haxxiy said:
It depends on the study - a 2009 one from the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division had all optical media fail in an accelerated aging test and concluded they're unlikely to last more than 25 years on average. There will be a lot of survivor bias here too - you might think there's a lot of Atari cartridges or w/e still functioning but that's a small fraction of all that were ever produced. Some of those no longer existing absolutely might have suffered masked ROM failure 40 years later. Digital is the way games will be preserved forever, and not at the hands of the companies. As taboo as it is and as much as many people don't like it, the emulation and piracy community has done more for game preservation than anything else ever will. While those folks with enormous physical collections that they won't ever play again will have lost most of them by the time they're old, the games will still be available online. |
Those were CD-Rs and DVD-Rs being written to in your 2009 study. Not professionally stamped disks.
We know how many copies of certain games sold and there are mathematical ways to get accurate population estimates without having to count every last game. Conservationists use these methods to estimate wildlife numbers. If only a small fraction of Super Mario Bros. for example had survived the game wouldn't be readily available in every game shop on earth in hilarious overstock numbers.
Physical has been proven to keep games around for over 100 years and I don't need a company to keep my collection in good shape. The emulation and piracy community has done little so far to save critically acclaimed games. Name an important, critically acclaimed game that was saved by emulation or piracy. I don't care if Barbie Horse Adventures can't be played in 20 more years. Software emulators can easily offer up an incomplete and inaccurate experience, for those too lazy to do due diligence. Roms from piracy sites are frequently incorrect. People who haven't touched physical hardware in decades like to claim that all emulators are accurate but they simply don't have a reference point. They also don't bother to do stringent testing.
Don't get me wrong. Many emulators are great and work just fine. Especially when using crt-royale. But to claim that software emulation is some sort of panacea for game preservation is misguided. Dreamcast emulation has miles yet to go. Nintendo DS has a specific pixel density that computer emulators get wrong. 3DS can't get the 3D aspect correct on an emulator. The touch aspects of DS and 3DS games are poor or non-existent on emulators. Vetrex games look and feel entirely different on actual hardware due to using an oscilloscope.
