Hi I was looking for a way to organize my psx games and i found this incredible project, basically people submit info of theyr ORIGINAL GAMES to the db. As there are a lot of colectors arround here, i think this would be interesting for them. Have a look at it www.redump.org Cheers
Riiiight... so they are backing up their stable pressed optical media (with a lifespan of a large figure if kept correct) onto a far more volatile magnetic media (with a lifespan of a few years, because it's a server harddrive that's on all the time and constantly accessed). That makes *perfect* sense. Seriously though, I could understand if they were preserving media which had a forseeable short lifespan (such as recordable media, magnetic media, etc.) but CDs and DVDs?
There is nothing illogical about it: - in order to accurately identify and burn discs table of contents and gaps have to be archived - in order to know if you're disc is immaculate, it has to be entirely readable which can be verified against other people's findings - in order to know if your CD/DVDROM is worth owning, it should be able to read tracks according to their guidelines which are quite strenuous - in order for you to make a perfect backup of your scratched disc, you need to know the CRC of the damaged track you need to search for - in order for someone to release parity files to help you fix your scratched disc, they'll need to have good dumps - in order for you to preserve any game with redbook audio, you MUST have plenty of other references since redbook audio has no error correction, just really poor error detection ----------------------------------- Here are reasons why people backup games: - so they can illegally obtain/distribute/"preserve" games - so they can legally play their games via emulation - so they can legally obtain a digital copy which they can examine and tinker with educationally So as you can see, there are PLENTY of reasons for a database like this to exist since any one of the legal reasons is valid, and the site is entirely legal as far as I can tell, since no "backups" are exchanged. Their affiliates, SnesOrama and No-Intro, on the other hand I know carry out TONs of illegal activity in the name of preservation, which itself is a joke since they are clueless about accurately archiving anything. Dismissing the entire database project though because of what most people illegally do with games isn't fair because there ARE a few of us that are both law abiding and dump our games.
You're right, I am dismissing it because of what people tend to do with "preservation" releases. However, you are wrong in your assumption that downloading a game you own and altering it is legal. In fact, it's only legal if you copy your own copy yourself, not downloading one that someone else has "preserved". Same thing with emulation.
I'd like a precedent since that's completely illogical. Nobody could be rightfully tried guilty for having downloaded an image of a game they own since there would be literally no incriminating evidence proving they didn't archive it themselves, unless the defendant's network traffic was monitored or something else as unlikely.
its just a database, you cant find links to anything there, and for what can i see ppl there hates piracy
I don't realy get what the site is for. I also don't get what all the fus is about when it comes to piracy. If it's a discontinued system, like Sega saturn, is Sega or any copyright holders getting any money if I buy Panzer dragoon saga Pal ? I probably can only get it second hand so... And not to mention those really rare items. It's not undemining the production of new games, sorry. But that was a little offtopic. Whats this site for again? i can see downloadables, but what are they?
from my understanding, it'll be just a compendium of cue sheets and similar that will help people burning their own backups or checking their burns edited:i guess the dat that are downloadable are just some kind of text with dumps infos
people dump theyr own original discs and submit datafiles with crc of the tracks, so others can dump theyr originals and know if theyr discs are ok or fucked.
A database like this contributes to the ongoing practice of emu-laming and should not be supported by us collectors. Emulation is for 99.9% about piracy. Piracy, apart from being illegal, devaluates game collections. I will certainly not contribute to this database. All the step you mention can also be done with CDR and silver bootlegs. The database is therefore tainted by default. Think about it: if the majority of people generate checksums based on backups the cheksum of the backup becomes the "correct" one. I have no faith in such a system. I like to note that not all emulators are legal. For older systems there is likely no problem, but more recent consoles have technology patents on them. For example: you cannot legally emulate a PS2 since you need to license patents to make software implementations of MPEG and MagicGate technology.
Speak for yourself, you sound like a fanatic against fair-use. How can you say emulation is all but 0.1% used for piracy? That may have been the case two console generations ago, but today with the Virtual Console and retro collections galore? Emulation is becoming more and more prevalent and it won't be long before mainstream legal use of emulation surpasses the slightly less mainstream illegal use of emulation. I'd like to remind you that what you say is your opinion, not fact or relevant to the database, since it doesn't assist in piracy any more than a keyboard does. I don't understand what CD-R and silvers have to do with this since it's solely about public statistical information from original discs, no different than projects such as AccurateRip for losslessly ripping your CDs for listening on your iPod etc. All discs without redbook audio (just single data tracks) can be accurately copied (the data track that is) by practically any consumer software/hardware. No it's not nice to submit bootlegs, but for the most part it doesn't matter since the data tracks will be identical provided they don't have bad sectors for protection. Given enough samples, the database's confidence of a bad bootleg will get lower and lower. It is true that initially some information will be tainted by bad submissions, but as with all public projects, you must have some faith or don't use it. Do you try to discourage people from using Wikipedia this strongly? And why couldn't an emulator legally obtain a license from MPEG or dynamically link to code licensed by MPEG? There is absolutely no need to emulate MagicGate either or similar DRM since it's presence isn't critical to the console's operation.
