A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.
“For the past three years, the Video Game History Foundation has been supporting with the Software Preservation Network (SPN) on a petition to allow libraries and archives to remotely share digital access to out-of-print video games in their collections,” VGHF explains in its statement. “Under the current anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA, libraries and archives are unable to break copy protection on games in order to make them remotely accessible to researchers.”
Essentially, this exemption would open up the possibility of a digital library where historians and researchers could ‘check out’ digital games that run through emulators. The VGHF argues that around 87% of all video games released in the US before 2010 are now out of print, and the only legal way to access those games now is through the occasionally exorbitant prices and often failing hardware that defines the retro gaming market.
Well, time to finally make my own collection to play
That’s what I’ve been doing. Been collecting various PS1-4 games on top of GameCube, Wii, and Switch games over the past year to rip and save digital copies for myself. Then I play them on emulators.
I have roughly a few hundred so far and plan to expand it further.
I have a NAS with two 8 TB drives in RAID to back them up and it’s already over 50% full. I want to start collecting OG Xbox and 360 games in the near future, but I need to get jailbroken consoles for them.
Obligatory “RAID is not a backup”
Sure, but it’s a start. It’s certainly better than trying to keep them on my laptop. And I do hope to add more forms of data backup/storage as time goes on. It’s taken several hours ripping all those games and I’d hate to lose them all.
I also have an external 4 TB SSD that I keep most of the games on (excluding the PS4 games because they simply take up too much space).
Make a torrent, best backup.