70 Long-Lost Japanese Video Games Discovered In a 67GB Folder of ROMs On a Private Forum (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Until yesterday, rare Japanese PC game Labyrinthe, developed by Caravan Interactive, was long thought to be lost forever. That is until the almost mythical third game in the already obscure Horror Tour series was found on a 67GB folder of ROMs on a private forum. Other rare games from the folder are expected to become public soon. According to a YouTuber called Saint, who posted a video of him playing the game and a link to download it on Mega, Labyrinthe and as many as 70 other rare or never-before-released Japanese titles have been circulating in a file sharing directory on a private torrent site.

Labyrinthe, alongside other rare titles including Cookie's Bustle, Yellow Brick Road and Link Devicer 2074 were in a folder called "DO NOT UPLOAD." Members of the private forum hesitated to upload Labyrinthe in the fear that the private collector would take down the folder and leave the collection out of reach once again. This hesitation demonstrates the often tense relationship between game preservationists and private collectors. According to a screenshot uploaded by Saint, the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and stop uploading games altogether if anyone leaked Labyrinthe. In uploading the game to Mega, it's possible the folder will be pulled from the internet. But in doing so, the person advanced the interests of game preservationists worldwide by leaking the this game and others.

Comments

A new kind of imbecile

[hjf]

You have to be a whole category of imbecile to keep "private" collections of ROMs.
"Look at me, I'll die the last person to ever play this video game". What kind of virgin feels proud of this?

Also, are the other forum members retarded? Can't they download the folder themselves in full and repost?

Imbeciles, imbeciles everywhere.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[drinkypoo]

It is understandable that collectors want to keep a low profile.

By uploading they've already failed to do that. Other people downloading and re-upping the files elsewhere won't change that at all. They've already taken the action of uploading them, the smartest thing for them to do is to never touch those uploaded files again. Therefore, they are either a staggering idiot (of which there is no shortage) or just refusing to share their toys with the other children, which is pathetic and childish.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[CrimsonAvenger]

Abandonware means there's no owner anymore so there's nobody to "steal" from.

No, abandonware is IGNORED (as in: not supported) by its owner. If the owner suddenly sees some money to be made from it, he'll start paying attention....

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[Megane]

At least this one had copied them from the original media. There are collectors with games on actual physical EPROMs who refuse to have them dumped at all. Bit rot is a thing, eventually after enough time the charge will leak away and the chip will erase itself bit by bit. It just takes longer without being exposed to light. CD-Rs also have similar degradation with time. They would rather sleep on their dragons hoard while the actual game vanishes and becomes almost worthless, than take the chance that someone else having a soft copy of it might cause more than a penny of its value to vanish.

And I say this as someone who has found at least one game that nobody else has ever found, and I dumped and shared that sucker right away.

Re:A new kind of imbecile

[fafalone]

The entire concept of copyright is to grant limited protection in pursuit of enhancing the public domain. Creators rights are balanced with the rights of the public; it's not for their exclusive benefit to do whatever they want in perpetuity (or at least that wasn't the original intent). The trade-off that if they're not selling it, it loses protection, is entirely in line with the purpose of creating an economic incentive to *create*. Copyright maximalists like you are wallowing in unmitigated greed. If you're done realizing the economic benefit of the limited protection of copyright, damn right the public domain is morally entitled to that work, especially if it's older than 28 years (which the games here most are), even if corrupt legislators have allowed the original limited term to be changed to effectively unlimited.

Re:ROMs?

[Sarten-X]

In the world of game emulation, the binaries are known as "ROMs", regardless of their original medium.

The term originates as "ROM dumps", which is exactly what you'd expect - extracted contents of the ROM from old console systems and cartridges. Notably, that's the part that is actually covered by copyright laws, with the actual execution details (originally in coprocessors, and now handled by the emulator itself) more often covered by patents, trade secrets, and simple secrecy.

As distribution technology has progressed such that games no longer have their data on read-only memory, and more importantly as those games have entered the emulation scene, the term hasn't changed. Now, "ROMs" include any game data not directly part of the emulation.

It's worth noting that legally there is very little risk from developing or distributing an emulator, but significant risk in distributing the ROM data. There have actually been some open-source or public-domain ROMs produced from scratch, but of course the biggest trade in them is in redistributing commercial software.

"Pirating" is good-the "owners" are lousy stewards

[Catbeller]

Jerry Pournelle, the late science fiction author, said on a TWIT podcast that his publishers had, really! lost a number of his books that had not been in print for many years. Libraries didn't have the books, NO ONE had the books. But, TA-DA, book scanning "pirates" *had* scanned the books and gladly zapped him the copies, which he put back on sale and were making him a nice bit of income.