Support Physical Games

[sc94597]

Cerebralbore101 said:

sc94597 said:

What happens when disc drives are no longer produced? They don't last 100 years. 

Storing a game on 5 different flash memory devices, and then transferring it to newer technologies when they become available lasts indefinitely. 

You would be surprised how easy it is to restore a disc drive. PS2 drives go out a lot but there's a program you can use to recalibrate them. Gamecube drives have surface-mount capacitors that just need replacing. It's a laser that reads data, with a belt and a small electric motor in it. Lots of modern mods let you download the game to an HDD instead of constantly read from the disc. This saves the drive from running 24/7 and massively extends its life. It's basically what the 360 and PS3 did with game installs off the disk. If you were to store a disc drive for 100 years you would need to replace the belt, caps, gears, and grease. The rest would be fine as long as the caps didn't leak, but changing caps to a non-corrosive substance before storage would fix that. 

Also there's FPGA devices or reproducing a system PCB, Chips, and all. The Neo Geo is being remade with all the original chips this winter. FPGA is just a chip that can morph into any other chip you need. People thought I was crazy back in 2017 when I predicted an FPGA PS1. Jokes on them, though. SuperStation One successfully shipped to early adopters. So don't hand-wave my prediction that we will be reproducing 1-1 clones of all consoles eventually. 

All of what you described is a lot more effort and maintenance than just storing duplicate copies on SSDs or HDDs (the latter for long-term storage.) 

For collectors, of course, this might be worth the effort. In the same way old record players are maintained a hundred years out by enthusiasts. But it isn't as robust a solution as duplication.