We're here today to announce the formation of an association of individuals, dedicated to the preservation of scene-related software material, primarily through the dumping of physical media and sharing of the contents. As some will know, a small group of us has been doing this for years, even arranging "dumping stations" at events like Solskogen, where people were invited to come share their floppydisks and other ephemera so it can be dumped.

While efforts like this has existed in the game realm for many years, across all platforms and even for arcade machines and the like, to our knowledge noone has made an organized effort to actively form a group to help each other out and make sure things are preserved. The recent events in Belgium were 80 boxes of disks were digitized from an old collection of Amiga disks (and later, C64 disks) are just one event that has spured us on to start getting organized about these things. The two people starting this already has a good amount of hardware and knowhow on securing materials from floppies, cd-roms and harddrives.

So, we're getting organized. We hope to attract more likeminded people, and we have the following plans in the pipeline to get going;

- Setting up a simple website where we can explain what we do, present blogposts on ongoing projects, and where contact can be established with other dumpers and people with collections they would be interested in sharing.

- Setting up a site for sharing the materials - after all, sharing is caring. We're thinking FTP would be a good, open fit for this.

- Start recruiting other people to "join the team", so we have physical presence in several countries and areas

- Organizing more "dumping stations" at other demoparties around the world.

We hope to have more news soon, but no reason not to start talking already. We are available at the Demozoo Slack for now, more news soon.

Menace & Dozer.

Wholeheartedly with you, guys. And while I don't any way to do the actual dump work, I'm certainly available to analyze said dumps (Amiga/MS-DOS/Atari ST ?). That, if such a role is planed in the "association of individuals" :)

Well we do this in some way for the Atari XL/ST/Falcon stuff since a few years... there is a private group on Facebook called "Atari Scene Archivists"... we buy or borrow hugs disk lots and image them... most of the Stuff is finding it's way to Demozoo then :)

^ what ltk said :) I have thousands of floppys now, about 100 or so of which were 'lost' and are now here on demozoo :)

Spiny: You keep them? I sell them off again after imaging :)

We were hoping to write the next chapter in this saga by launching some online presences at Solskogen this year, but unfortunately we had a little snafu due to a few power outages. :/ Rest assured though, it's just around the corner - so we'll have an official point of contact, and some tech in place to start sharing.

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we're not being lazy, we've setup in the Solskogen hall to dump some floppies :)

Some post-Solskogen vacation hijinks are making us less than productive, but at least I've started to look at the stuff we dumped onsite, and so far it's revealed a few C64 cracks that were not on the internet at all before - classic stuff from 1986/1987. I've put it on Demozoo naturally, but also crossposted to CSDB, to get maximum eyes on the releases. Work continues.

Oh, and we bought a domain. :)

In our ongoing series, Life Gets In The Way, we today present you with ourselves. So, in busy adult everyday life, we somehow never really got to the bit where we sit down and try to set servers and shit up so that it's just right, so the infrastructure is where it needs to be. So, fuck it. Let's just start sharing.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qswl02bj4hgad4d/Amiga_Dump_FH.zip - This is a batch of freshly dumped Amiga floppies by Dozer, 1.38 GB in total. The source is a non-scener, so there's probably not a lot in the way of long-forgotten demos in there, but let's just all dig in and see, shall we? The link will remain live for about a week I guess, and then on demand if someone missed it. Find me on our Slack.

A set of cd's from the same source is coming up soon.

And now a bunch of CD's from the same source, as mentioned earlier: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k1kpzz2o0etndle/Amiga_CD_FH.zip - the whole thing is around 8 GB.

Those discs are;

AmiCD 11.iso
Amiga - 1995.iso (Blobby International)
Amiga - 1996.iso (Totally Amiga 96)
Amiga Format - 100 - Phase 2.iso
Amiga Format - 97 - Scene Storm.iso
Amiga Format - 99 - Phase 1.iso
Amiga Format - The AGA Experience - Volume 1.iso
Amiga_CD_1.iso
Amiga_CD_2.iso
Club Amiga Montreal - Disk 1.iso
Club Amiga Montreal - Disk 2.iso
NFA SAdENESS Software - AGA Experience 2.iso
Sci-Fi Sensation v2.2 - Disk 1.iso
Sci-Fi Sensation v2.2 - Disk 2.iso
Software Explosion.iso
Speccy ClassiX CD'98.iso
The C64 Sensations - Volume 2.iso

I love this initiative and hope its is going to be used often. Especially the dumping grounds.

Now for a semi-sad story
Too bad, these dumping stations weren't around 2 years ago when i moved into a new flat. I contacted a scener i knew who was into archiving all the amiga stuff (no namig here) and offered to send my hundreds of Amiga discs, containing already archived stuff, many internal-only releases from my groups of the past and much of my own created stuff. I was declined the sending - no need for my stuff was the response given. So it all went into the shredder and got destroyed, because i had no means of doing a transfer to pc. I remember this so vividly, because it was a hard thing to do.

So again, i hope this system will change that and nothing will get lost!

o_O where are all the Amiga warez

I would like some news on this project - and am of course available for ripping disks - mainly Amiga ones, but i guess anything 3,5" can be done with Kryoflux. Even bought a 5,25" drive some time ago but haven't yet tested it.

And CONS: Breaks my heart, really - you should have written to me :( ...

curtcool: We're still working on it - hoping to have a portal of sorts for dumpers and sorters and archivers in the not too distant future. Meanwhile, we're all at http://slack.demozoo.org if you wanna chat until then.