There are preservation scenes for those systems as well. No Intro handles most cart based systems, while redump.org checks disc based systems (their site has been down for the past week or so for some reason). These two sites are major collaborative sites, where multiple people check the hashes of the ROM and disc images to ensure they are properly copied. There is also the MESS project, which takes things a bit too far, in my opinion. I really don’t think it would be possible to do a major preservation project without major collaboration, just because of the sheer cost of acquiring the games. I’d really suggest looking into these projects, so that you don’t have to start from scratch. Personally, I don’t think there is really much of a need to redump every single game again, as this has already been done for the most part.

Checking things to make sure they are dumped correctly is important, but I think that energies should be spent on more important projects. For instance, in my spare time I have been documenting prototypes of SNES games (here is a good example). The issue with prototypes is that many of them are indeed undumped and undocumented. Cart based prototypes also have the disadvantage of being on EPROMs, which tend to lose their data due to corruption much faster than commercial games, which are on MASKROMs. Many of these prototypes are in the hands of private collectors, who tend to want top dollar, so again collaboration is key to make sure that the price is not driven up. We all have the same goals here.

All this said, I have to admit that binary preservation is only a side goal of my hobby. My primary objective on my website SNES Central is documentation. I’ve done a lot of work trying to track down unreleased games, and of course prototypes. My archive (not what is on my site) has over 200 prototypes. I’ve also started documenting packaging variants, such as releases in different countries and re-releases. I’ll fully admit that gameplay is entirely secondary to what my site is about, as I think that is covered in other places. I’d also suggest checking Game Rave, a website similar to my own, but with a focus on Playstation and Saturn games.

I hope I didn’t come off as being rude earlier. I think that collaboration is important, and that there has indeed been a deficiency in serious academic documentation of video games. I’ve spoke with developers over the years, and it is amazing how little was actually backed up and saved during the 90s. A lot of companies would throw out their source code and transitional versions of the games (perhaps the exception is Sega, where there is a huge archive of alpha and beta versions of Genesis games available). Having a credible academic organization going after these materials would benefit everyone.

I would enjoy chatting with you about these things. Do you go on IRC? There are many like minded people out there…

Cheers,
Evan

Availability and cost aren’t reasons to use an inferior product like the Retrode when there are far better dumpers, or using a casual emulator like Snes9x with uses game hacks. If this were a random blog entry from an obscure site I wouldn’t care at all (most people just want t play the most popular games and they don’t care if an emulator does not correctly emulate a random and unused function of the SNES’ CPU), but this is the website of the Maryland Institute, so I expect a big research into SNES preservation, or at least some words about romsets like No-Intro or Zapatabase.

Seriously, just make an account on board.byuu.org. You would learn a lot if you’re interested.

I also won’t deny a certain amount of nostalgia for both ZSNES and Snes9x, aged though they might be. =)

My apologies of the typo for “do” which should be “due”.

With all do respect, a SNES preservation article STARTS with detailing byuu’s work. Anything short of that completely misses the mark.

It’s not without its problems, but neither are the existing checksum lists (there are tools that will check a ROM against a list, as well)–unlike the NSRL, none of them are backed by a government entity! Someone does have to create the First ROM, however, and there’s not a good way to do that prior to ripping it. Given that the Retrode essentially imposes an artificial filesystem, a particularly careful person might argue that we can’t say it ALSO alters the file itself.

I DO think having a registry of checksums maintained by some Trusted Entity would be lovely.

I’m not sure I understand exactly what’s happening (so apologies if I’m barking up the wrong tree) but that doesn’t sound like a completely convincing integrity check.

Isn’t there a Snes ROM checksum you could utilise here? http://romhack.wikia.com/wiki/SNES_header.

Another approach would be to download the same ROM image from various websites, checksum them, and compare with your checksum to see if they all match up. Comparing with just a few sources would give you a reasonably high level of confidence.

Publishing the checksums for each ROM image would allow others to compare and/or correct. Had a quick look round the web but couldn’t find anyone doing this. Wouldn’t surprise me if someone is somewhere though…