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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."
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
If there are two things that any "computer" with enough power and memory has, it's a port of Doom and a port of vi. What you need is this magical thing that iD released on December 23, 1997.
While this is an interesting archival problem, there is no indication that a sentencing element of preservation has occurred. Not all data is _worth_ preserving in the sense of accurate indexation, availability, maintaining and medium cycling.
I'm more interested in the sentencing criteria for preservation of electronic culture. My suspicion is that from an archival stand point most is ephemera which would best be preserved or not preserved by leaving it up to non-archivists.
I can't go out and buy a punchcard computer, but I can go and buy a 300 year old book.
Commit it to paper, it's the only proven archive method.
Not a new idea, in fact their is a whole community based on running and preserving old games.See, http://www.oldgames.nu/ or search for abandon-ware. Their are many tools that can be used to make old games playable and even to run at the speed intended (a common problem games running too fast to be playable) The biggest problem I can see to this becoming a active/mainstream idea is the fact the copyright protection agency's will get involved and we know what kind of a mess that creates.
By now, a lot of these programs where kept alive by the fan base. Emulators are available for lots of old 8bit machines.
For example I found several emulators for my old TI 99/4A, complete with cartridges of games and applications. Even single pieces of hardware where available, like the speech box and expansion box, which as a kid I wasn't able to afford at the time.
So what I guess they should do, is to store source codes (often available, since abandoned by the producers), and all the information of the hardware, chipsets etc, that one would need to built an emulator on some new hardware. Maybe it would even be possible to build a kind of "general emulator", that needs only to be fed with hardware information.
Preserving the software is one thing, but the experience of running one of these programs on the original hardware is considerably different.
With Star Raiders, for instance, the joystick is necessary to enjoy the same experience as an original user. Arguably the boot up sequence too and the CRT monitor.
Another example: "Daredevil Dennis" on the BBC Micro. The internal speaker on the system produces the sounds. Good luck reproducing that efficiently. And just the reality of sitting in front of the machine itself, loading the program from 5.25" disk and using the original keyboard to play the game completely alters the whole thing.
- not to mention the fact that an emulation of the hardware is going to be imperfect.
I thought that's what MAME [www.mamedev.org] and MESS [www.mess.org] are for. Preserving old games on all kind of hardware...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
In the context of archiving games, accurate software emulation the whole HW underlying each game is the only solution.
Obviously it should be done in a open, portable, multiplatform way to ensure that it is a long term solution.
Mame and Mess ( mamedev.org ) has already shown that this approach is viable and practical.
MAME is probably the most famous and widely used "game preservation" project in existence. The whole point of MAME is to re-implement obsolete arcade hardware and software as accurately as possible. Making the games playable is not the focus of the MAME project. It's been wildly successful, with lots of clever people reverse-engineering a lot of old hardware, and exceptionally rare games and hardware being documented and preserved.
MAME does "leave the original bitstream intact" as they put it. Getting accurate ROM or hard drive dumps is the entire point. Sure, MAME only handles arcade hardware, but there are plenty of other emulators out there for old gaming/computer systems, and people have spent a long time archiving software sets for these systems (Aminet, etc).
Basically, I'm finding it hard to see the difference between the emulation/preservation/source port culture we have now and what these guys are doing, with the exception that they are somehow more "credible" or "legitimate" because they're a university project. Their methodologies might be more formalized, and they're receiving government funding, but their goals are identical to those of the thousands of people already involved in emulation and archiving of obsolete hardware and software.
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.
In my future in 50 years there will be a World of Warcraft Themepark. Where I can take my grandkids on a Zepplin ride and go on Molten Core roller coasters and get their face painted like a Tauren and go to Lady Jaina princess breakfasts.
(I like my future better)
Doom is the ultimate example of JUST how to preserve a virtual world. By releasing the source code iD has decoupled it from OS/Hardware and ensured its continued survival.
So Doom is NOT an example of how hard it is to preserve a game but rather an example of just how to make sure a game survives.
On the whole, don't use success stories as an example of how not to do something.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
WoW could be around in 50 years, you never know, they have been around 5 years already.
Losing DOS years? I doubt it, Dosbox does a good job at running old game DOS games, it may not play them all but it play a lot of them already. You also have project like MESS where you could install DOS on a virtual machine and play the game or program. I'm more interested in games like Star Wars Galaxies and others where they won't be around in the future, and will most like never get emulated.
Digital Rights Management schemes will make it really hard soon to emulate the hardware and media.
That is why I believe that unless a non-protected copy of the game/media is submitted to the Library of Congress, or a similar insitution in your country, the game/media should lose all protection by copyright law and DMCA.
Just a thought.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I'm not a laywer, but as long as corporations keep their software patents and copyrights enforced, this will be a difficult task. It may take hundreds of hours of research and hard work to develop a virtualisation or emulation platform, but if Nintendo or Sony don't like the idea, then they can legally stop you, regardless of your motives.
Even without source code, It's called FUCKING EMULATION
Until the companies that control exclusive rights in these games start attacking emulator maintainers under theories of circumvention and/or contributory infringement. Besides, with Moore's Law shifting focus from speed to number of cores, I see it becoming likely that the Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 won't be emulated any time soon.
Short of looking at screenshots and reading old guidebooks, there's no way of returning to those worlds as they just don't exist any more.
Which parallels the real world perfectly, doesn't it?
If one wanted to know what your hometown looked like in 1885, you'd need a photograph. If you'd rather view your birthday party five years ago, there hopefully exists video of that event. I'm not certain that video games actually deserve more preservation than reality does.
I don't know if I could go AFK that long.