is what judges are for; to examine the circumstances and make a judgement call.
Copyright and patent law is a social contract and a very fundamental one.
United States Constitution has some pretty cool ideas in it. Freedom of speech? That the government cannot punish you for expressing an idea? That was added as an afterthought. Freedom of religion? That congress shall make no law establishing a religion, making our society secular and preventing the government from punishing those who do not conform? Afterthought. The right to a trial by jury of peers, the right to not be compelled to testify against yourself, the right to be secure in your person and property? Afterthoughts. All of that, all of the things we call the Bill Of Rights, were added on the basis of “Wait we should probably have this.”
The basis of intellectual property law isn’t in an amendment, it’s too important. It’s in the main body of the constitution. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 Intellectual property:
To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respecive Writings and Discoveries.
We The People grant creators for a time exclusive right of way over their creations to monetize and profit from them as incentive for doing the work of creation so that we may have the creations, after which the creation becomes the heritage of all mankind forever so that other creators in the future may build upon it. Americans tend to view our first amendment right to freedom of speech, broadly defined by our supreme court to include symbolic speech to include overt actions such as burning a flag, as near absolute. Even the allegedly liberal allegedly enlightened democracies in Europe will outlaw ideas; America will not. Copyright and patent law is one of the very few where we will limit speech or the press, for it is one of the few laws that came before the first amendment. You may not be free to print an idea if it currently belongs to someone else.
Without that incentive, the ability to personally profit form the works you create, you get the Soviet Union, which invented…Tetris. Whose inventor didn’t earn a single kopek from his invention until he became an American citizen. Without the expiration date for copyrights or patents you get…Disney. Who gobbles up creative works without the intention of letting go with the apparent goal of monopolizing the very idea of storytelling itself, hoarding wealth in perpetuity and simply buying any competition.
For a society to properly function it is important for patents and copyrights to be temporary in nature; they must exist and yet they must within a lifetime cease to exist. Lack of either condition is an intolerable rot. Copyright terms being the lifetime of the author plus seventy years is a rot the United States probably has not survived. I think we’re soon to find out.
That is an excellent write up! Well done OP!
My only critique is you seem to downplay Tetris like it isnt one of the greatest games ever developed. You are right in that Pajitnov had to straight up move to have any right to reward from it. Also the Soviet Union had to collapse
Tetris is a cool game, sure, but my point is the Soviet Union had a short list of hit video games. Name 5 other famous Soviet video games. Not a major exporter of cultural works.
While you’re right, its a really poor way to phrase that. Compare to something like, “In 69 years, the Soviets only managed to make Tetris, and even then the creator didnt see a cent until he emigrated to America”.
Could also mention how they failed to keep up with American computing
I don’t disagree, though another nuance is that…The Soviet Union wasn’t empty of people with creative capacity. A Soviet invented Tetris, and Tetris is an excellent game. But the way intellectual property worked (or not) meant not many had the opportunity and motive to try, and look at the result.
I dont disagree. Never did
Yeah corporations are terrified of you having fun without paying money to them.