3 ms·

I have dozens of game CDs from that era and they're still playable.

by xiaoma 10y ago

fludlight 10y ago
Your CDs with the playable binaries were "pressed" in a factory with industrial equipment. The source was stored on the hard drives of ancient workstations and/or file servers and maybe a non-archival CD-R or a Zip/Jaz drive. Either way, the physical media were lost in an office move or layoff 3+ reorganizations ago. Some ex-employee probably has a copy in their garage, but good luck finding them.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  Some of them were. Pretty much all my shareware titles were on CD-Rs because that's how my friends and I shared them.
ctdonath 10y ago
IF you can find an old computer or emulator. Be happy CDs are still supported; there's a lot of formats that were "THE way to store stuff" and suddenly the reader hardware stopped production and most readers were thrown out. And that's just the playable binary. If you want to, say, port it to iOS (no CD, wrong hardware, wrong OS) you'll need the actual source code - and the point of the OP is that source code is mostly lost, either being on unreadable media, unsupported obsolete data formats, or simply lost/discarded over time. Having dozens of game CDs from that era doesn't mean you'll have anything that can read & run them (or will in the near future).
- xiaoma 10y ago
  > Having dozens of game CDs from that era doesn't mean you'll have anything that can read & run them (or will in the near future). For the past decade or so, DosBox has been a pretty much flawless option for emulation from Win/Mac/Linux: https://www.dosbox.com/information.php https://www.dosbox.com/information.php. Before that Windows was pretty much able to emulate DOS environments on its own (for 80-90% of games). The great emulation options is one of the main reason, I've literally migrated my old data from hard drive to hard drive for 20 years. Some of my games were old even when I was a kid.

I have dozens of game CDs from that era and they're still playable.

by xiaoma 10y ago

I have dozens of game CDs from that era and they're still playable.

Your CDs with the playable binaries were "pressed" in a factory with industrial equipment. The source was stored on the hard drives of ancient workstations and/or file servers and maybe a non-archival CD-R or a Zip/Jaz drive. Either way, the physical media were lost in an office move or layoff 3+ reorganizations ago. Some ex-employee probably has a copy in their garage, but good luck finding them.

xiaoma 10y ago
Some of them were. Pretty much all my shareware titles were on CD-Rs because that's how my friends and I shared them.

ctdonath 10y ago

IF you can find an old computer or emulator. Be happy CDs are still supported; there's a lot of formats that were "THE way to store stuff" and suddenly the reader hardware stopped production and most readers were thrown out. And that's just the playable binary. If you want to, say, port it to iOS (no CD, wrong hardware, wrong OS) you'll need the actual source code - and the point of the OP is that source code is mostly lost, either being on unreadable media, unsupported obsolete data formats, or simply lost/discarded over time. Having dozens of game CDs from that era doesn't mean you'll have anything that can read & run them (or will in the near future).

xiaoma 10y ago
> Having dozens of game CDs from that era doesn't mean you'll have anything that can read & run them (or will in the near future). For the past decade or so, DosBox has been a pretty much flawless option for emulation from Win/Mac/Linux: https://www.dosbox.com/information.php https://www.dosbox.com/information.php. Before that Windows was pretty much able to emulate DOS environments on its own (for 80-90% of games). The great emulation options is one of the main reason, I've literally migrated my old data from hard drive to hard drive for 20 years. Some of my games were old even when I was a kid.