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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[–] EphraimEscobar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We have to admit, a private torrent tracker would be more efficient to prevent leeching. And using a torrent client to download a 2MB ROM is extreme, so perhaps including a "playable" 1G1R version would help for those who want the whole collection and then load any of those ROMs in an emulator without extracting the file (e.g. .zip or .chd or .rvz or .wux), which would prevent having two copies of it, however, updating a 1G1R torrent is out of the question, that would just cause more problems.

[–] quexotic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

I should have placed my comment about veilid here. It might be the right fit for this use case. Look into the protocol and see if you agree.