[ProgrammingAce]

I have a number of betas, protos, and preview builds from various PS2 and Xbox games. I don't really have time to start going through all of them to see if there's anything interesting, so i'm considering dumping them.

Problem is, each iso can be up to 9 GB, which is way more then my hosting can handle. BitTorrent is too easy to track, and most people probably don't have access to Usenet.

With DreamTR's grab-bag-apoluza i'm considering buying a few sets and just dumping all of the isos. A few of us have considered doing it as a group thing, but the issue keeps coming down to hosting.

Any ideas?

[TheRedEye]

Well, to me mass dumping random code like this is just a matter of making sure it's preserved somewhere, just in case. Everything else is just kind of secondary. With modern stuff, maybe a disc-burning "tree" could be your best option to make sure the code is out there? Are you concerned about torrents being tracked back to you specifically if you are seeding them? If so, maybe it's a matter of mailing an old hard drive with clean rips to someone who doesn't mind doing so (maybe some private tracker dude somewhere).

[ProgrammingAce]

Yeah, i'm just worried with torrents that if you only have half a dozen seeds it'd be pretty easy to trace back to me. Even if the publishers don't care too much, my company kinda frowns on piracy. And considering what i do for a living...

Preservation is one of my key goals here, i know i have more then a few discs that don't read anymore, either due to age, damage, or just cheap media. I started backing up some of the more important stuff to a couple of 500 GB drives, but i don't really have a good way of doing that either...

Moving beyond that, i have a few blu-ray betas... at 50 gig each, wtf am i going to do with them?

[TheRedEye]

Untold Legends makes a nice coaster.

[ProgrammingAce]

add in gundam crossfire, genji 2, and that fantastic 4 game and i can have a complete set

[tithin]

As redeye stated, the best way to distro betas is either by backing them up to an old hard drive and forwarding them on, or rar them up into parts, and upload them to a private ftp over time.

[ProgrammingAce]

Alright, i just got in 40 discs. I'll start playing with those to see what works best. Couple of E3 builds, lots of preview discs, lots of review discs.

First one i'm going to try "releasing" is an E3 build of one of the DDR games for PS2. I've already gotten requests for that. Apparently the DDR scene is crazy.

I don't think i'm going to release all of them, simply because some are probably final code. I'll try to do an MD5 against the main executable to compare to retail. If they match, i probably won't bother dumping them.

I have a feeling Usenet is going to be the best method of distribution. Once they hit usenet, someone could probably make a torrent.

I don't know how many people have usenet accounts these days. Out of curiosity, who here has one?

[Smeg]

I think it'd be shameful for an ISP not to offer at least some modicum of usenet access. Most users don't know what to do with usenet anyway.

[kap]

[ProgrammingAce]

I have comcast, which offers 2 gig per month via usenet. I keep a real usenet account around on the side, i've never actually tried comcast's setup.