cyb - cyberpunk

>>18753

This sounds like a great project, maybe you could take a really episodic approach. Make a really detailed rundown on each game. You could also use the internet archive or whatever to actually grab the games, that should cover your ass.

>>18753
please post the name of your blog. this sounds like something Id enjoy.
well I dont think you really have to fear much about getting taken down until your blog is more popular.
also I dont think they can really catch you because most obscure games dont have a huge publisher behind them.
MEGA is one of the best but its getting worse step by step.
choose Mediafire next to MEGA and Zippyshare too.
theyre the fastest file hosts.

>>18753
Cannot help you with your questions, but please do this.

>>18753
don't be too worried. takedowns only happen on large-scale websites, and most of the games you are talking about don't have a large audience. I know a SoF 2 fourm that has had a full download of the game for around 5 years or so, and they receive soykaf ton of traffic.
only steps you can take are use a secure hosting service, upload magnet links and have people download the links (torrenting) and open them in their program of choice. Besides those you can check who holds licenses for whatever you are giving away.

>blog api
wikia, tumblr, wordpress, and blogspot aren't really good places to go. make the site have an underground look and use something like neocities to make it all yourself. I don't really use blogs much but for personal stuff, I just use neocities.

>filehost
mega, mediafire or whatever you want. just not dropbox or google drive or anything made by those type of companies.

>>18774
>>18809
>>18848
Glad to see people are interested in the site. I'll definitely share it here once it's up and running. Right now I'm still working on cataloguing a preliminary list in excel. Don't have a name yet.

>Make a really detailed rundown on each game.
I'd like to start with hosting a lot of games, and slowly go back and give brief descriptions of the game + some historical context + why they're interesting. Similar to home of the underdogs, but the emphasis on radical elements rather than simply being under appreciated. I don't think I'll provide long-form reviews for the sake of impersonality but I'll link to any good coverage of it.

>use the internet archive or whatever to actually grab the games,
What do you mean?

>>18849
Don't want to use torrents, they're too easy to go dead if I'm not available to seed and these games probably won't get many of their own. Might link have to link to them for larger games though.

>make the site have an underground look and use something like neocities to make it all yourself.
I agree with you about the underground look. I want it to look a bit web 1.0 but not anything kitschy. I was thinking of taking erowid's color scheme. And ideally it'd be a lot of hypertext linking to direct html pages. I just want to make sure it's setup in a way that's not difficult to update in the future. I'll take a look at neocities.

The thing about liability is that I don't want to have an "if emailed by copyright holder, I'll remove the download" policy. If someone emails me, I want to be able to tell them to fuarrrk off (in so many words) - and get away with it.

Blogspot, tumblr, wordpress, etc. are all quick to side with the owner but I'll be using Nearly Free Speech hosting which is very good about not bowing down except when absolutely legally obligated.

So legally speaking, does the copyright holder actually have the right to ask me to take down a hyperlink to a separate site carrying a download of their game? It's not actually being hosted on my site.

Could I respond by adding a second degree of separation? I.e., linking to a pastebin that has a link to the download? Or maybe I should comply with takedowns, but keep a backup .onion with links intact?

Regarding the politics of the site, there are 2 programs involved:
>recover and preserve a forgotten history of independent underground games that's been tossed aside by the current generation of commercially minded indie devs, and point to all the exciting paths that could've been followed but never were
>reinforce the free software ideal that used to be a given among independent developers

Both are equally important goals in this project and, imo, to the future of the art of videogames. It's about both the preservation and freedom of information.

Frankly, I don't believe anyone is ethically right to sell software so I won't have any guilt putting up downloads for current indie devs I like and support. For anything that isn't abandonware (for example, Pathologic's just released HD retranslation), I do intend to provide a link to support the devs next to the download, but it's going to be titled "Donate" - not "Buy" - even if it's a link to steam's store. Or maybe "rent a license to legally access the files" since that's actually what it is.

The process will create enemies, even with people and projects I admire and support. I imagine it as leveling of not just commercial value but also authorship and ownership. For example, I also intend to feature articles of criticism and game philosophy that I consider valuable references. I'll be scraping and hosting this content just like the game data for the sake of preservation and future-proofing against link rot - which would surely offend the web magazines built on ad revenue as well as the academic journals behind paywalls I'll be taking from.

Too bad. I want to avoid compromise. If necessary, I'll migrate to the darknet. I take the silk road's Dread Pirate Roberts as a model, in the sense that I don't want this to be just a site of convenience, but something coming out of an antagonistic political foundation: It's not about just getting free warez, but asserting our right to it.

It's not TPB, I won't be putting up any AAA content, but still, it's not hard to imagine a well-connected indie dev with a game on the humble indie bundle appearing on the site could find out and be upset.

This why I want to make sure to cover my bases. I mean, should I upload the content to mega and access my serverhost through a VPN proxy, etc?

for the blog API, you could use a blog-generator like pelican (http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/content.html) to generate the site, then host it on github-pages
and just rip a basic theme and hit the css

github's had some soykaf about removing non-PC projects but I doubt they do any kind of moderation on webhosting (especially if it has nothing to do with popfem/lgbt shit)
in the worst case, there'd also be on trouble migrating to a different webhost, since the entire system is on your machine
biggest issue really is that your domain will be username.github.io

as for filehosting, to at least avoid the music blog's death by broken-links, best way would probably be to figure out if you can do an upload script
pushes the game to 1-2 sites (mediafire & mega?), and another script just runs through the blog files and checks if any of the dl's have gone down
if it has, then reupload the game and auto-update the game's dl links.
Of course, this assumes you'll keep all the games backed locally as well

If you really want to play it safe, and you're using github for hosting (which iirc doesn't ask for any personal info beyond an email address, and you can sign up over a proxy to mask your initial IP), you can also push updates over the tor socket protocol (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27279359/how-to-make-git-work-to-push-commits-to-github-via-tor). No payments, no information, anonymous pushing. The only thing to stop you is github taking down the page itself, but you can always make new accounts.
Dunno how other free webhosting services are about updating files. Github has this benefit simply because it's built on top of git, and git's a fully legitimate piece of work.

Last resort, you can set your own machine as the webserver, at which point its up to the domain provider (a russian provider and they'll never care..) and your ISP (who generally don't care beyond notices) to shut you down.

>>18874
Who do you think you are that YOU can tell other people what they can and can't do with THEIR software?

>>18874
I really admire what you're doing. Good luck. I'll be following this thread in anticipation.

>>18874
>>18880
And if you disagree with someone selling their software then don't use it. The fact that you still feel entitled to enjoy the software without respecting the way the author wishes to release it, makes you a slimy low life pirate.

>>18753
Somewhat reminded of Hardcore Gaming 101 when reading your posts, other people who are interested should definitely check it out. I love that they're writing these big books too.

On another note, this idea sounds great and I (as I imagine others here are) would be interested in knowing if there was any way anyone could be of help?

>>18889
Yea HG101 is an important reference and one I appreciate, but they're one of the sites I was thinking of when I referred to current projects leaning more towards historical interest. The site does cover many avant-garde games (i.e. Bruno de Figueiredo's contributions) but it's obviously not the intended program, more of a result of their relatively high journalistic standard than anything else.

At the moment, I don't need any help beyond finding the right blog API (and helping spread the word). I'll keep an email open for any recommendations of games to cover and if people want to contribute their reviews like on HOTU, that would be awesome.

>>18880
>>18883
Here's the trouble:
Authorship ≠ Ownership

Who are they to deny anybody access to information released to the public domain?

No one, but they still manage to get away with it through the threat of state violence (historically achieved by distortion of irrelevant IP law) and consumer misinformation.

>enjoy the software without respecting the way the author wishes to release it, makes you a slimy low life pirate.
Someone denying the public free access to information has committed a much greater evil, than those who disrespect the (irrelevant, immoral and misguided) wishes of its creator to control his creation's reception. Not only does he not have the ability (let alone the right) to lock it behind a price point, this limits the free flow of information just for the sake of profit - good for the individual, bad for everybody.

To put it in the context of videogames, imagine what the state of videogames would be if the independent community released all games open-source as a rule?
Yes, this puts an end to heavy consumer exploitation to obtain high profit, as well as minimizing the incentives towards artistic compromise for commercial-minded branding and popular trends, but more importantly, it means that games can now be developed and understood much more easily and quickly. Why are we forced to rebuild our engines, redesign our models when the information exists already? It's an extreme waste of resources that is holding back the medium heavily. Rather than helping each other, we treat each other as enemies (and the consumer as patsies).

The usual rhetoric is that people need money to incentivize creative production. This is clearly untrue, not only is commercialism the historical exception for outsider game development, it's obvious closed-source development is wildly inefficient regardless of what incentivizes purportedly capitalization brings.

We all love money, but it's not worth contributing to the destruction of the medium - assuming you hold any respect for it, at least.

>>18873

There's a website that hosts like a ton of old games. Mostly stuff from MS-DOS but a lot of other cool stuff too.

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

So I guess they did it already. So I guess I don't see why reinventing a platform for hosting these games will do any good.

I was thinking really cool articles built with a kind unconventional interface like this

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/year-ahead-2016/

Would be a bigger draw than just rehosting the games.

>>18893

Like I mean they have everything...

https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

>>18894
>>18893
Not him, but I think he wants to have a somewhat of a more "refined collection" of not just any "old game" but games that may be important in whatever way. Bringing light to some games we should be aware of for whatever reason. But I'm sure he'll answer.

>>18896
Yeh of course, I'm just saying. The games already exist for that. No need to go out and hack the ROM yourself right. I like the idea of spotlighting games in an artful way. Not so much just a place where an old game ROM is hosted once in a while.

>>19055
Most of the systems on Archive.org uses their web emulator. If Archive's collection goes down (or gets asked to take them down - though they do currently have a special allowance to make outmoded software accessible) the roms are lost too. More resilient is allowing users to download the roms and run them with their own client-side emulators. They're definitely a great site but that one pf centralization is a flaw in their archiving, I think it's due to dodging copyright.

And yes >>18896 a refined collection is the idea. For example, Archive.org hosts 'complete' archives for different MAME versions (though they're not actually complete), which, in isolation, isn't much use to an individual who doesn't know what they're looking for or have the time to test out the entire collection.
My site would point you towards MAME roms of more special interest. Danmaku shooters, for example.

Sorry it's been almost a month since I got back to the thread. I've been busy with work but I'll try and have the site setup and started by the end of January. I've been filling out the games I intend to list and slowly collecting and uploading them in the meantime.

I'm think I'll just code the site myself in basic html.
It'll be easier to backup to onion if TPP passes, too.