Gavin Smith wrote:(1) So that warez style GoodSAMC collections are not needed
Do you have any quality control plans? GoodSAMC seemed to hoover up anything and everything, [...] - the new SAM archive will have to be careful not to fall into the same hole!
I get the impression that whoever was responsible for GOODSAM neither knew nor cared about the Sam's original community, and wouldn't have known an original game disk from a warez collection anyway.
This, on the other hand, is probably going to be watched eagle-eyed by people who were actually around at the time and have some idea what they're talking about. Provided there's some feedback mechanism (and it's okay to have a single point of contact now, because all the software is legit) that should provide some quality-control in itself. Perhaps such feedback could take the form of a webboard associated with each particular page of software? Or in fact, the entire site could probably be composed of a wiki.
Software is then provided in .dsk format, zipped up and placed on the web.
Use gzip rather than zip, then SimCoupe can load them directly.
Hopefully an original representation of the disk will be preferred to a DSK dump, in cases where minor protection isn't checked by the program itself?
Well, SimCoupe's already got one format (sdf), but if you have plans to prefer different, more standardised one I think the archive needs to be using the latest format.
Debate away, nothing is set in stone in the slightest but I hope the above is at least a good starting point.
All sounds good to me - good job in getting things running so fast :-)
Sounds good, provided the software authors and copyright holders are happy with it.
Has anything been started on the design of the web pages? I think the page for each piece of software should also include cover art, where possible, and details like author, publisher, original publishing date where known etc. I assume the proposed hosting will allow you to run custom php and/or cgi?
Cheers,
Andrew
-- --- Andrew Collier ---- ---- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ --- -- Have you lost your Marbles? http://www.marillion.com/
