What does HackerNews think of passport?

4am has cracked loads of apple ii games, and after doing several hundred manually, automated it as a set of python scripts, https://github.com/a2-4am/passport an article with interview here, https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/15/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...

These lab notebooks of the cracking process are shared for titles that could not automatically be cracked.

These are the only public records of reverse engineering these titles, though many did this in the 80’s the techniques and findings were never shared beyond the cracks themselves, and 4am is so practiced and proficient I think he definitely wins the title of the best apple ii cracker in history!

Impressive. I think most of the Bitsavers stuff can be found at https://archive.org/details/bitsavers

These days, Apple II cracking and preservation can sometimes be done in an automated fashion. See https://github.com/a2-4am/passport and an example of thee output: https://ia801500.us.archive.org/23/items/CastleWolfenstein4a...

I follow @a2_4am because a screenshot is posted every time a game is backed up - it's great.

How are we going to preserve the 2010s? Are we going to be able to defeat Denuvo to have a chance of game collecting and preservation in the future?

What about a game like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5? https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3n157w/disc_version...

What about some 3DS games that have an (optional?) patch downloaded from Nintendo's servers - who's backing those up for when the server goes away? (like Wii and DSi already have).

I don't think anyone's able to back up Xbox One and PS4 yet - who's going to preserve them? Game companies and publishers often lose material. http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/06/27/original-kingdom-heart...