DutchDimension
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 122
Homebrew skills: Pixel, 2D and 3D art
Fave PCE Shooter: Override
Fave PCE Platformer: Mizbak's Adventure
Fave PCE Game Overall: Too many to choose from
Fave PCE RPG: Ys series
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Post by DutchDimension on Nov 24, 2020 2:45:50 GMT
So with retro consoles already facing the ravages of time in the form of leaky capacitors, failing laser units or worn down gears, what is the likelihood of Hu-Cards and CD-Rom²s eventually starting to fail? Have there been any reports of Hu-Card failure or CD rot? I guess new discs could be burned relatively easily, but for Hu-Cards it would not that straightforward.
I love collecting and playing the original games, but with the games costing as much as they do, it's a worrying prospect.
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Post by dshadoff on Nov 24, 2020 13:39:39 GMT
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nicole
Gun-headed
Posts: 50
Fave PCE Shooter: Magical Chase
Fave PCE Platformer: Legendary Axe II
Fave PCE RPG: Ys III
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Post by nicole on Nov 24, 2020 15:13:18 GMT
I would guess the most failure-prone medium PCE games are likely to be found on is the LaserDisc. Not sure if any work has been done to try to preserve the LaserActive titles... (obnoxious: at least if they go it's no great loss)
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Post by dshadoff on Nov 24, 2020 18:06:13 GMT
I don't know about LD games, but I found much more decay in HuCards (~2%) than CDROMs (0 unrecoverable issues) - and that's from among a larger set of CDROM games. Although I expect that once the CDROMs start to rot, they are likely to fail in larger numbers.
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esteban
Gun-headed
GOMOLA SPEED or GO HOME.
Posts: 94
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Post by esteban on Nov 24, 2020 18:42:17 GMT
I would guess the most failure-prone medium PCE games are likely to be found on is the LaserDisc. Not sure if any work has been done to try to preserve the LaserActive titles... (obnoxious: at least if they go it's no great loss) I want to play those LaserActive LD games, one day, but I don't know if they are being preserved (the last time I read about the preservation of LaserDisc games (in general, including arcade) and LaserActive (specifically for PCE and MegaDrive)... it was pretty depressing. This was 10+ years ago, though...
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Post by spenoza on Nov 24, 2020 19:19:32 GMT
What is the mechanism for decline for the ROMs used in HuCards?
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Post by SignOfZeta on Nov 24, 2020 20:22:33 GMT
I’m a long time massive fan of LD and audio CD which predate PCE by a bit (1978 for LD, 1982 for CD). My option after all I’ve seen is that “rot” is a hugely overrated, massively, it’s barely even an issue. Some guy finds one bad disc, never never shuts up about it until he dies, rarely mentioning the 10,000 good ones he’s handled.
Preserving a LDROM2 game is something that will be done, it’s more or less possible now. I don’t anticipate any games will rot before the Domesday duplicator project is eventually used to capture a high res recording of the raw EFM of the entire disc. (Playing this back will be another step however...) All LDROM2 games were made in very good factories so I don’t think any of them have rotted at all. Nearly all bad LDs come from one factory in the UK and one in the US or the very early parts of LD’s life, before 1986 let’s say. Finding a rotted disc that was pressed in Japan in 1991 is almost unheard of. It happens, but it’s very rare. By then the plants really had their S together, especially the Japanese ones.
Bad audio CDs come almost exclusively from the same UK factory that made all the defective PAL LDs. CDs, by and large, don’t rot. There are defective ones, and there are morons who are so stupid that they can’t even not scratch their CDs in the 2.4 seconds that it’s not in a case or a player. There are people who store their CDs in a shack in Louisiana. Rot in CDs outside of that one UK plant though, the disc just going bad in it’s case for no reason, is profoundly super super super rare, much more uncommon than rotted LDs which do in fact exist in waves.
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Post by dshadoff on Nov 25, 2020 0:26:44 GMT
I re-scanned my library of audio CDs the same year, and found 30 out of about 3000 which had unrecoverable errors in at least one track. Several of these were unreadable across large portions of the disc. (I think I mentioned this in that thread too).
If you extend this to the number of discs which had errors which were recoverable, there is a much bigger number. Something like 200. And when I say "recoverable", I mean that the software which did the scanning had multiple different error-resolving issues, and that the error correction was not by any means done during the course of normal read from any ECC or such data -> this was heavy re-reading with different sector offsets and so on, trying to infer the missing data through repetitive reads.
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Post by SignOfZeta on Nov 25, 2020 0:47:25 GMT
Yes, but how many of these discs had actual playback issues? How many of these games crash?
Related: I crashed Sonic 2 on the Genesis Mini today and in a way I’ve never crashed it on the cart. I was somewhat surprised by that...unrelated, I just had to mention it. That game must have 1000 bugs in it still.
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nicole
Gun-headed
Posts: 50
Fave PCE Shooter: Magical Chase
Fave PCE Platformer: Legendary Axe II
Fave PCE RPG: Ys III
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Post by nicole on Nov 25, 2020 2:45:56 GMT
I’m a long time massive fan of LD and audio CD which predate PCE by a bit (1978 for LD, 1982 for CD). My option after all I’ve seen is that “rot” is a hugely overrated, massively, it’s barely even an issue. Some guy finds one bad disc, never never shuts up about it until he dies, rarely mentioning the 10,000 good ones he’s handled. Preserving a LDROM2 game is something that will be done, it’s more or less possible now. I don’t anticipate any games will rot before the Domesday duplicator project is eventually used to capture a high res recording of the raw EFM of the entire disc. (Playing this back will be another step however...) All LDROM2 games were made in very good factories so I don’t think any of them have rotted at all. Nearly all bad LDs come from one factory in the UK and one in the US or the very early parts of LD’s life, before 1986 let’s say. Finding a rotted disc that was pressed in Japan in 1991 is almost unheard of. It happens, but it’s very rare. By then the plants really had their S together, especially the Japanese ones. That's totally fair; my judgment of LaserActive rot is mostly from one copy of Pyramid Patrol I own that's definitely experiencing some image degradation; nothing on the level of some of the truly rotted discs, but it gave me concern for the future of the format. I guess I just might have had bad luck there. None of my (two) PC Engine LD-ROM discs seem to be suffering that.
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Post by dshadoff on Nov 25, 2020 4:27:35 GMT
Yes, but how many of these discs had actual playback issues? How many of these games crash? All of the audio CDs with unrecoverable errors had issues. Of course, this is because it's pretty easy to get 100% coverage of the disc within one hour of passive use. For HuCards, it's much harder to get 100% coverage (and in some cases, nearly impossible). I hardly ever finish HuCard games, and the time investment is clearly more than one hour of passive use. Yet I did see at least one (I think two) problems. One was a boot crash; I believe I saw another issue on a another card which only occurred after a certain point was reached.
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DutchDimension
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 122
Homebrew skills: Pixel, 2D and 3D art
Fave PCE Shooter: Override
Fave PCE Platformer: Mizbak's Adventure
Fave PCE Game Overall: Too many to choose from
Fave PCE RPG: Ys series
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Post by DutchDimension on Nov 26, 2020 4:52:37 GMT
Terrific analysis Dave! Thank you for creating that other thread. I had missed that completely.
So it sounds as if there is definitely some concerns there. The question though is, if bit-rot occurs in non-code parts of the rom, such as graphics or sound data, would the game still run, albeit with corrupt looking/sounding graphics/audio? Or perhaps a better question is, how much would it take to completely wreck a game from working? A single bit in a crucial place gone rogue would be enough to render a game unplayable, correct?
Would there be a way to fix HuCards in a non-invasive way? I suppose not, considering it's non flashable Rom.
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Post by dshadoff on Nov 26, 2020 5:48:55 GMT
Here is a good video I recently watched, which goes through a variety of ways that older machines and software can age: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUe0qzBw-hQIf a bit rots in graphics, and if the graphics is not stored in a compressed format, it will just alter the appearance. In order to completely wreck a game, it would take at least one bit in a piece of code which is executed during a play session. Some pieces of code are related to where you are within the game, but others are common routines which will be executed many times even before the title screen appears. In this way, it's like a lottery ticket, because not all of the ROM is frequently-run code, but a certain percentage is. On the other hand, once one bit decays, you can bet that the remaining bits are edging closer to the end of their lives as well. This rot tends to appear in patterns, starting from the first bit, then on adjacent bytes, blocks and pages. Of the damaged HuCards that I found, one had only 1 bit altered. At the other extreme, one had many bytes per 256-byte 'page', across several pages and throughout a large portion fo the ROM. This one basically had errors across rows of data, not just bytes. And finally no, there is no repair for these ROMs, as they were one-time programmable only - and the older ones are likely mask-programmed, meaning that the data was placed there during the fabrication process, rather than later at the packaging factory.
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a
Deep Blooper
Posts: 40
Fave PCE Shooter: 1943 Kai
Fave PCE Platformer: what's a platformer?
Fave PCE RPG: No.
Currently Playing: Soldier Blade Special
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Post by a on Nov 26, 2020 10:02:18 GMT
Everyone should own a turbo everdrive in case their games start dying.
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Post by SignOfZeta on Nov 26, 2020 15:02:27 GMT
Everyone should own a turbo everdrive in case their games start dying. Yeah, I’ll still bet on the factory HuCARD over garagista flash stuff. I’ve never had a HuCARD or CD die on me whereas every flash card I’ve ever owned has died. What will keep these games alive forever is that they have all been dumped and recopied millions of times. The global mega RAID of video game piracy. You can’t place all your bets on any individual digital storage system. If you want one game to last forever your best bet is to hand print the binary onto paper and seal it in a airtight radiation-proof box, then bury that in a concrete tomb 100 feet below the earth’s surface. Then, when they thaw your head in 1000 years you can use your new robot body to dig up the vault and hand transcribe the binary into whatever sort of computer system exists in the future. Since that’s unlikely to be something even the most hardcore PCE will do, I suggest we just play our HuCARDs and CDs until they quit. Mask ROMs and pressed CDs are as set in stone and as totally unrepairable as anything can be. There is nothing you can do to save them and their ghosts are already preserved.
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