Slashdot Mirror
UK University Making Universal Game Emulator
Techradar reports that researchers at the University of Portsmouth in England are working on a project to create a game emulator that will "recognise and play all types of videogames and computer files from the 1970s through to the present day." One of the major goals of the project is to preserve software from early in the computer age. David Anderson of the Humanities Computing Group said, "Early hardware, like games consoles and computers, are already found in museums. But if you can't show visitors what they did, by playing the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music. ... Games particularly tend not to be archived because they are seen as disposable, pulp cultural artefacts, but they represent a really important part of our recent cultural history. Games are one of the biggest media formats on the planet and we must preserve them for future generations."
It's going to be a GUI that just links dozens of different emulators?
mess is just that for home systems (consoles and computers), while mame is for the arcade machines... so where are the news except that someone just decided to invent the wheel once again?
btw mess and mame are excpetionally well documented... http://mess.org/ for those too lazy to google it up
Sometimes, I'm still blown away by the music in early 1990s LucasArts and Sierra games.
Monkey Island 1 and 2 ... and so on.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Leisure Suit Larry 5
They're making music sound good on a Yamaha OPL3 FM chip.
Good luck trying to beat the various forms of DRM through an emulator (without using a crack).
Also DirectX is also a bitch, specially the earlier versions (4-6) have various compatibility issues.
What? You guys are just gonna mash up a bunch of emulators? That's so stupid!!
I could just download a bunch of different ones doing a bunch of research and do it that way!!
I hate that you guys are just putting all that together for me, cause I could just do it myself!!
That's why you can't have nice things assholes, you don't appreciate it.
Why do people have a problem with this?
Accepting games as a cultural artifact is very important. This will in the long run open up a legal way of running abandonware, which is a great thing both for history as well as entertainment.
When credible, tax-funded institutions start highlighting the legal problems with running and copying old software the law will eventually adapt.
.: Max Romantschuk
This is cute, but just think about the problem of trying to preserve the gameplay of various MMO games, without the servers. I'm not thinking of a real preservation, but of how you might attempt to reconstruct the graphics and the movement and battle models from captured screen video + synchronized keyboard + mouse inputs.
To be more concrete, say we have as many players as we want playing WoW using a real time KVM-over-IP setup and we record the IP streams. How could we use the information to produce a single-user "game" which would give a cursory impression of what WoW was like, minus all the social interaction?
Now this is a real research-level problem, I think.
I'm glad someone is taking preservation seriously. These are a part of our history. I wonder what the government will do about copyright, which is the usual counter-argument. Especially now that copyrights last for 6 billion years or so.
If they really want to emulate systems of old are they going to add the loading screens to the tape loading computers?
The countless hours I lost of life watching the eplieptic fit inducing loading screen of my Spectrum 48k really made you appreciate the game once you did finally start playing (oh and then when you did get them loaded up a speck of dust would land on the power cable or you had the temerity to press a key a little too hard and the whole system would reset)
Preserving games is nice and all, but it seems to me to be only part of what should be preserved. I feel it is just as important to be able to look back at old word processors, spreadsheets, desktop shells, disk utilities, programming environments, obscure OSes, and more. They may not be as glamorous as preserving games, but they are just as worthy of preservation.
How are you going to play the games?
What is pong without the rotary control?
Imagine (in 50 years time) playing Wii bowling without the wiimote.
How are you going to get a light gun to work without a screen that does a full refresh.
etc.
[Intentionally left blank]
But can it emulate Tennis for Two? (These guys did it...)
If we take for granted that preserving history includes videogames, shouldn't game companies that don't disclose specifications, ROMs, etc. be considered as targets for some kind of anti-history-archiving laws, if such a thing exists?
And if such a law exists or ever exists, we get in the same "differents countries, different rules" and "how much time to we give them before asking for the specs", etc.
I bet Tecmo would apply to have a Disney-esque protection on Pac-Man, for example.
Cambridge is probably the most highly regarded university in the country.
Yeah, and then Bath. Oxford's a shambles.</blackadder>
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
The AFI is a hybrid government-industry organization charged with identifying and preserving key Hollywood films. It started in the 1960s when the fear was television would decimate Hollywood and original film negatives lost. Each year they choose 25 classic films for special preservation. Since then movie technology and economics has changed considerably. But there is still the chance that even digital films can be lost.