Technosaurs: Locked and Loaded (July 20, 2008)
- Thread starter Bandit LOAF
- Start date
t.c.cgi
Vice Admiral
I'm probably making a huge, stupid assumption here. Why would a company let a group of outsiders come and make extensive copies of a large chunk of archived IP if it hadn't already been released? I'm pretty sure LOAF and Paul Barnett got all the permission they needed from EA before going through with this.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
The last thing Paul Barnett asked us before he left for ComicCon was how long it was going to take to get this material online. We're going through the official process with EA, but the guys at the top are all in favor of you seeing this stuff ASAP.
AD
Finder of things, Doer of stuff
Exactly! They've already come accross bits from other unreleased stull (like the aforementioned Technosaur, and Privateer 3) but there's almost certainly others. But it's going to take a while before we really have a complete notion of what we have.
ChrisReid
Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
I guess it depends how things go. There's a lot of data. Not counting any video rips, it comes to about 470 gigabytes. There might be opportunities for sorting down the line, but we would need to work out some of the distribution questions first.
I can't even believe it's August. Since I've been away from this thread for two weeks, sorry again for not being able to post live updates from inside. Were we allowed to do so, it would have still be difficult because of the frantic activity. The process went from roughly 7 am to 7 pm nonstop each day, and even at the ends of the day sometimes we were in too much of a daze to beam out an infoburst. I did get a few high quality videos inside that capture our process and setup pretty well, so I'm anxious to be able to post those and share our experience some.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I think we're finally ready to start answering some questions where possible. Here are some rough numbers on exactly what we managed to recover:
CD Images: 708
SyQuest Images: 25
Photographs: 3,390
3.5" Disks: 274
Optical Discs: 2
DAT Tapes: 36
8mm Tape Images: 1
Scans: 8,225
VHS Tapes: 101
CD Images: 708
SyQuest Images: 25
Photographs: 3,390
3.5" Disks: 274
Optical Discs: 2
DAT Tapes: 36
8mm Tape Images: 1
Scans: 8,225
VHS Tapes: 101
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
No stone left unturned. 
Now we just have to figure out how to use it all... and organize it. I've been going through ISOs today to try and confirm that we won't need to do a 'reshoot' day and I've found that the labels on the discs don't always match what's on them. "3DO Stuff", for instance, has all sorts of Wing Commander music and the source code for the SNES Ultima games...
Now we just have to figure out how to use it all... and organize it. I've been going through ISOs today to try and confirm that we won't need to do a 'reshoot' day and I've found that the labels on the discs don't always match what's on them. "3DO Stuff", for instance, has all sorts of Wing Commander music and the source code for the SNES Ultima games...
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Oh, I can casually mention lots of stuff!
Example: we uncovered evidence of Origin's earliest cancelled game... a *basketball* game from the mid 1980s (called... 'Home Court', maybe? I will check). We found a big envelope with all the packaging material they'd developed, including the logo, the border and a photographs of a basketball as they airburshed it into box art. First 'Spalding' is replaced with 'Origin' and then it's plugged into an Apple ][ keyboard (with a phone coord!).
We have all the receipts from the FMV productions -- down to the tiniest detail. Want to know what Chris Roberts spent his petty cash fund on? Liquor - lots and lots and lots and lots of liquor.
Example: we uncovered evidence of Origin's earliest cancelled game... a *basketball* game from the mid 1980s (called... 'Home Court', maybe? I will check). We found a big envelope with all the packaging material they'd developed, including the logo, the border and a photographs of a basketball as they airburshed it into box art. First 'Spalding' is replaced with 'Origin' and then it's plugged into an Apple ][ keyboard (with a phone coord!).
We have all the receipts from the FMV productions -- down to the tiniest detail. Want to know what Chris Roberts spent his petty cash fund on? Liquor - lots and lots and lots and lots of liquor.
Howard Day
Random art guy.
Wow. I bet the CIC is going to be overflowing with awesome tidbits like this for the forseeable future. I can't wait. As always if you need help with packaging or loading any of the 3d content, I'm your man...or one of them. I doubt there's a format out there I can't open up for you....unless you managed to score some of the original WC1 3D artwork?
Oh, I do hope.
Oh, I do hope.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
There's plenty of U8 stuff, but I haven't been able to examine it much yet (I think there's a project archive tape, but we need to set up a legacy Novell machine to read it). I know every Ultima fan is looking for Lost Vale, so I'll definately keep my eye out.
(Edit: actually, what's weird is that I haven't seen the Lost Vale artwork at all... we've got the layouts for every Origin box ever including unreleased stuff like Bioforge Plus and Prowler... but not the LV box.)
(Edit: actually, what's weird is that I haven't seen the Lost Vale artwork at all... we've got the layouts for every Origin box ever including unreleased stuff like Bioforge Plus and Prowler... but not the LV box.)
Wasn't that layout sold at ebay? I think even Denis Loubet said it was the real artwork.