Trigger warning: something might not be accurate or outside your tastes, but that is the magic of me and my friend (Bolívar) spending months on a document and marketing strategies.

For the longest time we have wondered one thing with ROM sites, why don't they use torrents? Is is that difficult?

"Hosting torrents is a total PITA. It's not worth it" - ████

So, we did some research around them and file formats that emulators use like CHD, RVZ and WUX for a few months and may have found a way to preserve retro video games efficiently and perfectly. But truth be told, we don't know if this idea is perfect or has something missing.

We have looked a bit about shadow libraries, but that will come when the site would be ready to deploy.

Currently, we are just experimenting the data with this, since it's free for testing.

https://www.screenscraper.fr/

Overall, we thought that the wake-up call on video game preservation should start sooner, rather than later. Also, thanks for reading this far!

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[–] Hyperrealism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The fundamental problem with using torrents to share small files (which old ROMs are), is that content is only shared while seeding or leeching. A torrents health works best, when people are actively leeching. You’re not going to get that for 1 MB files.

Given these are small files, I don't get why you wouldn't simply jam 1000 or whatever games into a torrent. I dunno, make a torrent for each year or even per console. Update the torrents with new files every month.

Maybe pop in the full emulator software in the torrent so it's ready to go. Sure, plenty of redundancy, extra bandwidth, yadayada but given the files are so small...

Also, if these are abandoned or public domain games, you can easily publish them on the internet archive.

[–] LedgeDrop@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 week ago

disclaimer: I haven't actually looked... but...

Historically, it is those large "complete collection" torrents that survive on public trackers... and probably still exist.

Thus, (sorry to be blunt) why I think this project wouldn't really provide a lot of "additional value".