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Re: State of the art of Dragon software preservation

Posted: Tue May 28, 2013 11:45 pm
by robcfg
Ok then. When I have a little time I'll update some pages with the links to their walkthroughs.

Do you think it's worth to add a new column in the spreadsheet for the walkthroughs/hints/cheats, etc?

Re: State of the art of Dragon software preservation

Posted: Wed May 29, 2013 10:09 pm
by Alastair
robcfg wrote:Do you think it's worth to add a new column in the spreadsheet for the walkthroughs/hints/cheats, etc?
If you will find it useful then go ahead.

Re: State of the art of Dragon software preservation

Posted: Wed May 29, 2013 10:16 pm
by Gardeniapips
I started looking at the main page under Software/Games and that showed me a wikipedia type page for each game, but it looked as though there wasn't much.

Then I looked under Navigation/Downloads and there were a lot more games there just in a list of zips to download.

Which is your list referring to. i.e. if it is green/red does that mean it is/isn't in the "downloads" or the "software". Or both?

By scans do you just mean a jpg scan of the cassette inlay card ? I still have a lot of old tapes so may be able to help with that. Is it allowed for copyright though? but I suppose people do scan them if selling on ebay.

Re: State of the art of Dragon software preservation

Posted: Thu May 30, 2013 9:04 am
by robcfg
Hi,

For dumps, Red means no dump, yellow means incomplete or underdumped and green means a good dump from an original source.

For Scans and screenshots, red means none of them, yellow means incomplete (we have scans but no screenshots, or no scans, or no quality scans...) and green means quality scans and screenshots.

Finally, for the wiki page, red means it doesn't exist, yellow means incomplete (though rarely used) and green means a complete page.

The ideal would be to have scans of everything, from inlay to tape, to hardware boards, etc. For standard tapes, a scan of the inlay, the manual and the tape is the way to go. I usually do them at 300dpi resolution, but beware that if the resulting file is bigger than 2MB, or any dimension is greater than 2000 pixels, it will not show correctly in the wiki.

Screenshots are 640x480 screens taken from Xroar.

We have also permissions from several publishers/author to link their software, you can check that here. In any case, dumping the software we don't have already is mandatory if we don't want to lose it forever, and in in doubt you can ask here first.

I also want to thank you for offering your help, as there is still a lot of Dragon software not preserved and any helping hand is quite appreciated!

Regards,
Rob

Re: State of the art of Dragon software preservation

Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2013 9:56 pm
by robcfg
Thanks to Serenarian's generosity, we have now Zapper, the Zapper Build Disk and the Zapper manual in the Archive, along with some background story on Softsystems.

Links below:

Softsystems
Zapper

Re: State of the art of Dragon software preservation

Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2013 10:35 pm
by admin
I have an EPROM labelled HighDOS somewhere - will dump it when I next find it again - now I know where it comes from/what it is.