Author Topic: Apple II game Hibernated 1 Director's cut's "ghost" releases : questions  (Read 863 times)

Offline chown6471

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Hi !

I am facing a problem related with game "Hibernated 1 Director's cut", released as a freeware for various old platforms such as the Apple II computer.

TOSEC 2021-12-31 references releases 8 and 9 of this game, but the binaries of these releases are no longer available for download, as the author is now only proposing release 10 of the game for download... In a nutshell, TOSEC is currently referencing "ghost" releases of this game, which have no chance to be collected.

How can one deal with this recurrent case of "home-made" recent games released for retro-platforms, where the authors do not leave downloadable artefacts related with former releases ?

In the case of freeware/shareware software items-only, does TOSEC or another organization maitain and/or propose a public repository to download such items from when the concerned items can no longer be downloaded from their original release location ?

Practically speaking, is there a way to download and collect packages' releases R8 and R9 for game Hibernated 1 Director's cut's

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Kind regards,

Chown



 








Offline mictlantecuhtle

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Re: Apple II game Hibernated 1 Director's cut's "ghost" releases : questions
« Reply #1 on: January 10, 2022, 05:08:14 PM »
This is definitely a difficult case - in particular with stuff released via itch.io it's entirely possible for a developer/publisher to remove or silently replace earlier versions with no warning and no downloadable artefacts remaining. It's actually part of the reason I've been trying to focus a little recently in grabbing as many of these as I can before they silently disappear, although getting 100s of feed notifications from itch every day is also becoming unsustainable...

I think the idea of a public repository of free/shareware/public domain titles is interesting, but I think it's one where TOSEC as a project probably couldn't have any official involvement. I'm likely being far too cautious but ultimately even a lot of freely-available software has licence conditions which would prevent redistribution (or even more cautiously, aren't officially published under any kind of e.g. GPL or BSD license which makes such distribution clearly acceptable). As a project our ultimate aim has to be only to catalog what is out there and not be responsible for the distribution of any copyrighted material.

Practically speaking, I don't think it would surprise you to know that other collectors do tend to make full collections of TOSEC sets available in places like the Internet Archive. They might not have got to the most recent sets as yet but I'm sure they will appear at some point.