I feel like this whole hobby has always existed on the verge of being deleted for whatever reason, and I am forever grateful that there are people who put this stuff up in the first place.

Still need to work out a way for me to help out.

And this is why I consider SSDs to be a downgrade compared to HDDs lol

Y’know I think another possible analogy here might be the difference between a videogame and a tabletop game. Especially if we compare RPGs specifically.

It’s one thing to play a computer RPG. It’s another thing to play with a human GM who can reshape the story as needed and who can interact with the player in an open-ended manner.

Thank goodness. Have those copies resurfaced and gone into the possession of proper archivists and/or research collections?

Yeah, I read. I don’t have much sympathy for him. He sounds like a jerk.

IMO preserving the content is more important than honoring him (or, for that matter, humiliating him).

I had poked all over the megathread, but didn’t know about the github repo. Thanks.

But yeah, you’re right about it being a matter of luck sometimes.

Heh, more of this shit.

Remember, the only reason we can still watch the highly influential 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu today is because some people didn’t destroy all their copies despite a court saying they had to.

DISOBEY DESTRUCTION ORDERS.

COPY ALL THE THINGS.

Oh, I see. That’s quite interesting. And I noticed that the Mac version is only split into 4 parts, with one clocking in at 11.6 GB (though others are capped at 4 GB).

I’m very curious why these differences exist.

I thought the file splits are based on size? But maybe I’m wrong. The larger games I have also tend to be Windows-only anyway so maybe I just don’t know this stuff.

The fact that you have some sort of plan for managing your photos is one step ahead of me. I have no plans and my photos are a very messy collection.

I would caution against using a flash drive (a.k.a. pen drive) for any permanent storage. I’ve had multiple flash drives fail on me. Usually it’s this super cheap kind that gets distributed as branded swag, but I’ve had some others fail too.

one day the search bar showed back up even though I’ve told it many times to not have it.

This sort of behavior (and other nastier things, such as introducing advertising for Microsoft services) is why I don’t trust Windows Updates and am increasingly distrustful of Windows being a satisfactory operating system.

Also I’d like it to be less bloated. Sure, fancy bells and whistles are nice to look at, but if I could make things look like Win98 again I totally would. I don’t actually need things like transparency or 3D rotation/resizing effects.

Update: It looks like it’s handling the offline installers in game-by-game batches. I told it to download the offline installer for a game that if I used browser I’d have to download two files; it shows as just one item and one download in the client, and I verified that it actually does give me both files.

In addition to installing and launching the games, there are cloud saves, achievements, time tracking, leaderboards for achievements (which integrates Steam achievements for anyone who’s linked their Steam profile), overlay, some multiplayer stuff, and more. In this respect it has social features and game management features similar to what Steam has.

GOG Galaxy is also meant to be a universal launcher so you can use “integrations” to have Galaxy launch other games through their respective clients and even have it close the client afterwards. You can also add your own independently-installed games, as long as they show up in a database of games that they use (I dunno where it’s from but these days it has pretty much everything I’ve looked for, aside from romhacks, but for that matter, I’m pretty sure you could make it launch any executable with any label and Galaxy wouldn’t question you). That said, I’m used to just launching things from game executables directly so I don’t use it for this anyway lol.

Also Galaxy offers more flexibility with managing game installs than the Steam client does. For one, you can set the install directory to anywhere, rather than being locked in Steam\steamapps\common\gamename. And pretty importantly IMO, there’s an easily accessible (though non-default, which is fine IMO) option to tell the game to not update, and the Galaxy client won’t try to force you to update (unlike the Steam client). (EDIT: there’s also a universal default for whether to auto-update games, in addition to per-game settings.) On top of this Galaxy also has more UI options than Steam does, e.g. having a List View option (which Steam unceremoniously junked several years ago in favor of their current mess).

I’m actually about to check out its ability to download standalone installers. I started a couple very big game downloads last night on my browser and they failed so I’m gonna see if the client can do better with stuff like resuming downloads.

Hmm, seems like this is really might be getting to a point where non-viable instances are the exception rather than the rule. At least, I hope that’s the case these days.

I’m too busy to switch to Linux at the moment but if I have to it’s definitely an option I’m making back-burner plans for.

I’ve seen stuff like ArcGIS on torrent sites the last time I checked. Dunno about Mnova.

Sidenote: their licenses are crazy complicated. I really wish there were just FOSS alternatives to everything. I know there’s QGIS/GRASS GIS for ArcGIS, R for S (or is it the other way around? I forgot), MuseScore for Sibelius/Finale/etc., and so on. And also LibreOffice for MS Office of course. But I think some academic/professional software is just so niche and/or has institutional players (like companies, governments, and universities) that are so committed to it that it can be hard to get people to change.

I really wish GOG made Galaxy for Linux already.

So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here’s the information someone else found when they looked into it.

https://leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)

In summary, this “policy” is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.

As far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), there’s nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there’s nothing saying they can’t just update the SSA to remove such a term.

Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam’s size I’d say it’s less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can’t be held to this promise anyway.

So, while it’d definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.

And there’s also kids who don’t have credit cards yet too.

Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We’re talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.

This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn’t do anything wrong on my end).

These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That’s an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it’s not available DRM-free, it’s ethically justifiable to pirate.