All 54 misplaced clickwheel iPod video games have now been preserved for posterity

Last 12 months, we reported on the efforts of basic iPod followers to protect playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel video games that Apple bought for a quick interval within the late ’00s. The neighborhood was working to get round Apple’s onerous FairPlay DRM by having individuals who nonetheless owned authentic copies of these (now unavailable) video games sync their accounts to a single iTunes set up via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That “master library” would then have the ability to present playable copies of these video games to any variety of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the neighborhood was nonetheless looking for iPod house owners with syncable copies of the previous couple of titles wanted for his or her library. With today’s addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the undertaking, although, all 54 official iPod clickwheel video games at the moment are accessible collectively in an simply accessible format for what is probably going the primary time.

All directly, then slowly

GitHub consumer Olsro, the originator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, tells Ars that he lucked into contact with three individuals who had giant iPod recreation libraries within the first month or so after the undertaking’s launch final October. That contains one YouTuber who had bought and maintained copies of 39 distinct video games, even repurchasing a number of the upgraded variations Apple bought individually for later iPod fashions.

Ars’ story on the undertaking shook out a couple of extra iPod house owners with syncable iPod recreation libraries, and subsequent updates within the following days left only a handful of titles unpreserved. But that is when the undertaking stalled, Olsro mentioned, with months wasted on false leads and technical points that hampered the trouble to get an entire library.

“I’ve put a lot of time into coaching people that [had problems] transferring the files and authorizing the account once with me on the [Virtual Machine],” Olsro advised Ars. “But I kept motivation to continue coaching anyone else coming to me (by mail/Discord) and making regular posts to increase awareness until I could find finally someone that could, this time, go with me through all the steps of the preservation process,” he added on Reddit.

Getting this working copy of Real Soccer 2009 was an “especially cursed” course of, Olsro mentioned.

Getting working entry to the ultimate unpreserved recreation, Real Soccer 2009, was “especially cursed,” Olsro tells Ars. “Multiple [people] came to me during this summer and all attempts failed until a new one from yesterday,” he mentioned. “I even had a situation when someone had an iPod Nano 5G with a playable copy of Real Soccer, but the drive was appearing empty in the Windows Explorer. He tried recovery tools & the iPod NAND just corrupted itself, asking for recovery…”