CAPSDI: CAPS Distribution Initiative

The goal of the CAPS Distribution Initiative (CAPSDI) is to collect and distribute to the community all the disk images released by the CAPS project team. We are NOT members of the CAPS team.
The CAPS team only distribute images to the people who dumped their original floppy disks. We believe that to truly preserve the games, the disk images have to be widely available otherwise the images themselves might be lost in the future. Although the CAPS team store all of their images in 5 places in the world to ensure preservation, we think every owner of the preserved game should have access to the IPF images, even if they do not have the hardware to dump their original floppies.
We want to gather the community of CAPS contributors so that all the releases are made available to everyone.

If you have dumped at least one game for CAPS, then maybe you can help us! Please check the lists of missing releases below and see if you have some that you could share with the community.

If you have original games already released by CAPS but not available here, you can dump them again and the CAPS team will give you the corresponding IPF images.

If you know people who contributed to CAPS, please them of our existence!

The "Classic Amiga Preservation Society" (CAPS) team wants to preserve all the original Amiga games before all the floppy disks become unreadable (which is inevitable). They have developed a very powerful technology to preserve only purely original floppy disks (including copy-protected ones), unaltered by cracks or any other change. In the future, their technology will also be applied to preserve floppy disks from other platforms (Atari ST, PC).
The preservation process is:

1. People with adequate equipment (at least an Amiga with a 68020 CPU and Kickstart 1.3) dump their original games with the CAPS dumping tool.
2. They upload their dumps to the CAPS FTP server (dumps are absolutely useless on their own).
3. After analysis and validation by the CAPS team, they release the dumped games as IPF disk images (their own file format) and give them to the people who dumped the games.

IPF disk images can be used in the WinUAE Amiga emulator with the CAPS library.

If you want more information, please visit the CAPS web site which has lots of detailed information on what they are doing.

Once a new disk images is sent to us, we will share it through eMule, IRC and post it to the newsgroups. We will anounce here in the news the availability of disk images.
Here are the several ways to share your CAPS disk images:

• You can send us your CAPS images by email to this address: caps_di AT yahoo DOT fr (replace the AT by @ and the DOT by .)
  This mailbox can contain up to 100 MB of data. Each message can be up to 10MB in size (however for files bigger than 8 MB, we recommend splitting the file in smaller pieces).
• FTP server: if you have a lot of CAPS images to send, you can request access to an FTP server to upload your files instead of sending them by email. Please request an FTP access using the email address above. We will reply and send you the necessary information to connect (server address, port, login and password).

Although you can request access to our FTP server to upload your CAPS images, we prefer not to open it to the public for downloads because of the small bandwidth allocated.

Several methods are available to distribute the CAPS images. However, some of them are not very simple. You can choose between distributing your images yourself, or send them to us and we will then take care of the appropriate distribution.

Here are the ways to share the CAPS images (see links in the left part):

• IRC. This is usually the place where you will find the most CAPS disk images. This is also the less user friendly method.
• eDonkey 2000 / eMule P2P network: need a central directory of links to find rare files.
• Newgroups: it is not very easy to post binary files.
• Web sites: easy to do, but requires large amounts of web space and bandwidth, which are usually coslty.

That is also why we have started our initiative: we take care for you of all the hassle of distributing the disk images through the various ways. However, if you still prefer to do the work yourself, please send us an email to inform us that you posted something so we can retrieve it, remove it from the missing list and distribute it.

We want to find all the CAPS images that are not yet publicly available. Here are the lists of images that we are missing. Please ensure that your images are listed here before sending them to us.

• Missing CAPS images (Text file, ordered by game name)
• Missing CAPS images (Text file, ordered by release ID)