Over the past few years, I’ve been assembling a TPP archive and watching through the runs. It was just Red and Crystal at first, but now it’s grown to include all 98 runs and a selection of revisits, intermissions, Stadium 2, and PBR. Additionally, I’ve got over 55,000 clips and a whole bunch of community content including an archive of the subreddit, TV Tropes pages, various Youtube videos, and over 37,000 Imgur posts.

Until recently, this archive was just a bunch of disks on a shelf (and in my safe deposit box), but I now have a dedicated machine for it: my Twitch Plays Pokemon Time Machine.



Specs:



CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

CPU Cooler: Thermalright Burst Assassin 120 SE

Motherboard: ASRock B550M Pro4

Memory: 4x 8 GB Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan Z

GPU: MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X 6G

HBA: LSI 9300-16i (with Noctua NF-A8 fan)

PSU: Seasonic Vertex GX-850 (Overkill wattage, but few PSUs have 18 SATA connectors)

Case: Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL

Case Fans: 4x Arctic P12 Pro front intakes, 2x Fractal Design Dynamic X2 GP-14 exhaust (1 top, 1 rear)

OS: Xubuntu 24.04 LTS (Thanks to u/hytag for the [wallpaper](https://old.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/4ji9pk/yet_another_olden_wallpaper/))



Storage:



Boot/OS/Cache: 500 GB Teamgroup MP-44L

Cache/Staging: 3x 2 TB WD Blue (ZFS Raid-Z1, 4 TB usable, a fourth drive was installed and will soon be added)



Main Storage:



As I was not planning on archiving all of this at the outset, the storage consists of several individual volumes (TPP1, TPP2, TPP3, etc.) pooled with MergerFS rather than a “proper” array. While I don’t currently have any parity (That’s probably next on the list), each volume has three independent copies (TPP1A, TPP1B, TPP1C, TPP2A, TPP2B, TPP2C, etc.). One copy is in the system (The hot set), one copy stored on a shelf (The cold on-site set), and another in my safe deposit box (The cold off-site set).



The three sets cycle through the different roles on a quarterly basis; hot becomes cold on-site, cold on-site goes to the safe deposit box and becomes cold off-site, cold off-site is retrieved and becomes hot (BORT). Every exchange follows SMART testing of the disks and scrubbing of the (single-disk) zpools (The retrieved disks are also tested and scrubbed).



Volume 1: 2x shucked 18 TB WD Easystores, 1x 18 TB Seagate Exos X18

Volume 2: 3x shucked 8 TB WD Easystores

Volume 3: 3x 14 TB WD Ultrastar DC HC530

Volume 4: 3x 20 TB Seagate Exos X22

Volume 5:3x 20 TB Seagate Exos X20

Volume 6: 3x 20 TB Seagate Exos X22

Volume 7: 3x 14 TB WD Ultrastar DC HC530



Main Storage Total Capacity: 342 TB raw, 114 TB usable with 3 copies



With this setup I’ve been watching through various runs as they happened X years and Y months ago. I start the footage at a specific time and let it run continuously. Since I have the chat logs from the stream (Including those from my [early chat restoration project](https://old.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1ingj3d/early_tpp_chat_restoration_project_20142016/), which may be updated in the future), I can render the chat as a video to run alongside the main footage. Using pre-generated timelapses (30x real-time) and the archived live updaters, I can keep up with the run as it progresses. Additionally, I view the various Imgur posts made along the way, and occasionally look at archived discussions on the subreddit.



It’s been really cool digging through TPP’s history like this. Although I was here for Red and some runs after, I fell away from TPP later on in the year. I had intended to see Anniversary Red, but because of a move and poor planning I didn’t have internet until the run was nearly over. That was kinda it for a while. In 2022, I discovered that most of the broadcasts are archived, and watched the original Red and Crystal. After that my interest grew; I finally saw AR and then the next few anniversary runs. In total, I’ve now seen 18 archived runs, as well as several contemporary runs as they happened. TPP is once again very important to me, and it’s plain to see the magic didn’t end with Red!

My 114 TB TPP Time Machine