Computer, Arise From Your Grave

Davy Mitchell writes "Interesting article on emulation on the BBC's site Good interview with Paul Burgin - author of several Dragon 32/64 emulators. This makes his views on copyright quite surprising!" It's a good article on emulation, and the revival of the old style computers. Good nostalgia.

Comments

Emulation, copyrights, and old software...

[cr0sh]

This is completely on topic...

For those of you who don't know, the Dragon 32/64 systems were licenced compatible systems of the TRS-80/Tandy Color Computer 1/2 (IOW, think of the Dragon as a PAL CoCo - for the most part). IIRC, there were some other differences, but for the most part, they were one and the same.

I am all for emulation of these systems, and others like them. In the case of the CoCo (and I imagine the Dragon as well), it is becoming nigh impossible to even obtain the service manuals and such for these machines, to keep an old one running. Even with this in hand, the parts won't be available forever.

As an individual who started programming with Color Computer Extended BASIC (a ROM'd M$ BASIC variant), and as someone who still owns two CoCos (a CoCo 2 and 3 - both which I cherish), it saddens me that someday these machines will die (though they are going on 15 years now, and still running strong, at all of 1 MHz - actually, the 2 only runs at a fraction of that - .78 MHz or so - but with the high speed poke - well).

About 6 months ago I got my CoCo's back from my parents, and after getting a "new" floppy drive (my old one died), I started going through my disk collection, to see what I had (it had been a while)...

Most of the floppies worked fine - a few were bad. I am in the process of moving the data over to my PC, to run on an emulator (a goal of mine is to make a "super" CoCo using an emulator on an old P90 or something, running fullscreen with output piped to the TV). I own the software, I want to run what I own. There shouldn't be any issue...

Even so, some of this software is effectively abandoned - no one is going to ressurect a classic game of Canyon Climber on any machine in the future (though I would love to see a resurection of Reactoid). This software needs to be preserved, and allowed to be used on emulators.

One of the games I had that went bad, you couldn't back up to another floppy (old copy protection scheme), except with something on a PC of the era called a CopyBoard (IIRC - some kind of super copy cracking system using a special ISA card or something). So, I never made a backup - and of course, the floppy fails on bootup (it gets partway, then dies).

That game is called "Gates of Delerium", by a company called Diecom Software, Ltd. It was a Canadian company, so I set out to find someone who might be able to get me a backup (hey, I have a valid license, and now I can't use it!). I eventually found out where the founder of Diecom worked at (heh, a games company for the handhelds) - third one down, Dave Dies. I sent an email, no response.

Hey, I would just like permission to try to recreate the thing (emulate it) on the PC - unless he is planning on releasing it for the GameBoy.

But here is a case of a game, that is unsupported, abandoned, with VERY few original owners (AFAIK, I am the only one on this planet with an original copy - I have not found a disk image of it yet). I would love to run this on an emulator or something, just to play it one more time...

I support the EFF - do you?