it’s a shame indeed! I get multimedia assets being hard to store, but how hard is it to store just code? Heck, Mechner had all his stuff in floppies, even having just the code would have been hugely beneficial.
@smoreon well, yeah, but it’s not quite that simple, unfortunately. Enterprise-grade storage has always been way more expensive because it’s supposed be more reliant… and then you’d need to to have multiples of whatever drive so you can setup the proper RAID level, and then you have to baby sit it in case one of the drives fails. Novell netware software was really reliable, at the software layer, but that also was way, way expensive — on top of the hardware costs.
Tapes are definitely a good, cheaper choice for long term storage, but that comes with its own set of complications — where do you keep it? how many do you keep it? My bet is that thet actually had tape backups, but those are pretty expensive too (even last year I paid $6k for a box of 12!), so most places just reuses their tapes every couple of months or so. No one really seriously thought about off-site tape storage untill 9/11.
@Andee hahaha, no, not really — storage was still pretty expensive back then, and not that plentiful.
There were servers dedicated to just storage, yes, but they were massive beasts that were very power hungry and storage still would have been at a premium, so keeping something around “just in case” was somewhat technically challenging.
Totally worth it, in my opinion… if i didn’t have an 800xl on my desk right now (I set it up again last month), I’d totally spring for this. The modding community for these guys is fairly active, but then I imagine anyone in that community already has original hardware.
Still though, it’s a bit of a hassle to get one working, between the very heavy power supplies, video cables, let alone if you want to plug a floppy drive. A simple plug and play solution is fantastic if you don’t want to deal with the hassle.
Comments 4
Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics
it’s a shame indeed! I get multimedia assets being hard to store, but how hard is it to store just code? Heck, Mechner had all his stuff in floppies, even having just the code would have been hugely beneficial.
Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics
@smoreon well, yeah, but it’s not quite that simple, unfortunately. Enterprise-grade storage has always been way more expensive because it’s supposed be more reliant… and then you’d need to to have multiples of whatever drive so you can setup the proper RAID level, and then you have to baby sit it in case one of the drives fails. Novell netware software was really reliable, at the software layer, but that also was way, way expensive — on top of the hardware costs.
Tapes are definitely a good, cheaper choice for long term storage, but that comes with its own set of complications — where do you keep it? how many do you keep it? My bet is that thet actually had tape backups, but those are pretty expensive too (even last year I paid $6k for a box of 12!), so most places just reuses their tapes every couple of months or so. No one really seriously thought about off-site tape storage untill 9/11.
Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics
@Andee hahaha, no, not really — storage was still pretty expensive back then, and not that plentiful.
There were servers dedicated to just storage, yes, but they were massive beasts that were very power hungry and storage still would have been at a premium, so keeping something around “just in case” was somewhat technically challenging.
Re: Retro Games Ltd Officially Unveils The Atari 400 Mini
Totally worth it, in my opinion… if i didn’t have an 800xl on my desk right now (I set it up again last month), I’d totally spring for this. The modding community for these guys is fairly active, but then I imagine anyone in that community already has original hardware.
Still though, it’s a bit of a hassle to get one working, between the very heavy power supplies, video cables, let alone if you want to plug a floppy drive. A simple plug and play solution is fantastic if you don’t want to deal with the hassle.