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Preserving Virtual Worlds
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so:
"Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."
Going to dismiss you but then I thought of Everquest. I got this old Beta 2 CD I got years ago when I played it and I just realized how much the game has changed over the years. Does anyone remember the old crappy interface it had? The horrible stat/level system?
Hell, how do you even preserve something like WoW? Even assuming you can get the server code for some kind of emulation you still run into the problem the poster stated about emulation.
Makes me worry its all futile. With all the massive architecture changes Evey 5 years or so, how do you get the money or the people dedicated to keep emulators up to date. I am very much looking at all the DOS years to be lost:P
Hell, in 50 years when I tell my grand children about this little game I played, World of Warcraft, I doubt they will ever know what I as talking about.