They also offer a glimpse into the future, with regards to preservation, as much of the content appears to be completely lost to time. It’s especially sad with Xband; I hope it gets reverse engineered and emulated to some degree at some point, but there’s probably a lot of data completely lost to time. At least someone was wise enough to make a bunch of video recordings before it shuttered.
Holy Shit! That's incredible. Thanks for the link.
Even cooler that it works on Analogue Super NT. That's two layers of video game history preservation right there :) After all, eventually, some day, the last working SNES unit will fail...
I don't see very much information on retro.live's page, but I hope they heed the lesson of Xband's demise and open source the important bits of their work in some time.
I'm sad that they didn't get anything meaningful on the retro.live website before the documentary launched. Seems like a massive wasted opportunity. Why not document the project? There's nothing on the site.
Someone would’ve had to have captured the patches that were downloaded and mapped over the cartridge code. Unless some of the game hackers kept copies and made them available, emulation won’t work.
Yes, that's a problem. My guess is that folks will just have to create new patches from scratch to make it work. The old patches, or probably the most of them, might be lost forever unless some entity or former Xband engineer happens to have them. Guess you never know when a backup disk could turn up.
The other reply to me points out that a service called retro.live is successfully getting Xband all the way into games. Not sure what they are doing, but I am guessing they must be creating new patches, since they look a bit buggy right now. (Video is linked above.)
