Welcome to the Software Preservation Society

The Software Preservation Society (SPS), formerly the Classic Amiga Preservation Society (CAPS), dedicates itself to the preservation of software for the future, namely classic games. As it is, these items are no longer available from their original suppliers, and are mainly in the possession of an ever diminishing community of well willed collectors. However, just by the passage of time these games are affected by the gradual deterioration of the media that stores them. These classics risk being lost forever in the near future, a tragedy that must be prevented.

Our main objective is to guarantee the preservation of such an important part of computer gaming history. Preservation dictates that nothing less than authentic representations of the software exist, which are both free of bit rot, and unaltered since the time of production. After a significant amount of research and development, we now have the technology that enables us to do this.

Due to the sheer number of commercial games released, we heavily rely on contributions and help from the related communities. You can read more about us, and there are some answers to most common questions about what we do located in the Frequently Asked Questions section alongside further detail in our knowledge base. If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

This content of this site is quite technical in nature.

Follow us on:

Contribute!

You can help fund the project!
The software we really want to get hold of... Alive.

News

2011-10-15

IPF Library Source Code Released [New!]

It's taken a long time, and we really appreciate your patience. We have finally released the IPF library source code, under the same terms as MAME (non-commercial use). Other licenses may follow. This code also includes a cycle exact, low level WD177x emulator that works at the signal (not command) level. (more)

2011-09-03

Duplicator Info (DI)

With C64 support around the corner, people are actually wondering why titles should be redumped, with several other projects already dumping C64 disks. Commercial games were usually copied at replicators that used many automated machines for high volume output. Such machines were produced by several companies with Trace Products (today: Trace Digital) being the largest with an estimated 80% market share. (more)

2011-08-22

Commodore 64 (C64) Preservation - we need your disks!

10 years ago, SPS (known as CAPS) started work on preserving Commodore Amiga disk images. Since then we've moved on to cover other less exotic disk platforms such as Atari ST, ZX Spectrum and more. Just as challenging as the Amiga, and just as close to our heart, and long overdue is the classic, Commodore 64. (more)

2011-07-12

KryoFlux Write Support (now in final testing)

Broken original game? Used a virus scanner to replace the allegedly dangerous non-standard bootblock? Bought it from eBay just to find out it was "fixed" by copying a crack over it? Very exciting news! We are now in the final stages of testing the new write support in KryoFlux. Finally, we are able to restore our game disks and continue to play them on real machines after our originals have worn out. (more)

2011-05-23

KryoFlux Track Data Visualisation

Over the last few months, aside from the work on writing support for KryoFlux, we have been working on providing more insight into disk data by means of data visualisation, since this is often helpful in identifying the cause of errors and provides useful information about the disk encoding. (more)

2011-02-09

Making IPF Open......

We've always said we intended to make IPF an open format, and that we would do so when we felt that we, and the format, were ready. It's taken longer than we had hoped, as these things do, but we feel the time is now right. We now have to decide what license to use, and we thought it best to have an open discussion between us, and you guys from all viewpoints, to come up with something that we can hopefully all be happy with. (more)

2011-02-02

Spectaculator 7.5 Released, now supporting IPF!

After extensive testing and polishing, the worlds leading ZX Spectrum emulator for Windows, "Spectaculator" by Jonathan Needle, has been updated to version 7.5, fully supporting the IPF format, as well as many other great new features. (more)

News Archive »