RetroGaming

In the age of emulators, original games are no better then NFTs. They are just a pretty thing to look at, and a store of value for however long other people value them.

I'm mostly being sarcastic, but only mostly. I personally see no value in game collecting. Obviously some people like to hold real games and stick them into real consoles. Me, I just want to play the games.

Makes sense. But what are the odds getting such?

That was actually the Initial discussion. It cant die so easily on that..

Yeah. Another thing is using Everdrives for each unit. I know a lot of people do that

At my first job at an ad agency we stored everything on DVD-Rs. A regular task for me was to copy old discs to new discs because they would rot after a while. It was all very stupid.

But those were rewritable discs. Regular ones will live for a long time before showing any signs of rot, if stored properly.

Just on the issue of disc rot, I feel like I have something to add to the conversation that's more than a personal anecdote.

For many years I worked as a game developer and I did tons of multimedia software, it would not be an exaggeration to say that in my career I personally oversaw the burning of over 100,000 discs, and that's not counting manufacturing or high-run final product.

There's actually a pretty high failure rate, even on new disks. Most that are about 7 years have a 50% failure rate, anything after 10 years if you're lucky you can use software.

In the above examples I'm talking about discs that the consumer grade hardware can burn. It doesn't matter that we used the highest quality equipment, it really doesn't change the formula. Commercially made ones have a much higher durability, somewhere around double.

So basically any disk you own, regardless of where and when it was made, you've got 15 to 20 years at best and then it's nothing but a crap shoot.

Thats one Argument for keeping the stuff OG. I really have mixed Feelings :/

Because facts. I knew about CDs/DVD and so on. New to me ist the GBA, DS, 3DS and Switch run out somewhen.

Write-once ROMs tend to be pretty reliable for a long time as long as there's no physical damage. Leaking save state batteries can do that.

There are some old rewritable ROMs that work by shining UV light on them to erase them, and then you can write to them again. Those can go bad, especially if the sticker falls off and they're exposed to light. They aren't common in cartridges, but you'll see them in arcade motherboards.

Magnetic media will lose its magnetic domains over time. A lot depends on the quality of the disk and the environment it's stored in. Commercially released floppy disks tend to be pretty reliable, but retail blank disks were increasingly cost-optimized into hot garbage as time went on. The new-old-stock disks we get these days are terrible. That said, quality stuff properly stored can last a long, long time.

Optical discs will inevitably get scratched when you use them. Commercial pressed discs can last a long time in storage, though. Burned discs, not so much.

Modern flash memory may lose its cell charge with time without any read/write cycles being involved. AFAIK, there's not much out there about using flash for long term archiving. Most people who are interested in archiving, especially for large corporations, use quality magnetic tape stored in a controlled environment. They aren't interested in flash, so there's not much info out there.

Flash memories don't last forever, and some of the 3DS cartridge batches in particular were rather shit and age quite poorly, a lot faster than DS cartridges for example.

Optical discs are subject to "disc rot", damage from UVs apparently. Some are more vulnerable to it than others. For some reason Wii U discs are quite bad and often have that problem. Sounds very much like Nintendo cheaped out a lot on their media around that time.

I dont know how to explain. I'm not that big of a techie. But yeah. They do somewhen.