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The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access
- eleveriven 2y agoThis is like a goldmine for researchers, historians, and just anyone curious about how games are made. Hats off to VGHF for making this happen!
- hirokio123 2y agoIt's like a place straight out of a child's dream. A game’s software might be emulated, but the feeling of playing on a Game Boy back then —the smell, the scenery, the friends of the same age— can never be recreated.
- a_t48 2y ago[flagged]
- globalnode 2y agothe ’ and — characters are kinda giveaways, besides the advertising feel of the text, maybe if they were using gpt it was as a translation aide?
- npsomaratna 2y agoCorrect punctuation marks, you mean? Humans use them too, you know. I've used the em dash (—) and opening/closing single quote characters (‘’) ever since I read Butterick's Practical Typography.
- globalnode 2y agofair point, its just not common, thats why i said 'kinda' giveaways.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoDo you have keys on your keyboard for those or do you have a key combo or browser addon for them? I tend to stick to basic ascii characters for the most part myself... but part of that is ignorance. I have trouble remembering the euro sign combo on Mac.
- hackernews1134 2y agoI use both quite often. The apostrophe from a young age and the em-dash from my locally hosted alternative to grammarly which auto-corrects for me - making it easy to use as it doesn’t exist on my keyboard as a built-in. If it existed on my keyboard, I would use it by default. (Noticeably absent is the em-dash in this message because my grammarly alternative is a chrome extension and I’m currently responding from my mobile device that does not have it.)
- throwing_away 2y agoI think you meant to use an "en-dash" there -- between "me" and "making". This whole thing is frustrating because I know all of these language models were trained on reddit and I was an early and frequent commenter. So a lot of my style is also the bot's style.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI think they meant to use an em-dash, which is this: —. An en-dash is typically used for ranges, e.g. 20–30 miles per hour.
- hackernews1134 2y agoYes I did; an in the second paragraph of my post I explain why I didn’t in this instance.
- rounce 2y agoWhat is the self-hosted grammarly alternative you use?
- hackernews1134 2y agoIt is called languagetool
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hyko 2y agoI use em dashes—chiefly to express parenthetical thoughts—all the time. Sadly, there’s no foolproof system for identifying machine-generated text. Happily, it means one less thing to worry about.
- pindab0ter 2y agoI often use ’ and –. What's wrong with that?
- qingcharles 2y agoThe em-dashes are probably a giveaway. Does any phone automatically insert em-dashes in place of hyphens?
- mock-possum 2y agoYeah - if you double hyphen — iPhone auto corrects to that character. It works for ranges 0–100 too— you can’t really count on proper en-and-em-dash usage to identify llm generated text. Could just be a typography wonk. ;]
- hirokio123 2y agoHey man, I'm a Japanese speaker, so I use ChatGPT for proofreading expressions. There's no dash in Japanese, so I'm not sure how to use it properly. Sorry if I got it wrong.
- a_t48 2y agoMy apologies - just be careful, your comment seemed only related to the title and not the content of the article, it looked a lot like spam. The dash is fine, don't worry about it.
- hirokio123 2y agoThanks for the advice. You're right—commenting with my own memories and thoughts on a discussion about a game development archive did seem spammy. I'll be more mindful of that in the future. Sorry about that.
- a_t48 2y agoDon’t sweat it, it was just a bit nonsequitor.
- pjc50 2y agoI've vouched for it so you should be unflagged. This place is a bit twitchy sometimes.
- dueltmp_yufsy 2y agoWould love to visit this place one day.
- Scuds 2y agoDigital archive means you won't have to, unless you want to see some yellowing paper.
- eleveriven 2y agoBut it's still a good idea. A retro game museum that you can visit and play
- Novosell 2y agoI also go to museums and play with the exhibits.
- DonHopkins 2y agoPhil Salvador and The Video Game History Foundation do great work (simultaneously serious and fun) and excellent research and compelling writing! In his quest to deeply research the evidence, perform interviews with the people involved with Maxis's Business Simulations Division, and document the history of Maxis's long lost SimRefinery, Phil was able to pull off the astronomically unlikely miracle of actually finding someone who had an extremely rare readable floppy disk of it! The articles he wrote tell an amazing story. A close look at SimRefinery: https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-analysis/ https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-analysis/ >Two nights ago, a reader on the tech news site Ars Technica named postbebop uploaded a copy of SimRefinery to the Internet Archive. This is incredibly exciting news, and it’s given us our first chance to take a closer look at the game. SimRefinery was not fully completed by Maxis, and we can learn a lot about the game from the state it was left in. Based on my research, I want to add some context and explain what some of the peculiarities the game might say about its development. Ep. 11: SimRefinery Simulated by a Refined Phil Salvador: https://gamehistory.org/ep-11-simrefinery-simulated-by-a-refined-phil-salvador/ https://gamehistory.org/ep-11-simrefinery-simulated-by-a-ref... >Today’s episode features the bizarre origins of SimRefinery as well as other Sim titles which never came to be. Phil Salvador joins the Video Game History Hour to discuss a branch of Maxis, Business Simulations Division, which gives us a glimpse into a path-not-taken, alternate reality where Maxis might have only made a name for themselves in the world of business. A world where powerhouse franchises like SimCity and The Sims never existed. But alas, perhaps we could have had, but now never will have, SimArby’s. </3 SimRefinery Recovered (obscuritory.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425041 https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/ https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/ >Never say never! Thanks to a reader on Ars Technica and an anonymous chemical engineer, a working copy of SimRefinery has been successfully recovered. >Two weeks ago, I published my long-in-the-works article about Maxis Business Simulations, a division of SimCity developer Maxis that made simulation games for businesses. It was the culmination of four years of research, and I’m very proud to share their story. >One of the games they produced was SimRefinery, an oil refinery simulation for Chevron. Very little was widely known about the game until now, and the article kicked off a wave of interest in SimRefinery that seems to have reached beyond gaming circles. Shortly after the article was published, it was picked up by the tech news site Ars Technica, where one reader, postbebop, reported that they knew a retired chemical engineer who worked at Chevron, who confirmed that he owned a copy of the game. postbebop walked the engineer through the process of reading the data from the original floppy disk, and he was able to create a digital copy.
- owlninja 2y agoSo cool! I wonder if I can find the EGM issue where my envelope art was printed? Or should I hold on to that memory, because it may have never even happened! Also can recommend for anyone that finds themselves in Frisco, Texas: https://nvmusa.org/ https://nvmusa.org/
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoIt seems to have a pretty complete collection of EGM issues, however the interface isn't the best, it's a generic file / image gallery that shows 20 items at a time instead of a dated index.
- brendoelfrendo 2y agoThis is a great project. Phil Salvador and Travis Brown, who were working on this, and founder Frank Cifaldi, are all great people. They have a podcast, the Video Game History Hour, where they discuss topics related to video game preservation (recently back after a roughly year long hiatus), if you want to here the people who work there talk about what they do and some of the challenges they face. This has been a long time coming, and the work they did with Cyan on the Myst collection in particular is nothing short of incredible. They had access to basically everything, and it was a huge effort to digitize all of the documents and VHS recordings to (hopefully) archive them long-term. This website is freely accessible, but the VGHF is a non-profit, so kick them a donation if you can and want to see more work like this!
- boogieknite 2y agoi found ep 7 with Gary Kitchen pretty inspiring. hes a little full of himself but he certainly has the hackers mentality and i find his frankness (ugh pun) kicks my butt into gear
- Scuds 2y agothat's one ep that sticks out in my mind - hardware hacking to dump a 2600 cartridge and build homebrew development hardware and then reverse engineering to figure out what's what. Also the subtle flex of making the Donkey Kong girders on an angle when the 2600 is a 'race the beam' system where each scanline must be computed. Even modern homebrew remakes of Donkey Kong on 2600 have horizontal girders.
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoThat's a great resource! Thanks! I loved the episode about Margo Comstock. I remember bumping into her and the Softalk staff at a trade show in the 80s.
- eleveriven 2y agoSuch people are very inspiring and motivating.
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- OhMeadhbh 2y agoVery cool. Rather than be a jerk and talk about why there are so few references to the text and early graphics games from the 60s and 70s, maybe I'll have to pitch the VGHF people on a blog post and book and software collection focused on the 60s-70s era of computer gaming. I was introduced to computers (and computer gaming) in the mid-70s, just immediately before the "trinity" microcomputers hit the market in '77. Our school district in North Texas had access to an HP mainframe (HP-2000?) to teach advanced kids BASIC. Part of my early education involved tearing apart the text-oriented BASIC versions of Hammurabi, Hunt the Wumpus and Star Trek. They would hardly be called "games" today. My dad had business contacts at UIUC and they were infamous for giving ANYONE a PLATO account, so I learned about the friendly orange glow and social computing in "the data center in the corn field." Anyone who played rogue or PLATO/EMPIRE could see where the industry was going by 1980. And the sad bit is we've lost most of the people who developed these games in the 60s and 70s. I think I'll pitch the idea of a small collection of David Ahl books, DECUS games tapes and an interview or two with a few of the remaining coders. Give me a +1 if you're hip to the old text based games, often coded in BASIC and played on microcomputers.
- eleveriven 2y agoPLATO, Rogue, Hammurabi, Star Trek, Wumpus - these games weren’t just early experiments, they set the groundwork for so much of what came after
- HideousKojima 2y agoMy dad recalls playing Star Trek at Berkeley in the 70's, and they used a teletype because whatever computer lab he played it in didn't have any terminals with monitors yet.
- eleveriven 2y agoEarly gaming had such a great mix of limitations and creativity. In a way I miss it
- crtasm 2y ago
- zombot 2y ago[flagged]
- hirako2000 2y agoPrecious to public goods. Wasn't obvious to me how to navigate to the digital library. Edit: it's here: https://archive.gamehistory.org/explore https://archive.gamehistory.org/explore
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoHaving written for at least one of the magazines they have metadata on, I'm wondering when the full text scans will actually appear. It currently looks like they only have 33 magazines in total, which must be a tiny proportion of their archive.
- qingcharles 2y agoWhich mag? I probably have it in my archives.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoOh, I've got hardcopies of the mag, I'm just after the cachet of seeing it in the archive :) For the record, it's a little-known print publication called Switch Player.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pindab0ter 2y agoI think it’s both funny and fitting that a video game library opens in ‘early access’. Apart from adding more games over time, I don’t see the distinction between early access and an actual release. The website is operational and usable, and will have more content added to it over time. Much like early access games. I wonder what the actual distinction is.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI guess, if the analogy is tight, further content would just be "DLC" while moving from early access to a release would involve functional differences.
- c420 2y agoDon't forget the loot boxes!
- taeric 2y agoI would assume that they plan to throttle or otherwise keep a limit on number of users. In case things turn out to be harder on the backend than they were expecting. Could also be a fencepost in case they decide to shard users in a different way in the future and need to wipe people's save data?
- uwagar 2y agoi tried to access say game developer but says "there was an issue loading this document. go back home" :(
- EncomLab 2y agoIsn't most of this (plus terabytes more) available on archive.org? I'm not trying to diminish this effort - anything that is done to preserve digital history is to be applauded - just struggling to see what differentiates this.
- risyachka 2y agoDifferent UI/UX is a massive differentiator that is enough to justify it.
- EncomLab 2y agoI just went to archive.org home page and typed M.C. Kids in search - It has a timeline, magazines, videos, nes guides and a DOS box emulator that you can play the game on. All in about 10 seconds.
- badlibrarian 2y agoarchive.org is also under the shadow of a $621 million lawsuit and run on a shoestring by activists. That amazing "play the game" feature was explicitly called out as fully illegal (even to people with disabilities) by the Librarian of Congress a few months ago. > The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal. https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-exemption-for-text-and-data-mining/ https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-... There's enough balls being dropped here that multiple organizations with different boards, advisors, and funding models are needed. Kudos to all involved.
- ranger_danger 2y agoYes but the vast majority of software on there is 1000% pirated.
- ForOldHack 2y agoDo you have any proof what so ever of this? I have a single counter example: https://archive.org/download/TheUltimateSharewareCollect https://archive.org/download/TheUltimateSharewareCollect
- beretguy 2y agoWill this library require online-only connection to the central servers? (In the spirit of many games that get released these days).
- autoexec 2y agoIn that case they'd have to cut out parts of the images and articles and sell them as "DLC"
- CobrastanJorji 2y agoThis is really cool. It's a wonderful goal to preserve stuff like this. That said, it is of course bizarre that we've gotten to a place where a video game history museum can't have video games for legal reasons. Imagine a museum of paleontology that can show you photos of paleontologists digging but can't show you any dinosaur bones.
- kernal 2y agoA "History" website with no history for users to see when they visit the website.
- Loudergood 2y agoI wonder what Early Access means?
- kernal 2y agoYou mean, like going to a museum pre-opening and seeing empty exhibits?
- gqgs 2y agoI wonder how VGHF's OCR compares against something like just using OpenAI Vision. Based on my experience with Vision, I'd be extremely surprised if this OCR system is more accurate and cost effective overall. For me it seems like this might be yet another example of the sunk cost fallacy.
- musicale 2y agoUnfortunately no DMCA exemption yet. https://gamehistory.org/dmca-2024-statement/ https://gamehistory.org/dmca-2024-statement/