Complete Acorn Archive?

[jon28]

Looking around the net there appears to be numerous sites (including STH) which have archives / downloads of Acorn material (disk/tape images, inlay scans, roms, magazines etc). With lots of duplication and no doubt missing items as well.

Is there a complete, standard archive out there anywhere?

Is there a standard naming convention?

Has anyone every tried to make one?

I'm asking this more from a 'making sure there is a complete archive for historical purposes' point of view rather than 'i want to make sure i have every game'.

[Samwise]

Is there a complete, standard archive out there anywhere?

If you're talking websites, STH is probably the biggest with The BBC Lives! also offering a lot ... there are a couple of other smaller sites, but nothing else that could claim to be a complete archive. If you look outside the beeb community itself, the TOSEC guys have put together probably the biggest complete archive, all renamed to fit their naming convention. These aren't usually available for download but can be found on P2P networks in complete archives. The only issue with the TOSEC archives is that they don't spend a huge amount of time comparing versions of games so, for example, they have about four or five identical versions of Chuckie Egg in their archive all labelled as alternates (there were only ever 2 different releases of CE). As they don't seem to have any simple option to feedback into their releases, these errors tend to remain unfixed for long periods.

Is there a standard naming convention?

This seems to be the only site within the beeb community promoting a naming convention:

http://www.acornpreservation.org/archive.html

It's starting to archive games for all 8-bit Acorn platforms, including packaging scans, but it's got a long way to go ...

HTH,

Sam.