I need one of those. The girlfriend is convinced i don't need to take another room, but i will win eventually. Or i will just build one.
Hi guys, I just got HP C6364A and ExaByte 8705T tape drives, from what I see these are in good condition and I don't need them. Thus I am ready to donate them for this project. Please let me know if you need them, right in this topic or by PM.
I have been reading this forum off and on for many years now but this project got my interest enough to finally register and post. I realize the original post is ancient but what is the current status of this project and how can I help? I would be happy to donate funds,materials and time/effort to get a chance to have a peek at the file system of a NES era game house. I believe I have a pile of SCSI cables laying around along with legacy cards ISA/EISA/PCI I know I had a couple HP/Sun tape drives but they are rather old if I still have them and stored in a basement so no good im sure.
Well, if ASSEMbler doesn't have enough motivation to proceed with this 14Tb archive - there is nothing we can do
yeah but do you know what was on the server when they did their tape backups? NES stuff would probably be a stretch though..
Hey all, Ive been reading this thread since it started and would like to express my want to help in any regard as well. Might I ask if Assembler has received any drives? I will endeavor to acquire any drives required if necessary and send them to Kevin if allowed. Ive seen a small list of drives on here, but are there more types needed? Let it be known that I have zero experience with them but will try to find and send them if such help is wanted. Also Ive been thinking of expressing an idea Ive had for awhile about how to figure out the software used for the tapes if its still relevant. If Kevin has the info of most of acclaims staff would it be impossible to track down the person responsible for the backups in the first place? maybe the former employees can shed light on the software used. acclaim was basically one of the biggest (if not biggest) game devs/publishers of the early 90s and chances are those tapes have a large amount (if not all) of their history in em. We should attempt to copy the data to safe media, even if it means risking using older hardware, its better than losing it all through inaction. let me know how I can be of help.
[video=youtube_share;I3zhdqQNOnQ]http://youtu.be/I3zhdqQNOnQ?t=34s[/video] 0:35. That is what happens when you rush these things with untested old hardware.
Who said anything about using untested hardware? I cant test em but Im sure Kevin can. You can too but youre too far away to make it worthwhile so what other choice is there? As for old hardware, that is also an unavoidable inconvenience, nobody is advocating rushing but I fail to see how 3 years of fear mongering about drives is being productive. if they work, then they should work no? that or the earliest tapes will go soon in the next few years (if they arent gone already). You can clean and test em with blanks zero em out to determine if they work and it could still fuck up but again that would be the best that could be done. BTW, that movie was great and they attained their objective (mind you in a very direct and dramatic fashion). Its a classic.
Druid: And Adam Sandler! Worth a watch. The problem is that some drives of that era looked the same, but weren't. Now, most of the tapes Kev has should be fine and readable. However, with older tapes, you might encounter problems. I guess you could say akin to putting a PAL VHS in an NTSC machine. You're not going to make much sense of it. Hopefully, that issue would be restricted to just wasting money on the wrong drive, rather than causing damage, mind you.
Perhaps using Kevs list of acclaim employees (if not considered a privacy breach) to find the one responsible for backing the data up could give alot of needed data. Ive got the idea from this very thread that so long as the tape drive is in working condition (of course tested to the nth degree) then the data could be dumped raw? and then toyed with at leisure. Tracking NOS drives that match the tapes type (dds-1 dds-2 ait ect) and picking the better quality brands could go along way to ensuring compatibility. if they're anything like the VHS, then they'd be quite resilient, even if loaded using wrong read speed ect the tape data would likely be undamaged (i remember my vhs eating a bunch of tapes and cassette even further than that and then re spooling em and they worked fine.) That and the likely extreme redundancy works in our favour. in the case of wasting money Id rather put it out to get good quality (albiet older) hardware and risk that then trying to save and ending up with real bad stuff. I just need to have an idea what brands or other types not listed im looking for
Which tape types are they for? which ones do you need? Im partial to the oldest ones myself, but if you've got drives for those, ill try to track down another type. let me know if you've got detailed pics of the earlier tapes.
