Interesting Article: Where Games Go To Sleep

[racketboy]

Thought this piece was pretty cool

Part one link:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6 ... _game_.php

Part two link:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6 ... _game_.php

[Ivo]

Thought this piece was pretty cool
(...)

Cool, thank for the linkage!
Gamasutra has some very nice articles, I should check it more often.

[J T]

Yeah this was fascinating. I can't believe how little respect Atari had for their source code back then that when they sold the filing cabinets for $2, they just left their source code in it.

[Ivo]

This is an area where I can honestly say that I think piracy made a major positive contribution.

The most important thing to preserve (IMO) is the actual experience of playing the game. It is important to have the source code (for reasons well described in the articles including remakes etc.).

It is nice to have other stuff like design documents and such. But it is most important to have the game in playable form (even if that is not so practical for museums). Even source code fails at that sometimes.

Sure, real hardware is best, but emulators are better than nothing (major props to those that develop emulators as well).
I believe that collections of images of physical media ripped (most often because of piracy) will outlast physical carts, floppies, CDs and whatever.

In some cases I'm pretty sure they will remain as the only historical record of certain games. So at least that I think piracy has made a worthwhile contribution.

Ivo.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Yeah this was fascinating. I can't believe how little respect Atari had for their source code back then that when they sold the filing cabinets for $2, they just left their source code in it.

No, the people at Atari cared, they were some of the best the industry's ever had.

It was that sack of shit Tramiel that needs to go die in a fiery pit.

[Flake]

Can someone explain to me why a games source code is different from a rom of that source code? I think I am a little too computer unsavvy to figure this out.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Can someone explain to me why a games source code is different from a rom of that source code? I think I am a little too computer unsavvy to figure this out.

To put it simply:

Finished code is the end product and only designed to operate one way and stay compiled. Working with this is very difficult as nothing is labeled to tell you what it does and all the development tools are no longer present.

Source, or build code is designed to be flexible and easy to edit. There are notations for what everything does and how the code interacts with the hardware on a base level. Typically so that changes can be made and portions of the game can be altered should the need arise.


You can rip apart finished code by de-compiling it, but this in turn transforms the code from a finished package into machine code. This is one step above binary and incredibly difficult to program as not many people study or learn it these days. Therefore source code is the best option whenever ports are being made if you want to stick to the utmost authenticity instead of emulating.

[CRTGAMER]

Great read. This reminds me of the recent Dreamcast Geist Force uncovered, in that case, someone smart enough to save the developer GDR. A surprise find always a good thing, discovering an unknown game. Anyone know what happened to the Unseen64 site? It had great beta info.

[toadhall]

Just finished reading both parts of the article. The part about the Kobe earthquake was particularly interesting to me. All the Castlevania materials up to that point--LOST! Such a tragedy

[ChuChu Flamingo]

Very sad to see how much disrespect companies had for maintaining and storing their source codes and materials.

They really don't deserve the source code back. Especially considering how terrible some of these ports of classic games are. Prices for most games on Wii VC are sometimes higher than the actual cart (and the selection and prices suck)

As much as I hate to say it, but the same thing is gonna happen again to current companies. Heck, Microsoft has lost data before, and these are from the pros, the pros who know better. It's only human nature.

Fault tolerance, fault tolerance, fault tolerance.