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Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative


Farb

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1 minute ago, SoulBuster said:

I can upload non-originals for entries that are not preserved.  If that helps to preserve them.

Yes, thanks. We can often use non-original dumps to verify original dumps (assuming that we can confirm the two dumps didn't come from the same physical media) ?

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Found my original hardware post: 

 

 

I noticed that the Preservation Site shows the equipment and Software that was used to dump.

 

Here is my equipment for all dumps if you want to update the preservation web site

Disk Hardware: Panasonic JU-475-3C02 on a SuperCard Pro

Disk Software: a8rawconv-0.94

 

Cassette Software: Audacity 3.02

 

Cartridge Hardware and Software: AtariMax Maxflash USB Programmer

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2 hours ago, SoulBuster said:

FYI.  The Archive has Jaw Breaker as a single word.  All disk labels and documentation show it as two words.

Yes, there was not a lot of consistency around this. On-Line Systems magazine ads and reviews for the title showed it as one word. And it is one word on the labels for Jawbreaker II (which were confusingly named just "Jawbreaker"). But you are right, the media labels and manuals I have seen so far show it as two words so I have changed it in the database. I probably need to implement an alias feature so both can be captured for search purposes ?

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One of the big lessons I learned working as an engineer at AOL/WinAmp, was that you needed to have multiple hashes generated from slightly different variations of metadata:

 

We, of course had a filename hash, which was generated from the literal filename itself.

 

There was also the metahash, which was generated from the parts of the metadata that would be chosen from lists (excluding things like titles etc)

 

there was also the name hash, which would be generated from a normalized title, where we would convert to uppercase roman, and remove all spaces and special characters.

 

And depending on the type of search, we would prioritize hash matches.

 

-Thom

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Collection #9

 

Around 150+ disks with a mix of originals, protected non-originals and menus.

As always have a look through and enjoy. Looks like there may be a few rares/missing in this one.

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JEOHtuhcu7rcsnkQfYhlV0XlJNH0usuT/view?usp=sharing

 

Previous collections - 1-8

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vh9tc09-zZ3jZTRH3OekwhKmAuEctUAQ/view?usp=sharing

 

Edited by Zarxx
link edit
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All,

 

This one is of personal interest. Doug Geiss of this Atari Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiasts, M.A.C.E created the The Protector at the age of 14 as part of games available for download on various AMIS bbs's. Along with the game ATR on DOS 2.5 attached  is a quick video of the game, instructions, and this the M.A.C.E article from April 1984.

 

The program started out as an exercise to redefine the character set, from the book Atari Graffics

 

Doug is still active on the Facebook group  Atari 8-bit Computers. Would be great to preserve this treasure.

 

thumbnail.thumb.jpg.807c6685e9602085475a956bd9d216f5.jpg 

Protec.atr

Protector Ins.jpg

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2 minutes ago, rcamp48 said:

Hello Everyone:

 I have 70 KWEST users group disks that have not been archived, I just got my Fujinet today so I am busy archiving  my collection. If anyone wants more infor please PM me or reply here , I will keep checking for replies. Russ

 

this is a preservation thread not and archive or warez thread, if these are original KWEST users group disks made by the KWEST librarian they might be imaged with an SCP, Kryoflux, or Greaseweazle but offering atr's and atx's of users group pd disks is not the same thing. You might have put this in it's own or perhaps another, possibly similar users group thread.

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6 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

this is a preservation thread not and archive or warez thread, if these are original KWEST users group disks made by the KWEST librarian they might be imaged with an SCP, Kryoflux, or Greaseweazle but offering atr's and atx's of users group pd disks is not the same thing. You might have put this in it's own or perhaps another, possibly similar users group thread.

OK I will ask that it be moved.

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On 8/17/2021 at 12:01 AM, _The Doctor__ said:

this is a preservation thread not and archive or warez thread, if these are original KWEST users group disks made by the KWEST librarian they might be imaged with an SCP, Kryoflux, or Greaseweazle but offering atr's and atx's of users group pd disks is not the same thing. You might have put this in it's own or perhaps another, possibly similar users group thread.

I have a program for you guys that you may be able to use, it is a file sorting program, written in QB64 , I will post it here , :The Atari 8 Bit Tosec File Sorter.bas    The_Atari_8_Bit_Tosec_File_Sorter.exe

Have a look at the source code and you may be able to use it to sort the files, and I was the KWEST librarian, atr is all I have. There are a lot of original files in there.

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One thing I can do is if I get access to the entire library, I am willing to sort all of the files into games, music, applications, graphics, demos, etc.... I have a lot of time on my hands and I need a new project, once I have sorted all of the files into sub categories , ie: games\atx, games\atr, games\car etc, I can run my sorting program on just the Preservation files....

 

Russ

 

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Hi Russ,

 

Thank you for the offer of help.

 

We don't sort the file directories in the preservation archive using the TOSEC standard since it is more important for processing purposes that we track the raw dumps by their specific release, the contributor & date of the contribution, etc.

 

However, the a8preservation.com website uses an extensive tagging system that can be used to categorize titles in many different ways for searching and other purposes. This is still very much work in progress as it is a failry recent addition to the site. If you have the free time, and are interested to help us improve our organization/categorization at the website level, please PM me and we can chat further.

Edited by Farb
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1 minute ago, MrFish said:

Can someone point me to the latest torrent?

No one has hosted a torrent in a while but there was a Mega link posted in this thread a few weeks ago. There will also be a substantial update coming shortly.

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13 minutes ago, Farb said:

No one has hosted a torrent in a while but there was a Mega link posted in this thread a few weeks ago. There will also be a substantial update coming shortly.

 

I saw the Mega link was from 7/2/2021, so I thought maybe I'd missed a new one last month.

 

If a new one's coming soon, I can wait. I figured it was about time.

 

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2 hours ago, Farb said:

No one has hosted a torrent in a while but there was a Mega link posted in this thread a few weeks ago. There will also be a substantial update coming shortly.

I'll do it again after the update...  we historically have only done this for substantial updates and milestones. It is always a completely new torrent so everything is up to date and anything that needed to be removed no longer exists. If real life allows for it, it will be torrent and ftp server like last time.

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2 hours ago, Farb said:

No one has hosted a torrent in a while but there was a Mega link posted in this thread a few weeks ago. There will also be a substantial update coming shortly.

 

As always, the latest official preservation archive can be found mirrored at the URL below for Atari enthusiasts and collectors— once the new archive is released, I'll update it on Atari-Owner.com as well:

 

https://atari-owner.com/fun/atari-preserved-software/

 

--Tim

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Hi all. I figured I'd post this to the larger thread so others can see it as well...

 

TL;DR

 

We can definitely use the Atari community's help to improve the preservation project and you don't need to be highly technical to contribute. Even just a knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet and a willingness to scour through the existing public website, magazine PDFs, etc. would be extremely valuable. See the items highlighted in red bold-italics below for specific areas we could use some help and please PM me if you'd like to get involved.

 

The longer version

 

We have a very small group of people assisting with the core preservation project work and the bulk of what we do is the actual dumping of media, scanning, performing time-consuming analysis, scouring old publications and doing other research to identify release dates, similar titles from a time period, similar protection types, etc. This information not only helps in cataloging everything but can also be valuable when we encounter rare disks or tapes with data corruption and need to manually attempt to fix them. For example, a non-trivial number of ATX and CAS files do not come from a single raw dump but are actually manual reconstructions from several raw dumps that all have data corruption in different parts of the disk or tape. We've created and maintain various tools to help us in these endeavors.

 

I wrote the a8preservation.com site itself completely from scratch and I have been slowly enhancing it to expose the results of our research and experimenting with new capabilities that don't exist (at least to my knowledge) in the Atari community today. For example...

 

1. Rather than simply creating a single category for a title, the site uses a tagging system which allows multiple tag associations per title. The site's search feature can filter based on the presence of one or more tags and even the absence of tags. This is how the Browse Software page is driven. For example, clicking the Text Adventures - Fantasy category is really a search for all titles that have the "Game", "Adventure", "Text", "Fantasy" and "NOT Graphics" tags. These tags are also used to generate the "You may also be interested in..." section at the bottom of each title page. There are even tags for all the different vendor disk protection variants we have identified so far.

 

We can use help identifying and fixing gaps in the tagging of our titles and releases.

 

2. Our Publications section has entries for most major Atari magazines. If you click into a particular issue, you will get a list of articles. Some articles also have the article text itself available.

 

Software review articles are of particular significance because we can discover information such as details of a particular release, how many disks were included, etc. The database currently has the ability to establish a relationship between a title and its software reviews. If this relationship exists, and we have the text of the article in the database, the site performs AI-based sentiment analysis of the review texts and generates an aggregate "critics' score" for the title. An example of this can be seen on the page for Jumpman.

 

We also have the ability to establish a relationship between titles and magazine ads (as also seen on the Jumpman page). This is another data point we use to identify release dates for a title if we don't have other indicators or if the other indicators are misleading (e.g. copyright dates that come from the release of the title on another platform rather than the actual Atari release date).

 

We can use help identifying missing article entries from each magazine issue, identifying missing ads, creating formatted article text from magazine PDFs, etc.

 

3. We still have gaps in our release metadata such as number of players, memory requirements, supported controllers, BASIC, etc. These are not only displayed on the website but also drive the generation of the filenames that we distribute.

 

We can use help identifying and resolving gaps in our release metadata.

 

Why is the above work useful to the community?

 

Well, there are two main reasons I have right now...

 

1. I've been slowly working on a public REST API for the site. It's still being actively refined but is already driving portions of the website today. This API could be used by the community in various ways. An obvious example would be an emulator getting the data it needs to configure itself accurately from the file CRC/MD5 when a disk, cassette or cartridge is loaded.

 

2. I am not currently aware of a data-driven estimation of title rarity. Others have made a great effort to estimate this manually based on their impressive knowledge of the Atari scene, but I'd like to try something more deterministic. We've been accumulating dumps for 7-8 years now. I think we have a number of data points that could go into a rarity calculation including how many dumps of that title we've seen, whether the media was mass produced, how many magazine reviews exist, how many publication ads exist, etc.

 

Summary

 

Sorry for the long post but it's been a while since I've shared what we've been doing in the background besides releasing a new collection of media dumps every few months. If you have read up to this point, thanks for your attention and please consider donating some time ?

 

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