Cerebralbore101 said:
Those were CD-Rs and DVD-Rs being written to. 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.
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A small fraction of Super Mario Bros. can still be millions of units considering how well that game sold. Hardly proof of anything.
Physical will only be 'proven' to last anything when they get there. After all, no durability study can properly encompass what happens with time given the myriad forms that phase transition and degradation can take place in these materials.
And it seems a bit disingenuous to think there will be readily available replacement parts for actual console hardware 50-100 years from now but emulation will still be largely feature-incomplete.
We can emulate 4th-generation consoles and earlier with literal 100% accuracy nowadays. In time the same will be true for more recent hardware. Meanwhile, things like CRT and Betamax already have to contend with a shrinking pool of replacement parts since no new ones are being produced less than 20 years after being discontinued. Imagine that for more obscure or niche console tech a thousand times over.
