Christian Bartsch Interview

How did you become involved in the organization?

Most of us in Softpres (SPS) come from various companies in the entertainment industry, like games or movies. It was founder István Fábián who was fed up with seeing the games he made littered with digital graffiti (cracks with intro added and in-game text obfuscated) and therefore decided to develop tools to preserve magnetic media in its original form, unaltered and verified. That was in 2001. Now, ten years later, Softpres is still a bunch of enthusiats striving for perfect preservation.

I did first spot the project around 2005 or 2006, but did not become actively involved until early 2009, when I was working on a technology project that was later taken over by Softpres.

How does the society provide for the costs of the organization?

Softpres is privately held. Softpres started out as a hobby project, it still is, although the scope has very much grown beyond a "hobby". So far we have spent an estimated EUR 100k for soft- and hardware, buying games and developing our technology. Counting in man hours spent for the development of our technology (calculated at the same rates we get paid in real life), we've already surpassed the barrier of EUR 1.000.000,-. Expenses are ongoing. Although a hobby, we take these matters serious. As said above, many people in Softpres come from the entertainment industry. We grew up with these games and / or were involved making them. We want to make sure the dawn of video games does not fade into oblivion. It might sound arrogant (but we just know what we can do and we can do it well), but when you find that some museums actually put digital media on a shelf and call it preserved, someone needs to take the lead.

Why did you choose this method of preservation for the society? Are there any technical difficulties you have encountered due to this system?

I assume you are referring to the technology developed. We do have our own format for storing games preserved called IPF (Interchangeable Preservation Format). It was developed because of the lack of a format being available when the project was started. Ten years later, IPF still remains the only format capable of storing original mastering data for floppy disks. The main problem with floppy media is that about 90% of them were protected using various sorts of copy protection. Such protection usually by design violates recording rules which makes it impossible to store such data in generic image formats. Replicating digital media is a very special niche in signal processing. In mathematics, the number 6 can be the result of various equations: 1*6, 2*3, 3+3, 8-2 etc. To store true remastering information, data ingested must be analysed to find the true equation used for writing (which will trigger the same result). Copy protection sometimes can be very tricky and picky and will only work if the correct equation is stored.

Our technology not only analyses the data, it can also verify integrity and detect modifications that were made to a disk after it has left the replicator. Only authentic, unaltered media qualifies for true preservation.

Because this process is so complicated, we have developed our own floppy controller KryoFlux that can read data off the disk's surface unaltered. All analysation happens in our Analyser, which will create IPFs suited for long term storage. While KryoFlux is also available to the typical end user, the Analyser is currently only available for institutes, archives, museums and libraries.

Please see http://www.kryoflux.com for more information. I also attached two PDFs dealing the the Analyser and our preservation goals.

At the time of writing, our technology has been sold to various large institutes around the world. We set up a company, KryoFlux Products & Services Ltd., which exclusively distributes and markets our IP.

Is all of the information you have stored accessible to the public?

Yes and no. Information itself is available, our web site is a treasure trove in regard to software preservation. Unfortunately, law does not permit distribution of the data ingested. There is no such thing as abandonware, regardless of what other web sites try to communicate. Copyright exists until 70 years after the author's death and it does not help getting permission from your cousin that used to play bowling with the trainee at company XY when the game was released. There is a pretty comprehensive "International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation" that was made by the Library Of Congress and others. It is available online and a pretty good read: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/2008/20080714news_article_copyright.html

Politics needs to address these problems. We just decided to act now, because it might happen that when politics are ready, all magnetic media already has deteriorated. Until then we have to keep the data ingested safe and sound. We do share data with interested institutes, libraries and museums. These can make the titles available to visitors, in emulation, or by writing them back to a real disk and feeding it into the vintage hardware they have.

Are you working in coordination with any other gaming preservation efforts?

We like to share information with other projects, but our rules usually forbid data exchange. One reason has been mentioned above - we don't have carte blanche from the copyright owners in many cases, and many other projects do distribute the data because they think it is okay to do so. We also think that it feels morally good if no one gets hurt - but it would still be a violation of the law. Another problem is the ingestion method. Many other projects use standard hard- and software and do store raw dumps without further processing. There is no way to tell if these images are genuine or valid. Assumptions are a bad start for preservation. It might be too late to repair something when the original media has vanished.

Many people just want to get their games working in emulation. They don't care about doing it right or perfect. Somehow working is enough, but this is not our philosophy. Saying so does not make you good friends with people from these projects. Telling them to dig a little deeper and broaden their knowledge further complicates things. We have to accept this. The feedback from academic users and libraries clearly shows we're heading into the right direction.

Moving forward, what, if any, changes should be made within the gaming community to prevent the loss of games over time?

France does it right. Like books, records and movies also video games are collected by the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France). They are even changing the law to force publishers to deliver unprotected copies to make sure they can be launched in years to come, even if the activation servers have already been closed down.

We have the vision of a centralized data center where institutes from all over the world send their games to have it analyzed and preserved. Once an image is made, this can be shared among other institutions without the need of redoing all the work. It would also ensure that if an image exists in many places, the risk of loss is pretty low.