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Reply 60 of 91, by F2bnp

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brassicGamer wrote:

In addition to luckybob's comments, whoever buys the INDY also has the anonymity, ergo they can release the source without fear of reprisal (small though that may be, it isn't insignificant). The source is worth nothing because it's someone else's property. The hardware is worth a mediocre amount. The combination is the golden egg. Read between the lines, folks.

Or they might not, because reasons. They can resurface in 10-20 years and sell it for even more or just keep it forever for their own personal amusement or whatever. It's been known to happen before with many games. Example: There was an alpha version of Conker's Bad Fur Day floating around, reportedly from a very early point in production (when the game was still cutesy and all). Some guy bought it, kept it for years without releasing anything and eventually... he died. It's been a few years since that's happened and I don't think we'll ever see that now.

It's all down to luck at this point.

Reply 61 of 91, by konc

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I've written and then deleted before posting a couple of thoughts on this already. They weren't good. So I'll just be blunt:

If SiliconClassics wants to sell the machines just to get his name out of the potentially accused list and then a spectacular leak surfaces with everything properly archived, I'll apologize and keep it in mind next time I judge anyone too fast.

If this doesn't happen I guess I should try to get my hands on some piece of history. Because you know, free advertisement, I'll create a hype around it until I make sure everyone possibly interested knows about it and then I'll sell it for literally thousands.

I surely hope it's not just me thinking this way and still considering both possibilities. I guess time will show.

Reply 62 of 91, by WolverineDK

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Sorry for being so blunt, perhaps it is my political/philosophical view upon certain things. But I personally think the hype and all that stuff is a capitalist dick move from SiliconClassics. Perhaps I am wrong(yes I have seen the video where he talks about his "reasons"), but to me, digital preservation is more important than money. But if he is indeed so worried about lawsuits about the digital source code and all that. He should not have made the hype he did. So I agree with konc.
Perhaps EABOD is not homophobic , but it is indeed sexist , and if the fellow is straight, whom SC shouted towards. Well.. Not that I care (even though I am against sexism, LGBT phobia and what have you) . But SC, if you are in a pool of mud, and you get up. Perhaps you should clean up just a bit.

Reply 63 of 91, by mr_bigmouth_502

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Copyright law is a cancer on cultural preservation. I may not agree with what SiliconClassics decided to do, but he's a lawyer, not me. He knows the legal implications of releasing the content on those machines much better than I do. I am hoping that whoever ends up buying these systems decides to donate them to an archival organization, instead of allowing the contents to fade away to the mists of time.

Reply 64 of 91, by SiliconClassics

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WolverineDK wrote:

Sorry for being so blunt, perhaps it is my political/philosophical view upon certain things...

Sounds like our disagreements derive from two very different worldviews. I don't see profit as evil and I'm not a cultural Marxist / SJW / progressive. The fact is that I can love retro-computing (which I absolutely do) and also profit from it at the same time - these are not mutually exclusive. And my actions do not fly in the face of digital preservation. You, and many others, seem to think that by selling these computers I'm causing their contents to be scattered to the wind, but that doesn't follow. The fact is that they were already lost to history, I re-discovered them, and whoever buys them will be someone who cares a great deal about them, possibly enough to make them available for everyone to enjoy.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Copyright law is a cancer on cultural preservation...

You're absolutely right about that. Copyright law is hopelessly outdated and really needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Last edited by SiliconClassics on 2017-01-18, 19:18. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 65 of 91, by sirlemonhead

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WolverineDK wrote:

Anyway, if you are easily offended , then do not read the reddit thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/5o5wv5/ … _is_lost_again/

Wow, the sense of entitlement from some of the people on that thread!

Reply 67 of 91, by Jorpho

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Does no one remember the "Infocom drive" debacle from a few years ago?
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4848
http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_un … e_to_the_galax/

Sometimes when you start publishing private correspondence without due deference to the people involved, then regardless of how legal it may or may not be, some people are going to get upset.

Reply 68 of 91, by SiliconClassics

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luckybob wrote:

As long as you promise to get a haircut with the proceeds, I'll be happy.

🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

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Reply 70 of 91, by mr_bigmouth_502

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SiliconClassics wrote:
WolverineDK wrote:

Sorry for being so blunt, perhaps it is my political/philosophical view upon certain things...

Sounds like our disagreements derive from two very different worldviews. I don't see profit as evil and I'm not a cultural Marxist / SJW / progressive. The fact is that I can love retro-computing (which I absolutely do) and also profit from it at the same time - these are not mutually exclusive. And my actions do not fly in the face of digital preservation. You, and many others, seem to think that by selling these computers I'm causing their contents to be scattered to the wind, but that doesn't follow. The fact is that they were already lost to history, I re-discovered them, and whoever buys them will be someone who cares a great deal about them, possibly enough to make them available for everyone to enjoy.

We can be hopeful, but there is no guarantee that this will be the case.

SiliconClassics wrote:
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Copyright law is a cancer on cultural preservation...

You're absolutely right about that. Copyright law is hopelessly outdated and really needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

It's one of life's painful ironies that copyright law was originally designed to keep things from falling out of obscurity, but thanks to the efforts of greedy companies like Disney, it's become abused as a tool to stifle the cause of preservation.

EDIT: fixed some formatting

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 2017-01-21, 17:09. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 71 of 91, by leileilol

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Regarding the whinetitlement, what people don't get is that unauthorized source code alone doesn't make progress. There are source releases of many games out there that were never legally cleared so anyone decent with a conscience knows to stay far away from them. Expecting a result (like a "Free" port of Turok) from an unauthorized source dump or leak would be very naive.

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 72 of 91, by mr_bigmouth_502

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leileilol wrote:

Regarding the whinetitlement, what people don't get is that unauthorized source code alone doesn't make progress. There are source releases of many games out there that were never legally cleared so anyone decent with a conscience knows to stay far away from them. Expecting a result (like a "Free" port of Turok) from an unauthorized source dump or leak would be very naive.

I'm not expecting a free port of Turok myself. 🤣 If anything, I'm actually hoping that some of the information on these machines (like the N64 SDK) can help emulator developers.

Speaking of emulators, I wonder why no one's bothered emulating any of SGI's machines. Are they just too complex?

Reply 73 of 91, by Jorpho

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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Speaking of emulators, I wonder why no one's bothered emulating any of SGI's machines. Are they just too complex?

I suppose there just isn't enough interest in doing so. (I guess it would let people run that famous Final Fantasy tech demo?)

Reply 74 of 91, by chinny22

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While it would be cool to keep them all together 20 odd machines is too much for 1 person, they would of been split up sooner or later anyway.
At least its someone in the hobby who understands the worth of the data and not a recycler type seller on ebay who strips down old machines and sells the parts. Which still may happen but is bit more unlikely now that the original owners are known, or even if 1 or 2 of them do end up being stripped all the data is backed up, even if it never sees the light of day again, it al least survived this long.

Reply 75 of 91, by Jorpho

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chinny22 wrote:

Which still may happen but is bit more unlikely now that the original owners are known, or even if 1 or 2 of them do end up being stripped all the data is backed up, even if it never sees the light of day again, it al least survived this long.

I don't think anyone's going to be proudly showing off their old SGI machine that was used in development at Acclaim and is still in mint condition, etc.

Perhaps people are forgetting that we're talking about Acclaim here. They weren't exactly a top-tier developer that made valuable contributions and changed the way we looked at video games, or something. As I mentioned back on page 1, they will probably be best remembered for their spectacularly awful marketing. There's probably similar caches from similarly-sized software companies out there (and with similar dev materials) that people could not care less about.

Reply 76 of 91, by gdjacobs

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Jorpho wrote:
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Speaking of emulators, I wonder why no one's bothered emulating any of SGI's machines. Are they just too complex?

I suppose there just isn't enough interest in doing so. (I guess it would let people run that famous Final Fantasy tech demo?)

Emulating the graphics hardware would also be a significant task, plus Irix isn't as generally available. IBM big metal software is similarly hard to acquire, but emulators like Hercules exist because they are sometimes the only migration path available for custom software on that platform. Pretty much everyone (even SGI) moved away from Irix to Linux for graphics work.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 77 of 91, by luckybob

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With 45 minutes to go on the auction, I had another look.

I must say, that is one NICE ebay listing description. If I sold more than 1-2 a month, I'd like to know how to do that. I assume it's just HTML?

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 78 of 91, by SiliconClassics

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Thanks Bob, it's just a simple HTML table made with Dreamweaver 3 (copyright 1999) and I took the pics with my smartphone, with some minor editing in Photoshop 5.5. Retro all the way.

Really wondering what will happen in the final minutes... [edit] - nuthin! Oh well, $2.5k ain't bad... and the buyer is a great guy whom I've dealt with before, someone with the means and the desire to properly preserve the code on this Indy.

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Reply 79 of 91, by Stiletto

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Jorpho wrote:
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Speaking of emulators, I wonder why no one's bothered emulating any of SGI's machines. Are they just too complex?

I suppose there just isn't enough interest in doing so. (I guess it would let people run that famous Final Fantasy tech demo?)

As with everything, it's on MAME's to-do list.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/s … rivers/4dpi.cpp
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/s … rs/iris3130.cpp
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/s … ndy_indigo2.cpp
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/s … vers/indigo.cpp
[EDIT] indy_indigo2.cpp is the only one that actually has anything of note on-screen, ip225015 is the driver

Anything besides these models, either we haven't acquired ROM dumps for, or we have ROM dumps but haven't yet entered them into the sourcecode (far less likely).

Though it's always possible someone else will beat us to the punch (like QEMU).

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto