I just realized I have no clue how to use torrents. To me torrent always got tied up with illegal stuff, but this is obviously not the case. Maybe this is a good time to experiment.
Weeeeeeellllllllā¦
ā¦itās just as legal as P2P. Meaning, the software isnāt illegal. The intended use probably isnāt illegal. But itās a great tool for you to share illegally, if you want to.
In this case, though, itās not illegal. Well, since I admitted thereās some commercial games there, itās not 100% in the clear either. But you have a choice to stop downloads of any files you donāt want, so you do have a say in the matter.
But as I was saying, torrents - like P2P - are, as I understand, a convenient way to get something huge from person A to person B. As valid as a filesharing system. Itās just that itās a system thatās so EASY to use for illegal purposes, that, well, most people do.
But HAVING a torrent program and client is just as illegal as having a computer. Itās what you do with it thatās legal or not. If you never use illegal torrents, youāre never doing anything illegal.
ā¦and, thatās as far as my knowledge goes!
EDIT - Aaaah, my torrent client has sprung to life! I can see someone has started successfully downloading. Excellent, everythingās working great.
Iāll check back in a month or so to see if I can delete the collection from my hard drive, or if some more seeding is still necessary. Until then party on, and be excellent to each other! Keep it nice, keep it cool, and keep it sane, above all else.
If there are any problems with the torrent in the meantime - like, if download speed is awful and you know how I can increase it (that last bit: really important) PM me. Iāll still get the e-mail notifications.
I started a partial download about 6 hours ago. Unfortunately I donāt have the drive space to hold the whole thing, so I wonāt be a proper seeder, but Iāll keep the Infocom and Z-machine stuff available if nothing else.
Then youāll want the āInform & Glulxā folder, mostly, but Iād also recommend the following folders as they contain ZCode games/ports:
- Adventure
- Apollo 18+20
- Scott Adams and Adventure International
- Phoenix and Topologika
In the āPending Gamesā folder, thereās a few unsorted ZMachine games. And, of course, the whole IFComp2016.
EDIT - Oh, but you donāt have to dive deep into the alphabetical folders of Pending Games for any Inform stuff. No, youāll find all of that either in IFCOmp2016 or just in Pending Games, not under any other subfolder.
TADS and ZCode/Glulx games are pretty much sorted, as well as web.based games. Theyāre the ones I could play on the go! So I gave them priority. 
EDIT 2 - Just before I go to bedā¦ I noticed people were downloading at, like, 6kb/s. So I took a look at my preferences, removed the speed limit, and itās averaging at a better-looking 300Kb/s, with occasional ups and downs. I trust itās an improvement. 
Iāll cap it again tomorrow if need be, but Iām going to bed now, so you might as well make the most of it!
Yeah, itās basically just a technique to distribute the cost of sharing files among groups of people.
As a very simplified example, imagine that person A wants to get a 100 MB file to persons B and C.
Traditionally, B would download the file from A, and C would also download the file from A. If we take an accounting after this has been done, we see that A uploaded 200 MB (100 MB to B and 100 MB to C), B downloaded 100 MB (from A), and C downloaded 100 MB (from A).
Using a bittorrent-like protocol, what would happen is that B would download the first half of the file from A, C would download the second half of the file from A, then B would download the second half of the file from C, and C would download the first half of the file from B.
Taking an accounting here, weād see that A uploaded 100 MB (50 MB to B and 50 MB to C), B downloaded 100 MB (50 MB from A and 50 MB from C) and uploaded 50 MB (to C), and C downloaded 100 MB (50 MB from A and 50 MB from B) and uploaded 50 MB (to B). So the extra 100 MB that A would have had to upload in our first example has instead been distributed among B and C, reducing the pressure on Aās outgoing link.
2 Likes
There you go, people. I hope you feel more instructed now. I do. Puzzled and confused, but thatās because itās 2.50am (a new hobby has kept me awake). But instructed!
Also, āinstructedā is certainly not the word. I hope the meaning comes across. If not, woe betide us for the tower of babel is again upon is. Hmmm. This is why I donāt usually post at 3am. I should go to slepelƧjkfbnla .hksb jwawa [snore]
1 Like
The meaning came across. Now is a bad time to quibble about word choice. @vlaviano, thanks for the explanation. And yeah, Iām vulnerable to not quite posting what I mean even when wide awake.
As we have some real expertise amongst the contributors here, can anyone summarize the use of torrents from a security perspective? Iāve never used them, because Iām risk averse to computer security hassles (viruses, hijackings, etc).
No need to go into great detail as a) I donāt want to derail this discussion, and b) I probably wouldnāt understand the details anyway. Are these kinds of file-sharing generally āsafe-ish,ā assuming one doesnāt use them to directly seek out illegal types of content?
I think so. The two things that come mind are that peers discover one anotherās IP addresses via the torrentās trackers so that they can download content directly from each other, and ISPs can usually detect that youāre using a P2P protocol and perhaps make an erroneous assumption that youāre engaging in illegal activity when youāre not (theyāre kind of between a rock and a hard place where customers want privacy and the entertainment industry is lobbying governments to deputize the ISPs to investigate copyright infringement).
Thanks for the info. That doesnāt sound too bad. If I were to guess, my thinking would be that the primary risk even if one were deliberately looking for things one ought not be looking for is not from potential legal problems, but rather that uploaders of bad stuff are mostly crims and mischief-makers who are likely to add security-breaching ābonus contentā to take advantage of those who donāt exercise caution when downloading. I may be totally wrong on that though.
Have you shared this with Jason Scott before? Even if it canāt all go on archive.org heād probably have a good idea of what to do with the rest.
I think I tried to contact him once before. Someone suggested as much over at the french forum. Didnāt have much luck.
Iām not sure itās the sort of archive heād be interested in. If I had every version of every game, Iām sure heād love it. As it is, itās mostly of interest for players. Having said thatā¦ the torrent is out there, and if someone wants to point it out to him, go wild!
IF is still better than pr0n, Peter
Why not combine the two? The AIF crowd have been doing that for years.
Origami, actually. Fun fact: thereās a book called Pornogami. I wasnāt folding anything from that book (I was in fact folding a horse, and yes, it was anatomically correct), but I plan to at some point. Itās good for a laugh.
I am rather offended that you would think that of me, namekusejin. That wouldnāt be a new hobby.
Howās the torrenting (is that the right word?) going? I always meant to download your collection in the past but, as with a lot of things I intend to do, I never got around to actually doing it. Funnily enough, even after all these years Iāve never played most of the Infocom games and if theyāre part of your collection, this is probably as good a time as any to take a crack at them.
They are, and they include all the feelies.
A note about the feeliesā¦ theyāre all in PDF form, and when I first made them, I made a serious blunder. Iām afraid a lot of things are stretched to fit an A4 sheet (because I printed them all out and put them in bindings). But itās not too bad, really, and the stuff that would have been seriously distorted is still the original proportion; I didnāt stretch that.
Tranfers have been steady, thanks for asking. I donāt know how many people have it already but I expect that over the next week or so enough will have been transferred that I can pull out. Iāll ask before, evidently.
Let me remind yāall again: it is possible (well, at least itās possible in my client, uTorrent) for you to click a file or folder and go āI donāt want to download thisā. If youāre concerned about unadvertantly downloading commercial titles, PM me and Iāll tell you what these are likely to be, memory permitting. Some folders will be quite obvious as for what you can expect, of course.
(if in doubt about any particular commercial gameā¦ if itās IF and itās downloadable, itās there. Sole exception being Worldsmith. I planned to purchase it but never got around to doing it, and now, wellā¦
Actually, there are other exceptions. Some commercial twine games have been cropping up occasionally as well. Those I didnāt buy)
EDIT - Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
I just remembered something. I have commercial and registered emulators in there.
Thatās a no-no. Iāll be deleting them. I trust everyone has their own emulators, anyway. For Windows, I recommend Spectaculator (it really is spectacular), and of course AppleWin and Amiga Forever, and BeebEm, and CCS64 or PC64Win.
EDIT - Actually, while Iām at it, I should delete the commercial games too.
Hadean Lands and Cipher spring to mind. Textfyre games and 1893 are now free. Future Boy isā¦ I have no idea. So HL and C andā¦ erā¦ I guess thatās it for now.
Some games are abandonware, pretty much. The eternal edge case. If someone asks me to remove them, theyāre gone. Until thenā¦ theyāre there.
Guys, this means the torrent will error at some points. Donāt worry about it. Keep going with the files still left.
EDIT - Iām having now to re-check the torrent, because of the files I removed which it expected to still be there. I seriously hope I didnāt screw this up.
truth be told, while I do enjoy some historic digging to appease curiosity, I have to say most older stuff is really best left to nostalgy. I tried really hard to enjoy the crude simplism of Scott Adams or the pac-man disguising as IF that the huge maze of empty rooms that were most of the games by Level 9 really were, but I simply canāt.
I think our digital age has people going bonkers about preserving all kinds of junk. Junk is best left to rotā¦ in the past, it was simple: it just rot for itself while people looked away for other things, but now we keep collecting and talking about them as if they were any worthā¦
thus, Iām really not sure I want to download 20GB of mostly junk for junkās sake. The Infocom and IFComp gems I have them all alreadyā¦
This is not directed specifically at you, Peter. Itās a phenomenon of our time, I call it the BIG empty HD syndrome: āwhat do I do with all that emptiness besides filling itāā¦
sorry, I woke up in a trollish mood. good thing we have a forum with enough freedom for that
Didnāt seem trollish, donāt worry. I like digging through the junk because some gems fall through the cracksā¦ but no way am I going to try and convince anyone that 90% of the Spectrum and Commodore games in my collection are worth playing.
Mind you, I agree. Being a packrat myself, Iād have to. We keep trying to fill our lives with something. We keep on looking for something elusive, and if we canāt find it we hoard tons of meaningless little things, maybe on hopes of looking back at them at the end of our lives and being able to say āthese things prove I accomplished somethingā.
Or maybe itās just so that we donāt feel lonely. This is a lonely world. The veneer of social media makes it lonelier.
Heh. You woke up trollish? Well I woke up philosophying!