Some random musings about corrupt game sources. There are many bad dumps/rips of games out there. There are also a surprisingly large number of discs that unknowingly shipped with corrupt data. This is especially true in the early CD-ROM era. Some of these corruptions are minor (hiccup in the sound/glitch in graphics), some are major (large chunks of missing/corrupt video), some are fatal (game crashes at a certain point). In DREAMM I have a mechanism to patch/fixup problems at installation time. So from a user-friendly perspective, it would be easy to silently fix up any known corrupt files and leave the user happy. From a preservation perspective, it's not so simple. We don't really want corrupt or bad dumps to propagate, and fixing them up only encourages them to be treated as valid. So that case seems pretty straightforward. That being said, there are a number of corruptions that come from accurate dumps of discs that shipped with corrupt data. Sometimes this situation is difficult to distinguish (generally needs multiple dumps to verify identical corruption), but I've seen probably a dozen cases, and I keep finding more. It's particularly common on shovelware demo CDs, like those that shipped with magazines. QA for that stuff was generally nonexistant, so it's not surprising to find that they messed something up or shipped a damaged file. But even official releases came out bad. For example, the Outlaws 2.0 CD release has a 95MB video file with 70MB of all-0 data at the end. It shipped this way in both US and Europe releases. While this example is rather too large to practically patch, this seems like the sort of case that would be good to fix up for the user. Another example is the Rebel Assault demo, which shipped corrupted on at least 5 separate releases by the German distributor. Since it's so common, should I fix it up? Leaning toward no. Maybe instead of fixing these up I should explicitly tell the user that s/he is installing from a known corrupt source. But what's the recourse for the user in that case? 🤔