Welcome to Hackathon 3!
In our neck of the woods, a hackathon means "hacking on stuff you are interested in". Which means screenshots and research and metadata are just as welcome as any codework or actual site infrastructure contributions. Every little hack matters! :) Community is as important as the actual work, having fun and being part of a helpful community is a good motivatior for further work. With that said, there are a few areas where we are currently looking for help, so if you're looking for somewhere to start, look below;
(this document is wip, and further information will appear during the day)
Screenshotathon
Demozoo encompasses a ginormous amount of productions across an equally gargantuan set of platforms and graphics modes and what have you. We'd like to have each and every single one screenshotted, but alas it's a big mountain to climb and we're not quite there yet. But, if it's anything we've proved since we started, it's that a little preserverance goes a long way - so let's get started fixing that, yeah?
We've arranged a couple of "weekend of screenshots" in the past, but we can always use more of them. It can be as simple as firing up VLC or MPV or your video player of choice and getting shots of video entries, to firing up an emulator and getting shots that way, to running the latest highend productions on your gaming rig while getting some shots in. We previously made a guide for screenshotting on various platforms that you can find here - which probably needs some updating at this point, but that's another thing we can hack on while we're at it :)
The report called Productions without screenshots will probably also prove useful if you're just looking for some things to get started on. On there, you can drill down by platform and type until you find something you want to shot.
Musicathon
Similarly, we have functionality in place to make various music playable in the browser, based on a few criteria - it must be served from a supported https host, and it must be a supported format. Our gracious founder Gasman wrote Cowbell for this, which you should all follow and star on GitHub. It currently supports "MP3, OGG (and whatever else your browser supports natively), MOD, XM, S3M, IT (and all other formats implemented by libopenmpt), SID, SAP (and other Atari 8-bit formats implemented by ASAP), PSG, VTX, STC, SQT and PT3 formats".
So what this means is, if you find a tune that does not have a working playable link, then you can find it and add it as a download link on the tune, and hey presto - it is now playable. Please note that it does need to be in unpacked form, so zip's won't help. Supported sites are;
scene.org
Modland (ftp) - also see the handy dandy search engine on Exotica!
The Mod Archive
Should the tune in question not be available unpacked on any of the supported platforms, then please get in touch with on our Slack, as there are admins for all those sites on there that can help.
We're working on surfacing a link for music pieces without a working link for all users, and we hope that is in place well before easter.
Preserveathon
We are all about preservation around here, and we are always looking for new stuff to dump. In fact, Curt Cool will present a seminar at Revision about practical preservation. Also come join the channel #diskdumping on our Slack, where those of us who dump stuff hang out, talking about the finer points, as well as share our dumps as they come through.
Even if you don't have anything to dump, you can still help - because once something is dumped, it needs looking over and sorting and uploading of the relevant bits to various scene sites. Come talk to us, and we'll get you a bundle to look through for your platform of choice.
Easter egg - we recently came across some Amstrad CPC floppies, and none of us are fluent in that world, so Amstrad people please come say hi! :)