Date   : Fri, 05 Jan 2001 16:43:15 +0000
From   : Ben Newsam <ben@...>
Subject: Re: VFS: (BBC Video Disk) : Doomsday Project

In message <3A55BCAE.E62AB89C@...>, Paul Wheatley
<p.r.wheatley@...> writes
>Which brings us to the question of authenticity. Do we want to have the best
>possible pictures or do we want an authentic reproduction of the original,
>even if that means reproducing the graininess of the pictures on the original
>system? Is that in fact a property of the original system we want to
>preserve?!

This is the nub of the problem, isn't it? All (well, most of us; I do
anyway) like to play games such as Defender, and when emulated, they
never *quite* have the same "feel" as on the original kit. So that is
why we keep our old Beebs going, and will continue to do so until they
fall apart, which they will eventually of course. The Domesday Project
is quite different, in that it was actually *intended* to be used as a
historical resource far into the future. With the original Domesday
Book, the actual original document is preserved in some deep dark
dungeon somewhere, a replica is available for study by selected
scholars, and the extracted text information is also obtainable in a
more modern form. All three approaches are desirable with the BBC
project.

>I think the ideal answers to that are both yes and no! Ideally we would want
>high quality pictures digitised from the original film. We would also want
>digitised pictures from discs, that show a future user the kind of
>(relatively poor) quality of photos that were available to users of the
>system in the eighties.

Quite. My own interest is in its use as a historical source. Having seen
the original, it is more of social interest than "hard" history, but it
is *well* worth preserving.

>> I can send you a solidisk program which will allow you to save a rom from
>> ROM/RAM to floppy. I will dig this out and send to you if you want?
>
>Yeah that'd be great. Either a floppy or bytesteam I can zap down the line
>from PC to BBC.

Ummm, I wish I could find the little program that I wrote (called
ROBROM) that I used to extract ROM images from various machines I met on
my travels. It used to copy all the ROMs very quickly onto a floppy for
later examination, and was a (hem hem) useful source of quite a few
"interesting"  files. Very naughty, I know.
-- 
Ben