But will the equipment required to read this crystal survive a trip through the oven and be available in a billion years?

Uh-huh.
#sponsored, much?

Just stick to the important bits, please. Data on a medium that might be impossible to retrieve or would be useless for most of humanity's remaining existence is of no relevance.

If you wanted this to read as something that wasn't a publicity stunt, clay tablets or stone carvings tend to be a good medium to last long enough.

Great to see games from Ubisoft and Activision getting patched and updated...... but can we get more games from Ubisoft and Activision? You know.... for preservation purposes?

I like what I'm hearing. I didn't realize HOMM2 had music issues. This is what happens when you didn't get a chance to experience the full original experience as a kid.

Hey, Chronicles actually starts on my PC now! Great, I didn't need to accomplish anything after work today.

Kudos for the video, much appreciated!

Guess The Crystal comes with a manual how to read it/what's inside (the reading machine can be recreated or designed a new, not that important). How would The Manual be preserved (seems to turn to a chicken-and-egg problem)?

BTW, you likely need to preserve multiple copies, I volunteer to keep one safe as long as I breath.

Excellent! Always good to see the forgotten Chronicles and Heroes2 receive love.

What GOG did not tell: The source code for the first game they was burning into a crystal for near a eternity lifetime got a source code which was been stored and restored from a "good old HDD". Without this HDD this code might indeed be lost forever... already.

https://x.com/DiskBlitz/status/920801845349466113
http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=45810

Anyway, there is now a improved engine based on it, it seems:
https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi

Linux version: https://vcmi.eu/players/Installation_Linux/

I must understand that the tweaks in HoMM2 are only for the Windows version?

Great! The world always need Heroes! :)

Actually it is like stone cavring in micro size. :P I believe it would always be possible to read it bit by bit, even from the scratch. To decipher data from these bits is another problem but well, that's rather unsolveable.

I think the initiative for maintenance is excellent, but we should also support game engine projects that add new features and make it playable multiplatform, as is the case of fheroes2

GOG's preservation program along with the now added Mods section is a good step, lacking only a crowdfunding campaign that GOG can lead to support community-made projects to expand the arrivals of these Good Old Games to a wider audience.

This Holy Trinity is what I want to see for the future of this platform because it is how I play video games nowadays:
* Buy Classic games
* Expand them with mods
* Use open-source engine to play them at a good resolution and on platforms like Linux.

My two cents.

PS: Heroic Games Launcher among other projects is what makes me still buy games on GOG, because the official GOG Launcher doesn't work on Linux. It should be given more love!

PS 2: I forget something important, the community. Before the privacy modification a few years ago, I used to spend my time looking at the profiles of fellow GOG members, reading their reviews and memories, the nostalgia that brings us together in this space. I was a stalker, I accept that. I think GOG should adapt how the community shares and communicates in these new times. Maybe GOG think that a forum is something retro and cool, I'm not against the meaning of "forum", but at least let us upload images, let us upload screenshots. The most important thing: that users can generate quality content, give us the tools.

It's a good thing I preserved the unpreserved versions, I guess. I still don't trust the "preservation program" any more than I trust an NPC the DM introduces while checking his notes a lot and rolling dice behind the screen.