(re: re: Ken: your personal collection of Sierra games)
Hi Ken,
The reason I was asking is because I am very interested in preserving all Sierra games.
Cartridges usually last for a very long time, and they are also easily dumpable.
For example, I have dumped the 2 Sierra PCjr cartridges I had (which are available on a friend’s site http://retrograde.trustno1.org/pcjr.htm).
CDs also last for a quite long time, and they are more recent and probably easily dumpable as well.
The preservation of floppy disks, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. That’s why I have created the Disk2FDI software that is able to image any floppy disk with an excellent quality. With this tool, it is possible to dump any floppy, even a protected original, for any machine, then preserve the imaged floppy on a CD, DVD or whatever future storage may become available. The problem with real floppy disks is that they can get corrupted with time, so the task of preserving the older games should be done as soon as possible.
Floppy disk images can then be used with emulators supporting the image format, just as if you were using the original floppy with the real machine. BTW, that is what was done for the Roberta William’s Anthology.
What Disk2FDI adds is the ability to automatically image any original protected disk with only a PC.
I was thinking that it would be very nice to make images of your collection, so that it can be preserved safely for the future.
I’m not (necessarily) interested in getting the games myself, but rather make sure there is at least a properly imaged copy kept somewhere. I also think that would be very interesting if a Sierra collection was made from the collection of the founder of Sierra himself. Whether it can become available to the public by one way or another in the future is another story…
I would be glad to offer you a free registration of Disk2FDI (www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi) so that you can use the enhanced imaging functionalities. I would also help you in any way I can so that you can setup a working configuration to make Disk2FDI work well.
Making such a collection with eBay would probably be very time and money-consuming, especially since I don’t live in the USA.
I know you may not have much time to do this, but please let me know what you think about the general idea of preserving the old games this way.
Vincent.