keaxtu
abandonware should be public domain, force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't want to lose the rights to them.
omikronsoul
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago.Nobody who wants to play something fo the purpose of retrogaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original disappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they are not even selling.
justlemeremember
op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc. but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided not to maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare, we have two Windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware, one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research, part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make difficult-to-impossible to convert those files types without their specif software, by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refuses to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, butt they made a lot of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollar to replace this microscope, this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post and go 'well, op just wants old video games to play' (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and close it off) but also this is critical for like, biomedical research, if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
Yikes, that setup with Windows 95 machines sounds nerve wracking. They should really be running a modern computer with Windows 95 in a VM.
I actually posted that in science_memes a few days ago including other solutions as well as hardware passthru. People kept replying that it wasn't a solution because alternatively the lab doesn't have the expertise and somehow after 2 decades the only solution available is to continue to fight a losing battle of maintaining with no longer made hardware and also that source code availability would somehow just magically be maintained by magic software developers also interested in it after all of this time.
There's more goal post moving and some stretching assumptions in the responses but that's the ultimate gist.
It isn't that I'm again code rights dying with a vendor or even source code availability but I was merely posting that these types of problems are too common and solvable already outside of severe edge cases.
Often it is not socketed to be able to do that (hardware is also an issue).
Back when I was a hardware engineer (embedded hardware, not really part of IT) for avionics, most of what I'd see where the interfaces weren't standard inside 'black boxes' were really just PCs on a motherboard with a 'bus controller' (not really a bus controller) that could be slotted into a PCI. You just have to pass the PCI from the hypervisor to the VM where the drivers and OS that uses it sits.
An issue that hangs some people up is some hardware that required an RTOS and was being virtualized is the CPU scheduler (due to vCores/HT/SMT) but those didn't run on Windows of course. My solution is just pinning the physical CPU and every odd core (if I can't just turn HT/SMT off) to the VMs with an RTOS. Works great.
Most data connections are just serial types and the Data|TX -/+ or TX|RX are simply swapped in the pin-out with a 'proprietary' formfactor that's easy to pigtail into whatever.
Maybe I should just go into business modernizing old lab and factory equipment's compute.