By Nelson Schneider - 09/13/15 at 05:29 PM CT
Back in January of this year, news of the Internet Archive’s appropriation of thousands of old DOS games pinged pretty hard on my radar for relevant happenings in the world of gaming. Just recently, however, I stumbled across another group that is providing a significant service in the preservation of the old games that built the industry as we know it today.
No-Intro started out with the simple goal of removing the sometimes-annoying headers, intros, and trainers hacked into ROM images of old games by pirates more interested in gaining fame from their ROM dumps than in preserving the game software in an unaltered state. As a hacking group, No-Intro has been working since 2002 to organize and document every ‘clean’ ROM for every console in the history of gaming (even the weird ones,like the LeapFrog educational handheld). Since hosting those ROMs can get a group in trouble with ‘The Man,’ No-Intro itself only hosts their own software, consisting of searchable .DAT files that serve as a comprehensive index to the world of ROM dumps.
When the volunteers who upload media to The Internet Archive have access to tools like No-Intro’s DAT-o-MATIC, glorious things can happen… such as the preservation of a massive 34GB collection of intro-free ROMs for almost every console… ever! Not only is this download free and reasonably legal, it’s subdivided into convenient, well-organized (how did that happen on Archive.org?) .ZIP archives for each individual platform.
Since the Big Gaming Corporations don’t maintain their own archives or – even worse – attempt to sell access to their incomplete archives one game at a time, a comprehensive index maintained by a third-party unmotivated by profit is a very important tool in the preservationist’s toolbox. Combining the No-Intro Collection hosted on the Internet Archive with a nice all-in-one emulator, like the up-and-coming RetroArch, is the perfect way to preserve access to all of these games – the good, the bad, and the ugly – for everyone.
