Vimms lair is starting to remove many roms that are being requested to be removed by Nintendo etc. soon many original roms, hacks, and translations will be lost forever. Can any of you help make archive torrents of roms from vimms lair and cdromance? They have hacks and translations that dont exist elsewhere and will probably be removed soon with ios emulation and retro handhelds bringing so much attention to roms and these sites
Every time I see this news (Reddit or Lemmy) I see this kind of comment, but I wonder, what if I want to download just a ROM of a few mbs? I certainly don’t want to hoard the whole collection, as a torrent user I believe I can just pick up the file (if it isn’t zipped), but wouldn’t that be against the torrent’s moral code?
But most (all?) Torrent clients let you select which files you want to download so of there was an official unarchived torrent then archivists could seed forever and others could select the ROMs/manuals/etc. that they wanted
And this way we will get uncompleted seeds and in the further future nobody will be able to complete the damn torrent.
I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.
Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.
You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.
I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.
That is incorrect. Partial seeding means they seed the part they downloaded, end of story. There are no downsides.
