I just found this thread because I was wondering if somebody had already done this. Now with rmarchiv being a thing I’m wondering if it is planned to create DAT files for ROM managers like b2282009 already has mentioned in this thread?
Personally, I think it’s crucial for a proper preservation afford to make sure that all the files are very easy available to everyone who wants them. It’s really wonderful what the guys over at rmarchiv have already achieved but I think it would be better if the archived games would be shared as a whole as well and not only just on a game-by-game basis. Otherwise only a fraction of the whole archive will be backed up on various PCs of the community out there and some games will be lost again when the rmarchiv is no more, or isn’t allowed to host game XYZ anymore.
What the maker scene has perfectly shown is that websites and its hosted content can be gone forever at any time. I’m sure that you guys are really serious about preservation with multiple backup servers, etc. in place. But even all of this doesn’t protect you from things like copyright strikes if, for example, Nintendo finds that they don’t like their copyrighted music and sprites in some of the projects. Basically, the same reason why many German RPG-Makes sites have removed download links from their pages. You also have to think about the future, can you really say that the archive will be available in the next 10, 20 or 30 years?
What I’m trying to say is that I think that a critical part of digital preservation lies in decentralized backups and to give it in as many hands as possible. And, in my humble opinion, the best way to achieve that is to share the whole thing in its entirety as easily and convenient as possible, for example as a single .zip package accompanied by a DAT file to verify its content or at least make it easier to rebuild it on your own.
A good example for comparison would be the Flashpoint project. That’s a project determined to preserve flash games, animations and a wide variety of other web games. They offer it in 2 variants. One very light weighted variant, where their launcher downloads the games on-demand from their servers when you start it (very similiar to what is already offered by rmarchiv). The other one is a giant package that has everything included and runs completely independent on your local computer with no internet connection required at all. With that they make sure that everything is backed up on as many places as possible even when their own servers or the project as a whole is long gone.
I think with rmarchiv we have the proper infrastructure already at hand for something like this. You have all games available as .zip archives and a lot of metadata to rename them with a proper naming convention like No-Intro or TOSEC does it.
As for hosting I think that general preservation sites like archive.org or the-eye.eu would be good place to start.
And in regards of what Ghabry has said about that it doesn’t make sense to also re-host games from common websites. I have to whole-heartedly disagree with that, for the exact same reasons I just talked about.
Just something to think about.
