Recently I downloaded a package of over 6,000 Atari 8-bit PC disk images. I downloaded an emulator (Altirra) and familiarized myself with it just enough to be able to load most disks and started working my way through the images one-by-one.
Why would I do that?? I have a full-time job and a family. I can justify it in my head by calling it a hobby, but it seems like a huge waste of time anyway. But I can’t really stop myself. Each disk is a little prize–a little piece of digital history. Some of them hold clues to my own past–all of them hold clues to the past of some fledgling company or lone enthusiast trying to produce something for other people to enjoy.
But why do I have to go through each one? I saw this word on another blog recently, “completist”. Is it a real word? Is that what is going on? Or am I just OCD? I should tell you that I recently went through my massive library of ebooks. Over 20k. Categorized each one. It took weeks. Loved every minute of it. I do the same thing with old blogs, magazines–I obsessively go through every old article. Clip some of them and save them to Evernote. I tried to make it through the eXoDOS adventure archive but fizzled out on that one–so there are some victories and some defeats.
But again… I know that none of this counts for anything. No one cares. In the end, when I give an accounting of my time here on earth, I will have a hard time explaining this. And yet, here it is, earlier than 6 AM, and I have been working on this task (and blogging about it now) for over an hour.
Can I make it through 6,000 disk images? I am only in the A’s right now (they are alphabetized). I suppose it’s a much more manageable task than 20k books, but each one takes a bit more time since you have to play around with emulator settings to get each one to work. Add to that a good many of them are completely mis-categorized by the import process of the front-end software I am using. That’s not to knock LaunchBox–there was not a lot to go on when it tried to figure out what each disk was, and it did figure out an awful lot of them. I don’t know if it can be done or if I’m the one to do it–but I’ll try and I’ll try to update this blog.
Adventures in Retroville 