Read it here!
- https://files.catbox.moe/l9cmlm.pdf
- https://wormhole.app/kzyPEq#WjEU7pMIH135gRwobOX68A (24 hours, but faster)
- magnet:?xt=urn:btih:4ebc47225c6c2b0d99738dcfb3165f4d247686f7&dn=RetroTorrents%3A%20A%20Detailed%20White%20Paper.pdf
A few socials and spaces
- Rentry page: https://rentry.co/RetroTorrents
- Lemmy Community page: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/RetroTorrents
- Bsky page: https://bsky.app/profile/retrotorrents.bsky.social
Trigger warning: something might not be accurate or outside your tastes, but that is the magic of me and my friend (Liam 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.
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https://annas-archive.org/blog/blog-how-to-become-a-pirate-archivist.html
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https://annas-archive.org/blog/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html
Currently, we are just experimenting the data with this, since it’s free for testing.
Overall, we thought that the wake-up call on video game preservation should start sooner, rather than later. Also, thanks for reading this far!
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.
You’ll basically need to force people to seed and not just seed two copies (the default), but like 10:1, which means forcing all the users to chance their settings - which I’m doubtful of this happening on a large enough scale.
… and the pdfs proposed solution is:
3.2. The Retro Rush Event Torrents will rely on a community of active players and archivists. To prevent obscure games from having slow download speeds or freezing, a weekly community event will be announced and shown to encourage preservation efforts from the community.
Goal: The community unites to seed their favourite or obscure titles. This creates a predictable time where download speeds skyrocket, ensuring that even the rarest games remain available.
I don’t think a rally of specific games is going to be enough to keep these torrents alive.
You’d basically need to run this as a private torrent, with upload/download credits and credit “boosts” for struggling torrents.
Or, as was rejected in the pdf, you use tor and create an “anonymous service” and host these small files, but the pdf is right in that tor is not the best tool for multi-MB files.
Anyway, I share your concern regarding the archiving of old games, but I’m doubtful this will help in a meaningful way.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
By the way, you can join the signal group and discuss this further with us! You can send me a direct message as a request or find it in the “RetroTorrents” community page.
I know that inherently being the new kid on the block means outreach and building trust but advertising what is essentially an illegal platform feels very much like a honey pot to me. I hope I’m wrong, as game preservation is incredibly important. Something just feels off about this project.
Yeah, we know that being “illegal” puts us in a bad light, perhaps we can embrace it. And apologies for the bad impression! This is the first time we want something as big as the lair, and we know that messing it up would ruin the movement. :)
Did you look at existing retro gaming torrent sites?
We did…It’s complicated!
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/ROM_%26_ISO_sites#BitTorrent
We have found the torrents from the Reddit user r/1G1R to be a great choice, but some of these collections use a file format that does not work on an emulator. For example, the “1G1R - Redump - Sony - PlayStation” torrent has ROM files stored in a .7z archive (does not work with DuckStation). That is Game Over for those that want to download, play and archive every game at the same time. :(
Wait, you just need to open the 7z file and duckstation can read that.
Sounds like the old Underground Gamer which I still miss after all this time. Good luck!
It may be worth your time to have a chat with the veilid devs about using the veilid protocol to host all the files.
I haven’t heard of veilid before. How does it fit with the privacy tech like i2pd, Tahos-lafs, reticulum, etc?
Why not look into other P2P protocols for sharing small files?
