Vimms lair is starting to remove many roms that are being requested to be removed by Nintendo etc. soon many original roms, hacks, and translations will be lost forever. Can any of you help make archive torrents of roms from vimms lair and cdromance? They have hacks and translations that dont exist elsewhere and will probably be removed soon with ios emulation and retro handhelds bringing so much attention to roms and these sites
Every time I see this news (Reddit or Lemmy) I see this kind of comment, but I wonder, what if I want to download just a ROM of a few mbs? I certainly don’t want to hoard the whole collection, as a torrent user I believe I can just pick up the file (if it isn’t zipped), but wouldn’t that be against the torrent’s moral code?
But most (all?) Torrent clients let you select which files you want to download so of there was an official unarchived torrent then archivists could seed forever and others could select the ROMs/manuals/etc. that they wanted
And this way we will get uncompleted seeds and in the further future nobody will be able to complete the damn torrent.
I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.
Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.
You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.
I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.
You can partially seed?
I don’t know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you’re uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that “seeding” if you aren’t a “seed” with 1.00 availability? idk.
I’d still count that as “seeding” since you’re running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there’s a precise definition somewhere.
Yes you definitely can
Yes. Select to download a part and when you downloaded that part you are seeding it. The torrent swarm counts you as a leecher, since it doesn’t know you are done downloading. But you are actually seeding your part.
What if I only want to download a specific part of it and not more than that. For example a specific episode of curb your enthusiasm and not anything more. Is that possible to stop and seed that episode? I thought by default it will try to download the entire torrent.
Select to download that part.
Amd those H&R users are exactly why it wont work.
Maybe a popular archive will stay alive by the few voluntary seeders but I believe the seed woll be dead.
That is incorrect. Partial seeding means they seed the part they downloaded, end of story. There are no downsides.
Correct. And Isaid if everyone just downloads the same 20% of the torrent because the other 80% is shovelware and unpopular means it’s lost because nobody downloaded the remaining 80% in the first place.
qbittorrent shows you how many seeders each part of the file has. Archivists can prioritise the parts with the least.
Assuming those come to the rescue and quick enough before the last one abandons the seed without looking if someone is leeching the last part to make a 100% completion possible.
Look mate. We all know every once in a while a torrent dies or will be incomplete for ever. There’s no denying that.
That’s not a different or added risk vs a website.
The only change is that it’s significantly easier to keep an archive going.