Thoughts on Video Game Archiving

What is archiving?

At its core, it's basically the accumulation of a bunch of information for the purpose of retaining some level of availability while maximizing the data's integrity. The information could be of any sort; it doesn't matter. Different archives represent different scopes of what is archived (so I guess it is worth defining this clearly).

Important considerations include:

• Minimizing information decay (or any other type of decay; e.g. the National Archive probably tries to minimize the deterioration of the original Declaration of Independence paper, even if its written contents are still legible and its contents have been saved many times over)
• Maximizing the amount of in-scope information
• Balancing the burden of storing/preserving this information (compression) vs. the level of availability

among others. For the remainder of this ramble, I will consider only digital archives as that is my focus area.

The order of priority for the important considerations may go something like this:

1. Availability; i.e., an archive is literally nothing if its information becomes inaccessible.
2. Integrity; i.e., the information has to be accurate with regards to what is expected, otherwise it isn't a proper archive
1. Minimizing information decay falls under this item, since the goal is to maximize the integrity with regards to the original information and not any deteriorated or altered state. (Altered state depends on the point of view; e.g., is it worth preserving bootleg versions of licensed games?)
3. Maximizing in-scope information quantity; archives and libraries have more value the more information they contain.
4. Compression. This one may matter more or less depending on the resource availability of the archive. Given infinite storage space, compression would be undesirable since it requires computational power and more time in order to retrieve the information. But if saving on storage space is a necessary means to store more information, then it is imperative to do so.

Why do it?

There may be strictly practical reasons for maintaining an archive. In all cases, archiving serves as a stopgap measure to stall the natural decay of information as much as possible. (Information decay example: shitty CD-Rs have a much lower "robustness" value and their data will decay earlier/more quickly than an M-DISC. If any amount of data loss leads to errors in the application and a computer cannot execute the program properly to present some or all of its contents as "information" worth anything to a human, then a tiny amount of data loss can equal huge information loss.)

In my case, I guess I want to make sure no bits of video game or doujin music history that I may have in my possession get lost, because I love this stuff too much. That's also surely why the friends over at the Discount Danmaku Warehouse do it, for one. That's also why I believe it is worth preserving bootleg versions of licensed games. That's how most people got to play video games in countries like Egypt where I spent a good portion of my childhood (mostly in the summers). They are unarguably a part of gaming history, as are doujin games and the like.

What constitutes information worth preserving?

This is a question that came to my mind after I saw the kind of things being saved over on Redump, like the different codes printed on discs. To me, as long as two discs have matching hashes, they are the same. The particular differences in how they were printed etc. don't matter much to me. And as it turns out, Red Book audio doesn't always give you the same exact data, because that stuff is accepted by the computer however it comes (without any error correction). So there might be imperceptible differences in audio quality depending on your rip or the drive you used. In that case, there isn't really anything to do about it. If it's a lossless dump of a fairly good condition disc, then the job is as good as done.

Ultimately, if it's music, let there be no imperceptible errors. If it's data, have the files/program(s) function exactly as they would originally. This also means replicating copy protection/DRM mechanisms, which isn't always easy because the drive may literally be incapable of reading certain sectors of a disc used for copy protection. But as long as the reaction of the game/program to the archived or reproduced version is precisely the same as with the original media, then there is no issue.

Redumper supports SafeDisc, which a great deal of the games I own use, but it doesn't support some other copy protection mechanisms, such as Alpha-ROM (which some 2000s Japanese visual novels use; a now-very-obscure program named CD革命/Virtual Ver.11 can handle it though but I will probably have to sift through shops in Akiba to find it...) and the proprietary mechanism used for the game Quraish by Afkar Media.

What about no CD/DVD cracks then? That is a much more inferior solution from the perspective of archiving, but if the copy protection mechanism can't be replicated, then it is a good alternative so that the game is at least playable. (If the game wasn't playable, then it almost may as well not have been archived. But if an inferior archived copy of a game without a no-CD/DVD crack exists and the original media is lost, at least the possibility of cracking it will remain.)