Our Video Game Heritage Is Rotting Away

eldavojohn writes "There's been a movement to preserve virtual worlds but MIT's Tech Review paints a dire picture of our video game memories rotting away in the attic of history. From the article: 'Entire libraries face extinction the moment the last remaining working console of its kind — a Neo Geo, Atari 2600 or something more obscure, like the Fairchild Channel F — bites the dust.' Published in The International Journal of Digital Curation, a new paper highlights this problem and explains how emulators fall short to truly preserve our video game heritage. The paper also breaks down popular SNES emulators to illustrate the growing problem with emulators and their varying quality. Do you remember any video consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey that are forever lost to the ages?"

Comments

Vectrex

[jomama717]

I have fond memories of playing the Vectrex console when I was a kid - I suppose there must be a few working units floating around out there but based on the way the graphics worked I wonder if you could ever truly emulate it on a PC.

Even if you could emulate the graphics you couldn't emulate the clear plastic templates you had to mount on the screen depending on the game :)

Re:Vectrex

[sqlrob]

You can't?

Ever see the emulations of Space Invaders that are colored? Space Invaders is black and white, the color was from plastic on the screen.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do you remember any video consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey that are forever lost to the ages?"

Maybe if you're a 14yrs old teenage girl, but stop thinking you're the only one remembering old consoles, why don't you compare it with old cars ??

Re:Vectrex

[Hatta]

You can emulate it, but poorly. Emulated overlays look like any other color graphics. It really doesn't strike you just how far we've come until you stand in front of a Space Invaders machine and see the overlays, or when you plug in a Channel F and hear the audio coming from the console instead of the TV. That's when history touches you. That's when you recognize the reality of a world before colored sprites and digital audio.

Re:Vectrex

[The Clockwork Troll]

Consollection

/article

Re:Vectrex

[WeatherServo9]

Emulating the clear plastic templates should be relatively easy; could look something like this. What I find tough (nearly impossible currently?) is emulating the look of the vector display itself. Up until recently I had a crt, and despite its high resolution the scan lines still gave it away. I have a nice lcd display now, but the pixel grid can still be noticeable a bit. As displays increase in resolution and quality it will probably become possible to get pretty convincing emulation, but for now it seems vector displays have a look that's downright difficult to emulate.

Re:Vectrex

[HelioWalton]

I've got a Vectrex hanging around in my basement. I play Armor Attack on it every now and then, but it typically just hangs around looking cool. Hell, you can even get flash cartridges for 'em, so no need to emulate!

Re:Vectrex

[gbutler69]

you couldn't emulate the clear plastic templates you had to mount on the screen depending on the game :)

Sure you could. You could produce a graphic overlay for each games based off the original plastic overlay.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

But we replaced those things for a reason. They weren't good. It's like people complaining about how games are so easy now and how we used to not have saves and only have 3 lives.

Those things were terrible. We replaced them because they were frustrating and annoying and reduced the gaming experience. What you remember is the joy of being younger, and while remembering that system might help YOU with that, it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.

Re:Vectrex

[tepples]

Hell, you can even get flash cartridges for 'em, so no need to emulate!

Until the display breaks down, as vector displays are notorious for doing.

Re:Vectrex

[Tackhead]

You can't? Ever see the emulations of Space Invaders that are colored? Space Invaders is black and white, the color was from plastic on the screen.

Bigger problem with the Vectrex is that it used a vector (X/Y) display. Although you can now draw lines on a raster monitor that are very smooth, and you can do glow effects that look pretty nice, it's not the same as drawing a straight line from point A to point B. No pixels, just phosphors emitting light.

Anyone who's played Asteroids on the original coin-op hardware (or even just played around with a CRT-based oscilloscope!) knows that if you dump a CRT's electron beam onto a single point, you get a spot of brightness that's radically brighter than a single white pixel on either a CRT or an LCD monitor.

For emulation purposes, I could live with rasterization. Sometimes, preserving the original hardware's important. Fortunately, there are communities in both the coin-op (big convention two weeks ago in San Jose) and console (big convention this weekend in Vegas) communities dedicated to keeping the hardware alive long enough for the software to be preserved (and as much as possible, the hardware to be reverse-engineered for emulation purposes).

Re:Vectrex

[Sunshinerat]

The problem with emulating the Vectex is that it is a vector based console, not raster based graphics. No matter what you would do in an emulator, you would have to translate the vector graphics into raster and that would take a way the one thing that made the Vectrex unique.

Re:Vectrex

[jomama717]

Well, sure... but while you can simply download an emulated game how would you get access to the original overlays? If you got access I suppose you could scan them and then print them on clear overhead paper. Maybe somebody that has the originals should start a business doing this - talk about a niche market...

Re:Vectrex

[Hatta]

I've seen hacks where people have hooked vector arcade games up to oscilloscopes. So at least some sort of vector display should be around for a while.

Re:Vectrex

[zevans]

There MUST be people doing that as a business already... mustn't there?

Obligatory car analogy: lots of businesses producing replica AC Cobras using modern materials.

Re:Vectrex

[Khyber]

Lame collection, no Action Maxx system.

Re:Vectrex

[tepples]

based on the way the graphics worked I wonder if you could ever truly emulate it on a PC.

Vectrex's display is based on wireframe vector graphics. But for the past decade, PlayStation, video cards have been designed to do one thing and do it well: rasterize vectors. Draw each vector as a quad, apply a blur filter over the whole thing, and blend in the overlay. What difficulties did you imagine?

Re:Vectrex

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Anyone who's played Asteroids on the original coin-op hardware (or even just played around with a CRT-based oscilloscope!) knows that if you dump a CRT's electron beam onto a single point, you get a spot of brightness that's radically brighter than a single white pixel on either a CRT or an LCD monitor.

I've done both, i.e. played the original coin-op Asteroids on an oscilloscope when the screen broke. :-) Rather, we used an oscilloscope in X-Y mode to confirm that it was indeed the high voltage driver to the screen that had burned out, (someone much more skilled in electronics than me) fixed it, and were back in action. It was a bit different playing Asteroids green on a 4-inch screen with green traces though.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't show how that worked in a realistic manner, then all that remains is the rose-colored memories of old-timers who are forever fond of the games they played when they were young. If you just want to play Space Invaders, an emulator with color graphics will do. If you want to preserve the heritage, then the handling of the actual devices can't be omitted.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations. You've completely missed the point of history. Their badness gives context to the goodness of what we have.

Re:Vectrex

[HelioWalton]

I've seen a website with quite a few of the overlays downloadable in some sort of image format. They were appropriately sized to be printed out on overhead sheets and cut out.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

Those things were terrible. We replaced them because they were frustrating and annoying and reduced the gaming experience. What you remember is the joy of being younger, and while remembering that system might help YOU with that, it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.

I don't think some modernday cinema + asdf experience can replace getting 50,000 points in International Karate+.

Re:Vectrex

[Applekid]

At a sufficiently high resolution, the raster construction of a vector image is indistinguishable. I don't think a display with such high dpi currently exists, but, given enough time, it will.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

Behold, a CRT vector graphics implementation of Asteroids. The article (in German) describes the whole project. The logic hardware is recreated as an FPGA "program". An X-Y-capable oscilloscope can be used as the display.

Re:Vectrex

[poetmatt]

the change in difficulty is not something that has impact on whether it was "good" or "bad".

To try to say that lowering the difficulty of games is "good" or "terrible" creates an argument that makes absolutely no sense.

I, as a gamer, am offended that games have gotten so damn easy. However, plenty of people like it. So there's both ends of the spectrum on that.

Yes, quality in a variety of ways has gotten better for gaming, but that doesn't mean that we don't want a history of what was.

On your same concept, should we just throw out (insert prominent art piece's name) because the newer art is better? No. History is there for a reason. Or, in a more relevant way, should we just throw away all the old apple II's because the new stuff runs better? no.

Re:Vectrex

[mcgrew]

What you remember is the joy of being younger

I don't think so; you don't have less fun just because you've gotten older, but nostalgia does play a part.

it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.

I never had a Betamax or a Laserdisk, but I still have 25 year old VHS tapes, and even older cassettes and LPs (many of which I've sampled to CD). These are part of our heritage and are worth preserving.

Re:Vectrex

[camperdave]

it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.

But my laserdisk holds the proof that Han shot first.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd hardly argue that they were terrible. If anything, some games indicate the inverse of that kind of trend. Emphasis on some, though. The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise is a good example. It's only managed to get worse over the years, despite having issues like a lack of save-games (though Sonic 3 & Knuckles implemented that quite well) and a limited number of lives be *resolved* over time. I disagree that those things, among others, were terrible, as there were some damn fine games in older times and mechanics like that caused a player to have to actually TRY to complete a puzzle or adventure.

I do however agree that there were many things which made the experience less worthwhile that we have weeded out, such as: password-save systems; poor quality audio (not to say the style of music, just the hardware constraints in systems which caused poor sounding audio); RF video output; and so forth.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving. The idea that because all these obscure systems are fading out and the more popular ones are harder to find fully working versions of that history will forget video game origins is insane.

Mario will be remembered for hundreds of years. Emulators recreate the experience of the game. We can make a perfect replica of a Genesis or a NES if we need one for some gaming museum... but these obscure systems that most people don't remember? They're the other artists working at the same time as Van Gogh that nobody cares about because they aren't worth remembering. A lot of our childhood was shitty and of no merit and just because it holds special value to us personally doesn't mean it needs to be preserved by society as a whole. The important things will be remembered and preserved and the rest will land exactly where it belongs: by the wayside.

Re:Vectrex

[sesshomaru]

Let me guess, you never played a Vectrex and were one of those poor souls with 2600 Pac-Man.

It should be possible to recreate Vectrex as long as Vector Graphics monitors are available.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

I don't need to ride a Roman chariot across cobble stone roads to visualize how primitive it used to be.

Or to imagine playing Space Invaders or watching Star Trek in black and white. It's why I got rid of my old Atari and NES consoles and just emulate them instead. Less space needed for storage, fewer parts that need constant dusting, plus it's portable (fits in a laptop or phone).

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

But we don't put terrible paintings in museums (modern art notwithstanding) to "gives context to the goodness". We forget it and remember the stuff worth remembering.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

Limited "lives" were an artifact of arcades where they wanted you to put more money in. On a console they were just pointless frustration.

If you really want the game to be harder due to only having 3 lives you can just reset the game after 3 deaths.

Lack of saves were a hardware constraint. There is no reason I should not now be able to save my game whenever I want and I wouldn't play a modern game where I couldn't. Again, if you don't want to use the feature you can just not use it but it's lack of existence is a definite point against.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

I had a NES. I'm only in my 20s.

Re:Vectrex

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

But we don't put terrible paintings in museums (modern art notwithstanding) to "gives context to the goodness". We forget it and remember the stuff worth remembering.

False. We put the early works of great painters in museums all the time. Look, here's an article about how some Ansel Adams negatives could be worth 200 million dollars because they are "images that didn't fit in anywhere, that show he is trying to discover his voice, to fully realized Ansel Adams masterpieces.""

That is EXACTLY the same thing as showing how we went from crude games to more sophisticated ones.

Re:Vectrex

[Binkleyz]

Ok, that thing is awesome!
Mod parent up!

Re:Vectrex

[amicusNYCL]

I don't think some modernday cinema + asdf experience can replace getting 50,000 points in International Karate+.

I'm pretty sure they can, and I'm pretty sure that the peak of video game creation was not reached 23 years ago with International Karate+. .. have you sat in a dark room and played Doom 3 on a large screen with surround sound? Granted, it's not exactly pixelated karate fighting, but it's still a pretty impressive experience.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

No. Putting early versions of pong controllers and the original sketches for the pacman levels is the same as that. We don't put negatives that other photographers who weren't any good in museums.

Re:Vectrex

[drc003]

No, to you they were just pointless frustration. For some it was a great challenge that, if the game was solid, made you want to play longer, get better and beat the game. Something that because of the difficulty was actually an accomplishment that was "cool" to use lingo from back in the day. It was actually something that a small percentage of those who owned the game had been able to do. Unlike today where if someone says, hey I beat blahblah, 90% or more of those who played or owned the game say yeah, me too. I completely agree that there are many things we have gotten away from in games because they are outdated, etc. However I completely disagree that is the case with difficulty, especially in certain genres of games.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>you never played a Vectrex and were one of those poor souls with 2600 Pac-Man.

Yeah having the most popular console of the day, with all its great exclusives like Defender, Berzerk, Space Invaders, Phoenix, Ms PacMan, Pitfall, et cetera, really sucked. I feel sorry for myself.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

Your betamax argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny - that was nothing but a distribution format, and had nothing at all to do with the content that was put on it. Laserdisc is closer, since there were some awkward attempts at interactive media - but in most cases it still wasn't anything more than a generic media storage/distribution format for whatever material happened to be dumped into it.

The point being made isn't that all plastic overlays, odd interfaces, lack of color, or other limitations and workarounds are _good_ and should be used for gaming today - it's that they were intrinsic to the game or platform as it was originally created & played.

Just because Iggy Pop's 1997 Raw Power was better produced than 1973 Bowie mix doesn't mean I'm going to toss out the original.

(Sorry, no car analogy - I'm a DJ not a driver)

Re:Vectrex

[Korin43]

What's on your tapes may be interesting, but why does it matter what format it's in?

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>Limited "lives" were an artifact of arcades where they wanted you to put more money in. On a console they were just pointless frustration.

The first is true, but not necessarily the second. Some of us enjoy having limited lives because if you can get all the way to the last maze in Ms PacMan or Bruce Lee or whatever, it proves your gaming skills.

Getting to the end because you used a cheat (like saving every 5 minutes) proves nothing. Anyone can do that.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

Like I said. You could artificially impose those restraints on the game yourself. Then your bragging right becomes "I beat GAME X with only 2 deaths" instead of "I beat GAME X". There's no reason I should have to start over at the beginning of the game every third death. Especially in games like Battle Toads and Contra.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>have you sat in a dark room and played Doom 3 on a large screen with surround sound?

I think Doom is boring. Most FPSes are boring - pointless button mashers. The person who survives is the guy who sprays the most bullets. If they have some kind of compelling story, like Goldeneye and the first Red Faction had, it makes it worthwhile but for the most part I get bored after ten hours.

Give me IK+ anyday. Or Populous. That was a cool game.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

And getting to the end without dying ever proves that exact same thing without a life cap frustrating the 5 year old with poor manual dexterity who just wants to see what the 4th level of Contra looks like.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

Popular and historically relevant aren't the same thing. Even when they are, popularity may fade away eventually, and the same will happen with the games.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

They weren't good. It's like people complaining about how games are so easy now and how we used to not have saves and only have 3 lives.

You may have a point about saves and three lives, but every game being utterly piss-easy is NOT a good thing.

Re:Vectrex

[Beelzebud]

Wow that thing is neat! I want one!

Re:Vectrex

[NotQuiteReal]

You can't No, you can't. Not with today's hardware. The Vectrex was a Vector image game - NOT a raster scan image.

Space Invaders is NOT an example of a Vector game. Vector games were Space Wars, Solar Quest, Battle Zone, etc. Monochrome line drawings.

The vector graphics vs raster graphics would be akin to vinyl vs a CD.

Or, if you like car analogies, like a 1964 Mustang vs a 2010 Prius.

Re:Vectrex

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

No. Putting early versions of pong controllers and the original sketches for the pacman levels is the same as that. We don't put negatives that other photographers who weren't any good in museums.

So, original sketches of pacman levels are worth preserving but not the ability to actually play the original pacman. Yeah, you are playing with a full deck.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

Got a working unit safely stored away. Picked up for a few bucks because the controller wasn't working anymore.. opened it up, removed some rust, closed it, working Vectrex!
(Just one game though..)

I've got about 30 machines like these, including the Magnavox Odyssey, BBC Micro, NASCOM-1, etc.

An *AWESOME* website about this topic is:
http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp

Save these machines from the garbage!! :-)

captacha: APOGEE , like the game developer!, how fitting!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apogee_games

Ah, Commander Keen, the good ol'd days. ;-D

Re:Vectrex

[meepzorb]

But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving.

...and who decides this? You? By what metric is 'value' determined? And why is your aesthetic the only one that counts?

Most of the Roman graffiti preserved at Pompei has dubious artistic value, but has great value to historians (to give insight as to how the 'little people' lived and thought back then).

Just because something's a throwaway for you doesn't mean it won't be of value to someone else, at some future time.

Re:Vectrex

[badboy_tw2002]

Somehow given your username and general outlook I probably won't use you as a reliable source for FPS reviews. But you're right, there haven't been any advances since doom. Every game with a first person perspective is the same, and definitely involves button mashing and shooting alien hordes non-stop. That's why classic games were better - the variety. There were so many different types of gameplay that 3D perspectives just can't give you! For some reason they were all rose colored, never quite figured that out...

Re:Vectrex

[Target Practice]

"There's no reason I should have to start over at the beginning of the game every third death. Especially in games like Battle Toads and Contra."

Ahem... Up up down down left right left right B A select start

thank you very much :)

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

No, I'm saying early things related to great works are worth preserving. That's why the negatives by that guy from before he knew what he was doing are valuable. But game systems that were never very good and never evolved into anything good and negatives by photographers who never went on to accomplish anything are not.

Re:Vectrex

[Richard Steiner]

You can find working Vectrex consoles ... and multicarts containing LEGAL collections of games ... on eBay.

Mine Storm rocks! :-)

And yes, I own a working Vectrex. Since 1982.

Re:Vectrex

[cgenman]

You can still buy new NES and Genesis consoles from Asia. Obscure / difficult ones like Vextrex are right out, but a lot of this old hardware "rotting" away is actually quite accessible.

I'm reminded of old cars. There are many great old cars worth preserving from the 1930's. But you're not going to be able to keep the original leather and parts... those will eventually rot away. That's the nature of the beast.

Arcade units in the 80's were largely purpose-built machines with non-standard technology. Keeping old machines alive is quite a pain. Emulated versions can be very close, and accessible to everyone. You can't always keep the exact leather, but you can keep the soul.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even if you could emulate the graphics you couldn't emulate the clear plastic templates you had to mount on the screen depending on the game :)"

Emulators have layers, FYI.

Check out the Game & Watch emulators for all the reasons why this is wrong.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

The important things will be remembered and preserved and the rest will land exactly where it belongs: by the wayside.

Good post, well worth Score 5 Insightful, but there's a quibble: The popular things will be remembered and preserved; it's generation specific. The tricky bit, demonstrated often in the archiving of historic legacy, is what's popular/important to the next generation or two is often rather different from what's popular/important to the third, forth, and so on. Our preserved legacy relies on cranks who 'wasted' time preserving things when they were unpopular. This thread is for, and by these cranks.

This interest gap is fairly regular in historic preservation. I had a bit of a front-row seat to one because I was into vintage aircraft when I was younger (good god, forty years ago). What is now called the Greatest Generation was then characterized by Archie Bunker, and the very few people running around preserving hardware and manuals from disposal were considered loser and weirdos.

One I knew then has a museum named after him today. Then, he was a smelly old guy who slept on a couch in his quonset hut full of rotting junk, and was considered an embarrassment to his family.

Re:Vectrex

[wrencherd]

I think that adding "naive" paintings to museum holdings, and/or creating museum spaces out of places like Lascaux, is more like what you are both referring to, rather than the development of one individual artist.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

When did I say I determined what was good? Do you see the Vetrex 64 around? No? Then it probably died out quickly for a reason. Nintendo survived, Sony survived, in some capacity Sega and Atari survived. We can't save everything therefore we have to judge what is the most culturally relevant. I don't decide what goes in museums either, but someone does.

Re:Vectrex

[Haffner]

It's not that games have gotten too easy, its that the defaults have gotten too easy. I usually play games on the "Hard" setting initially, just because the normal is usually too easy. I want to have to find every ammo crate, have to kill every pink lion in the level to get all 5 of some item. The thing is, many "noob" games that are easy enough initially become difficult on harder settings

Of course, some just don't get that hard. So impose limits on yourself. Play Final Fantasy with no phoenix down. Don't let yourself buy ammo in games where you can find it too. The game can be as hard as you want to make it.

Or, play multiplayer games. Right now, I play DotA, which honestly is the most competitive, in depth combination of strategy and tactics in a video game that I have ever seen. I have played probably 2500 games of dota, and it's still my favorite. I also play valve multiplayer shooters, which can be difficult depending on whom you play with. If you want competition, play against people. If you want difficulty + story, set limits for yourself.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

I didn't know the Konami code when I was 5. And battletoads doesn't have it.

Re:Vectrex

[interkin3tic]

But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving. ...and who decides this? You?

No, we collectively decide what gets preserved with emulation or ports, directly by what we port, and indirectly by what we buy. If there's a game that no one ports to new generations of consoles, and no one emulates it, that's a reasonable indication that no one cared about it: it wasn't worth saving.

It's a little less arbitrary than what got saved in pompei. The amount of games preserved in emulation, at least for the moment, is pretty high. Especially the early generations, I mean you could fit the entire libraries of multiple early consoles on one $5 flash drive. Much more is going to be preserved than a city that was destroyed by a volcano.

Sure, it would be nice if we had the capability to preserve every game out there. Feel free to spend your time and money doing that for games no one is interested in. Until someone wastes money like that, preserving the classics and trashing the disposable works for every art form out there, and "what games do people want to see ported or emulated" is a generous standard.

Frankly It's a little pretentious to take GP's observation in the way that you did. He didn't nominate himself to be the one deciding which games were good and which ones were bad.

Re:Vectrex

[Richard Steiner]

Even with its limited title selection, there were some very good Vectrex game implementations, and Mine Storm was built into the console and was a fun Asteroids variant. Also, and unknown to many, there have been some very good titles written for it over the past 20 years, and new titles are still appearing! Just do a search for Modern Vectrex Games. :-)

Re:Vectrex

[Golddess]

Agreed. Heck, you could even put in some sort of a score penalty for dying if you wanted to give people some kind of epeen measuring device.

Re:Vectrex

[operagost]

Do you emulate your Commodore 64?

Re:Vectrex

[PrimaryConsult]

And that is why modern games have achievement systems. For those who just want to happily run along with the plot and shoot things (or what have you), the game is accommodating. For those who want the challenge, there is a reward structure in place.

And even before achievements, a few of the Resident Evil games had nice easter eggs for those who completed them without saving.

Re:Vectrex

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

No, I'm saying early things related to great works are worth preserving. That's why the negatives by that guy from before he knew what he was doing are valuable. But game systems that were never very good and never evolved into anything good and negatives by photographers who never went on to accomplish anything are not.

Every historian and ethnographer on the planet would vehemently disagree that the only art history worth saving are the early works of the grandmasters. Those artists do not exist in a vacuum, they are influenced by all kinds of other artists. Furthermore, even the poor works influence society in other ways - when I was a kid jokes about ET on the atari 2600 were rampant and I'm pretty sure that the next generation of game developers learned from ET's sucktasticity - they learned things to avoid.

Re:Vectrex

[Sark666]

This way of thinking really bothers me and I'm surprised to see it on slashdot.

Of course some of the games are crude and maybe considered 'not worth remembering'. But tell me, who decides that? Based on what? The graphics? On that metric almost all of them aren't worth remembering. In movies, the story is king, but in videogames, gameplay is king.

Yes some of them are crude and basic, but others have amazing gameplay and are just plain fun.

I don't care what decade it is, defender kicks ass. Asteroids kicks ass. But most youngins today would look at that and dismiss it in 5 seconds.

When attempting to preserve history, ones opinion must be put aside and preserve the good with the bad.

Re:Vectrex

[amicusNYCL]

I think Doom is boring. Most FPSes are boring - pointless button mashers. The person who survives is the guy who sprays the most bullets. If they have some kind of compelling story, like Goldeneye and the first Red Faction had, it makes it worthwhile but for the most part I get bored after ten hours.

I realize I'm not going to get someone with a name like yours to agree with me that any C64 game is inferior to anything else, but the combination of lighting and sound made for an immersive and engaging environment in Doom 3 that you just aren't going to get with anything that displays at 320x200 while shrieking saw waves at you.

Not that there aren't a lot of great games from the past 30 years, but it's pretty ridiculous to assume that somehow the art of game development peaked at a point when technology was so relatively limited. There are still plenty of talented game developers making interesting games, the only difference is that the technology makes for a better experience. That makes it a better game. Portal is a perfect example.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>Most of the Roman graffiti preserved at Pompei has dubious artistic value - http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm

I feel like I'm reading Twitter. While a historian might like to see SOME of Twitter saved, I doubt they think it necessary to preserve all of it.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>But my laserdisk holds the proof that Han shot first.

George Lucas re-released that laserdisc on DVD. It's much better quality (480p digital out, not 480i analog NTSC or PAL), so you might want to upgrade?

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>"I beat GAME X with only 2 deaths"

Yeah but no one would believe me - "Yeah suuuure you did." In contrast with the old nonsaving games, beating the game with only 2-3 lives was the only way.

I

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>without a life cap frustrating the 5 year old with poor manual dexterity who just wants to see what the 4th level of Contra looks like.

You make a good point, but that's also why those old games had 20-30 different "variations" where you could adjust how many lives you got, or how many enemies were on screen, or whatever. The games on the old Atari console had some variations that were so easy (1 ghost in PacMan) even a baby could get to level 4. Meanwhile the adults could brag they got to level 4 on the hardest "invisible ghosts" setting.

That's something that should be in modern games, with varying levels of difficulty, rather than the cheat of being able to save anytime you desire. "Ooops I got killed. Let's just pretend that didn't happen. Load game." Getting a 100% perfect game no longer requires skill - just lots of patience.

You say you beat Prince of Persia? Wow. Color me unimpressed. Now let's see you do it on the original NES game without the saves

Re:Vectrex

[Hatta]

But we don't put terrible paintings in museums (modern art notwithstanding) to "gives context to the goodness".

Yes, we do. Look at all the early pottery we have with crudely drawn 2d figures on them. Looking at that art gives context to present day art, and shows us how far it's come. Early video games are an exact analogy. In 1000 years, there will be Atari 2600s in museums serving the same purpose.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>I probably won't use you as a reliable source for FPS reviews

Why not? I have modern consoles (PS2, X360, Wii) and newer games just like most people. The fact I also enjoy classic gaming (as far back as 1977) shouldn't diminish my opinion of FPSes...... on the contrary I would think it would enhance my opinion, because I and my fellow classic gamers have the longview of the genre, not just the recent past.

BTW another FPS I enjoyed was Metroid Prime..... mainly because it wasn't about shooting/button mashing. It was more of a hide-and-seek type game, just like the original NES and Super Nintendo games. Nintendo called it an "FPA" and that's probably the best description.
.

>>>There were so many different types of gameplay that 3D perspectives just can't give you!

You're right. There are a lot of Commodore=64, Amiga, and Super Nintendo game styles that simply don't exist in the modern 3D world, because the companies figure anything less than 3D won't sell. So those styles died out.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

But we replaced those things for a reason. They weren't good. It's like people complaining about how games are so easy now and how we used to not have saves and only have 3 lives.

Those things were terrible. We replaced them because they were frustrating and annoying and reduced the gaming experience. What you remember is the joy of being younger, and while remembering that system might help YOU with that, it doesn't mean that society as a whole needs to remember them and put them on pedestals and more than we need to keep our old betamax tapes and laserdisks.

Your and idiot, as they say.

I'd rather, to this day, play Asteroids Deluxe or Tempest or Galaga in emulation than any multi-million-dollar PS-whatever monstrosity. When you only had 16K to deal with, you had to concentrate on GAMEPLAY, and the best of the old games have that in spades. Then and now, crappy gameplay and snazzy graphics still add up to crappy games.

Re:Vectrex

[badboy_tw2002]

Examples for your assertion?

I've been a gamer as long as you and I can't say I'm ever for want of something new or interesting to play, FPS or not. Try the indie scene sometime. Try Xbox Arcade, try Steam, try your iPhone. I can't think of a single genre that's not well represented. It may not be a top seller that's on the end of the aisle at best buy, but its out there.

Re:Vectrex

[Greyfox]

They were good. Everything was fair game back in those days, and game developers had a lot more latitude to be creative than they do these days. There are some blatantly experimental titles that are completely off the map in terms of what genre they belong in. The late 70s and 80's were a golden era of gaming before the arcade industry got into a rut of increasingly complex fighting games and racing games that give you barely a minute of play for your buck (I remember being outraged when the first games arrived in the local arcade that were $.50.)

And for all their crappy graphics, limited number of lives and cheesy (at best) audio, a lot of those games are still playable and just as engaging today as they were three decades ago. For pure reflexive twitch value and for getting in "the zone," I'd still take many of those games over anything that's come out in the last decade.

Re:Vectrex

[poetmatt]

this is pretty much incorrect. Just because something dies out doesn't mean it was not worth saving or not relevant.

example: (please forgive the godwin): tons of stuff from the holocaust was destroyed, and a lot of families can't trace back to lineage who basically had their data destroyed as well, perhaps in order to save their lives. Does that mean the information wasn't worth saving?

There is almost nothing that doesn't have some kind of historical value. It doesn't have to be monetary but there isn't anything that either a: isn't relevant or b: isn't worth documenting and saving.

to compare, even the littlest shit like that recent "oldest caveman"'s digested remains tell us a fuckton about ancient history. To disregard our own history is to disregard our own future, as well.

We can save a whole lot, thats what digitization and standardization are for. The only limitation we have is physical space, really.

Re:Vectrex

[poetmatt]

i do agree with your concept, and I agree with what you say about dota. However, it should be noted as to what dota isn't: it isn't difficult. It is , however, competitive. So it's more of a sport with it's respective pros and veterans than a matter of difficulty.

Re:Vectrex

[sydbarrett74]

But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving.

Yeah, but who makes that determination? Sometimes the value of a piece of art isn't acknowledged until long after the artist's death.

Re:Vectrex

[mattack2]

Except the controls used in emulators are often much worse than the original controls (esp regarding arcade games).

Yes, sometimes I see a MAME cabinet someone has built that uses real arcade controls, but that's rare.

I know there are various 'real arcade control' things people can buy to even use with consoles, but they're expensive, and even then you wouldn't necessarily have close to the orig experience (e.g. standing up at an arcade machine).

Re:Vectrex

[EggyToast]

I don't think they need to be on a pedestal, but I do think the ability to play them as they were released is important, even if it's just as a "museum arcade" type of thing. We don't use lead-acid batteries but seeing the bulk of them and how people wired up electrical circuits 100 years ago is absolutely worth preserving. Same with old computers that used vacuum tubes; they're woefully slow but it's a part of our technological heritage.

Not to mention that merely talking about old games -- 3 lives, no ending, wave after wave of bad guys -- doesn't sound like much fun. Yet playing them is still oddly addicting, even for people who pick them up for the first time. I think the actual original is more informative for "how things were" than an emulation, because the emulation just looks like a crappy modern game. The old game cabinets, overlays, screens, and boards are much more illustrative of the past than a little blob of code that accomplishes the same thing.

Re:Vectrex

[The_mad_linguist]

Weren't there some pretty big claims about the iphone's dpi?

Re:Vectrex

[Rival]

But we don't put terrible paintings in museums (modern art notwithstanding) to "gives context to the goodness". We forget it and remember the stuff worth remembering.

Actually, we do.

And it does indeed "give context to the goodness." By seeing negative examples, we can better appreciate what it is about "good" art that we enjoy. Plus, it gives one the chance to wince, laugh and point at an art exhibit, without feeling like you're breaking social rules. It's quite refreshing, and the art truly is terrible.*

* Not as terrible as Boxbot though. (Inside joke for fans of Gunnerkrigg Court)

Re:Vectrex

[Registered Coward v2]

>>>But my laserdisk holds the proof that Han shot first.

George Lucas re-released that laserdisc on DVD. It's much better quality (480p digital out, not 480i analog NTSC or PAL), so you might want to upgrade?

HAPPY 25th AMIGA - Just 0.007 GHz 0.0005 GB for this amazing video: youtube.com/watch?v=5-JFJ8Hjo_g - PC/MAC can't do it

Apple just released a new MacPro - so you might want to upgrade?

Re:Vectrex

[OrangeCatholic]

It depends whether you consider it "action" or "adventure."

Long, difficult games like Contra and BT definitely blurred the lines. Ultimately it comes down to expectations.

The biggest complaint on NES was that BlasterMaster didn't have codes. For a game that does take, actually, 1 hr. to complete.

Goonies2 (with codes)? 2 hours.

Zelda (with batteries)? 4-6 hours, we've all done it. They could have ditched the batteries and it would have been the same game.

But, you know, not having that map is a bitch.

Re:Vectrex

[Miamicanes]

Actually, you wouldn't even need a vector graphics monitor. Given a decent 20" glossy 1920x1080 LCD (possibly in portrait mode) capable of 120hz native updates with subpixel control via hdmi or dvi, combined with triple-buffered video emulating the bloom, defocusing, and (in the case of a color vector display like the ones used for Defender and Tempest) fringe artifacts caused by misaligned shadow masks, you could emulate a vector display with more or less perfect accuracy.

Emulated games looked like crap on 1024x768 LCD panels because they didn't scale well, and didn't offer enough raw control over the rendered video to recreate the appearance of an interlaced CRT. When you're talking about a display that can do 4x oversampling with respect to both resolution and framerate, and a computer fast enough to emulate the phosphor behavior of a CRT, you can achieve nearly perfect emulation. Hell, if you made a Vectrex-sized LCD with the pixel density of a Retina display, you could probably emulate a monochrome Vectrex down to the exact bluish-white raster on a grayish background. We're not *quite* at *that* point yet, but in another 5-10 years, we absolutely will be. At that point, having physical vector displays ceases to matter for the experience of reliving the past, and really matter only to act as a reality-check against creeping "improvements" beyond that point to the emulated video algorithm that make it look better, but destroy its historical accuracy. Does anybody *really* want to emulate the appearance of burnt-in phosphors, at least while actually *playing* an old game?

Let's face it... most 3-4 year old games at mall video arcades looked like shit thanks to years of burn-in, bloom, and slowly-dying electrolytic capacitors on the circuit board (not dying as quickly as "turn of the century" bad caps, but still visibly degraded compared to when they were new).

Re:Vectrex

[adolf]

Vector graphics emulation doesn't seem to be that difficult anymore, since it's already being done.

With Java and OpenGL, even, for cross-platform goodness.

I think it works well enough.

Re:Vectrex

[Miamicanes]

It depends. From what I remember (teen in the late 80s), at least in the Apple //e, Atari 400/800, Vic20, TI99/4A, C64, Atari ST, and Amiga era, most games didn't start out as a brilliant high-level concept. Someone discovered a cool video hack, and managed to build a game around it. That was part of the reason why ported games on any platform almost universally sucked... whatever it was that made them look GOOD on their native platform didn't exist (or was moot and no big deal on the new platform), and forced to stand on their own, they fell flat on their face.

The games that lasted were the ones that did, in fact, transcend the video hack that made them possible in their first implementation. Jumpman is still fun, warts and all. In contrast, most of us wouldn't waste the erase cycle on a flash drive for a pirated copy of Incredible Mission, because the only thing that ever made it interesting was the relatively high-resolution (for the time) graphics and 4 seconds of digitized speech at the start. A hundred years from now, at least a few people will still know what Zork was. A few might even have played it in some context. Nobody will care about playing Elvira, Mistress of the Dark on an Amiga emulator.

Re:Vectrex

[arkane1234]

Sounds like a Mac user argument haha

The Vectrex ran $200, while Atari ran $120. Games were abound for cheap on the Atari, and you knew you could easily go to Sears/JC Penney/Zaires/or any local game store and find a new game to play.

Sure, I bet it was an awesome system, and ran the games it had rather nicely.
People who are gamers historical "aficionados" will swoon over it. It's a niche market.

Re:Vectrex

[meepzorb]

Sure, it would be nice if we had the capability to preserve every game out there.

Um... we do have this capability. You yourself said we could fit it all on a flash drive.

He didn't nominate himself to be the one deciding which games were good and which ones were bad.

He said 'worth saving'. "Worth" implies value. He sure seemed to be passing judgement. Or, rather, like you, going for the cheap contrarian points. Otherwise... why comment at all?

"Meh, the sun swallows the earth in a cosmic eyeblink. Why bother?"

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

But we literally cannot save everything. We'd run out of space to display, document, etc. To properly document the holocaust we would need to preserve almost the entirety of Europe. It's just not practical. Imagine a museum with every drawing/painting/photograph/piece of writing EVER. It wouldn't fit on the planet. We need to decide what is worth storing.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

That's one small museum dedicated entirely to bad art that relatively few people know about. It in no way reflects the cultural attitude towards art preservation.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

My point is that if someone emulates one of these games, unless they're doing it purely for the challenge (which is a totally fine way to do it mind you) they use save and load states to circumvent the "you only have 3 lives" thing. Almost every friend I have does it at least from time to time because they've never seen the end of some game and trying to get to it legitimately was a pain.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's a reason that modern games don't tend to use those elements.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

Actually most NES games had, at best, 2 difficulty settings that effectively translated to "hard" and "punishingy hard". If I had known about the Konami Code and that I could have set my life count in Contra you be your ass I would have. But a lot of games you just flat out can't.

Re:Vectrex

[crossmr]

If there's a game that no one ports to new generations of consoles, and no one emulates it, that's a reasonable indication that no one cared about it: it wasn't worth saving.

No. It means there is no one that cared about it who had the talent and resources to save it.

Those are two different things.

Re:Vectrex

[Greyfox]

A lot of those were "twitch" games that really didn't have an end. Although you can play many of them forever, you can tell when you look at them that they're designed to efficiently separate you from your quarter. The games that came later that actually did have a story usually let you continue from where you left off with another quarter.

Re:Vectrex

[orange47]

saving every 5 min is not cheating if game has such option originally. think of all time and nerves wasted on something thats supposed to be FUN.

Re:Vectrex

[Joce640k]

I bet you could very close graphically. The only real problem is that vector graphics displays could make very bright spots of light but that's just a question of contrast.

What you can't emulate is the little Vectrex joystick and buttons, that's what really made it unique.

Re:Vectrex

[tehcyder]

False. We put the early works of great painters in museums all the time.

We should and do keep these works, but if they're not very good, they are basically there for specialised educational/research purposes only, not usually on general display.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is interested in them *now*, you mean.

Re:Vectrex

[ogdenk]

The Vectrex was my first game console as a kid.... I was born in '82.... There exists an emulator out there for OSX but it's pretty weak. MESS supports emulation of the Vectrex as well and sucks a lot less, includes overlay template support.

Your right though..... it's not the same.... vector screens very really bright and the lines had no jaggies. Animation was also very smooth as drawing vectors was a lot easier than dealing with a bitmapped display and could produce very detailed wireframe images for the time. Compare "Major Havoc" to "PacMan" to see what I mean. Vector displays were really neat.

Re:Vectrex

[mcgrew]

It doesn't; but you're going to lose as much quality sampling to digital as you would copying to an analog medium, although digital copies of the sampled data won't. The analog original makes a good backup for the digital copy.

Also, LPs often had great cover art, and scale matters with album covers, which is the second reason that LPs were superior to cassettes (the first of course being sound fidelity).

Re:Vectrex

[Phoghat]

I have fond memories of playing the Vectrex console when I was a kid - I suppose there must be a few working units floating around out there but based on the way the graphics worked I wonder if you could ever truly emulate it on a PC.

I've never heard of the Vectrex system, but from what you're describing, it sounds like a computerized "Winky Dink And You" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winky_Dink_and_You

Re:Vectrex

[ogdenk]

Business blunders don't mean it was a bad system and the company didn't have awesome engineers. To regard an incredibly innovative entire platform created through blood, sweat and tears from the ground up as irrelevant because a few greedy execs f**ked up is retarded. Vectrex was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition as far as playability and tech went. Gimme a Vectrex over an Atari 2600 any day.

The system was great and lots of fun to play but expensive to produce among other things.

Atari is dead and has been a long time, someone bought the brand name. The Atari 800 and Atari ST's were incredibly innovative platforms that are long dead as well but still culturally relevant.

Not succeeding in a business sense doesn't mean your products are shit. Analyzing older systems to gain engineering insight and see how they solved strange issues is also fascinating.

And why the hell can't we preserve everything? We could if we cared too.

In fact, I think the NES was one of the most UNINTERESTING platforms simply because they were so common and not very innovative.

Re:Vectrex

[ogdenk]

Exclusives that were very poor attempts at arcade ports with incredibly bad sound and graphics capabilities even for its day. The 2600 sucked ass. The 5200 wasn't bad as it was the same architecture used in the Atari 8-bit computers which had much better graphics hardware (a programmable GPU even, the Antic/GTIA).

The few arcade ports the vectrex got were WAY better than the 2600's arcade ports. Like Armor Attack, Space War, etc. Some even better than the original arcade games, i.e. Scramble and Berzerk.

Re:Vectrex

[easterberry]

And why the hell can't we preserve everything? We could if we cared too.

The only way to "preserve everything" would be to put the entire planet in some sort of temporal stasis. There are logistic and space based constraints.

Re:Vectrex

[c0d3g33k]

Congratulations on your stealth-Godwin. You slipped that in quite cleverly.

Re:Vectrex

[flabordec]

And there has been a big shift in gaming towards competitive gaming. Sure, you destroyed the Overmind, but how would you fare against WhiteRa or The Little One or so many other Starcraft legends? Where do you rank in the ladder? Or in Starcraft 2, which league are you in? With automatic matchmaking you can get enough of a challenge and all the "cool" factor you want.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

You can buy Atari and NES joysticks/pads that plug into your USB port, and thereby recreate the original feel.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

Yes in order to save the original hardware. But some games (mainly Red Storm Rising) only work properly with the Commodore keyboard, so then I dust it off and use it.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

I meant PC/mac can not recreate the music video with only 7 megahertz and 1/2 megabyte. Why? Because they were both inferior in the 1980s.

Re:Vectrex

[commodore64_love]

>>>Exclusives that were very poor attempts at arcade ports with incredibly bad sound and graphics

I disagree. A lot of focus is placed on games like Pac-Man (the programmer hated the game so he sabotaged it), but ignore the great ports like Asteroids, Missile Command, and Space Invaders that were BETTER than the original game. Or Berzerk and Defender and Phoenix that were not identical but still fun. (And didn't require a small fortune in quarters.)

Considering that Atari was working with an ancient 70s console that had only 128 bytes of RAM, 2-4 KB of ROM, a 25x25 bitmapped playfield, and just two sprites, they did a decent job with their ports. So too did Imagic and Activision with their exclusives.

As for the 5200, it had a bastardized joystick that made the games near-impossible to play. Give me the old 1977 Atari VCS/2600 any day, because it may not look as pretty, but it has working controls.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>I probably won't use you as a reliable source for FPS reviews

Why not? I have modern consoles (PS2, X360, Wii) and newer games just like most people. The fact I think most FPSes are boring (pointless button mashers) shouldn't diminish my opinion of FPSes...... oh wait, yeah, I guess it would. Nevermind then.

FTFY.

Re:Vectrex

[ogdenk]

I disagree. A lot of focus is placed on games like Pac-Man (the programmer hated the game so he sabotaged it), but ignore the great ports like Asteroids, Missile Command, and Space Invaders that were BETTER than the original game.

Asteroids was a vector game originally and the 2600 and even the 800/5200 port was not near as good as the arcade and jerky in comparison. The vectrex vector game ports were almost identical to the arcade in smoothness and gameplay.

Missle Command graphics on the 2600 were awful and gameplay wasn't as good (1 silo vs 3, etc).

Space Invaders I'll give you.

Or Berzerk and Defender and Phoenix that were not identical but still fun. (And didn't require a small fortune in quarters.)

The Vectrex version of Berzerk was more complete (even with sampled sounds) on the Vectrex, higher resolution due to the vector display as well.

Considering that Atari was working with an ancient 70s console that had only 128 bytes of RAM, 2-4 KB of ROM, a 25x25 bitmapped playfield, and just two sprites, they did a decent job with their ports.

And there's my point, I never knocked the programmers, the 2600 was a piece of shit hardware platform that was inferior to most others even when it was new and really not very capable. The Vectrex was around during the same timeframe (maybe a year or two later) with a much better hardware architecture that was far easier to code for since you didn't have to chase a scanline to draw graphics, just plot lines.

The 5200 used a similar CPU as the 2600 but had the advantage of the POKEY and GTIA (basically a programmable GPU) coprocessors used in Atari's 8-bit computer line and was MUCH more powerful and easier to code for.

I also liked the multibutton 5200 controllers because the 1-button 2600 controller was inadequate for games like Star Raiders. The 5200 also supported standard analog joysticks with an adapter. The 2600 controllers were digital btw and therefore sucked. My Atari 800XL used the same style digital sticks.

So too did Imagic and Activision with their exclusives.

As for the 5200, it had a bastardized joystick that made the games near-impossible to play. Give me the old 1977 Atari VCS/2600 any day, because it may not look as pretty, but it has working controls.

Not really and 3rd party sticks were available or you could use a standard analog stick plus a keypad with an adapter. The 5200 version of missle command supported a trackball as well which was awesome. Nintendo 64 controllers sucked too but that didn't stop people from buying it.

I grew up with Atari.... my first computer was a straight 800 (moved to an 800XL then 130XE), my first GUI-based 16-bit machine was an Atari ST. First game systems were a 2600 (which didn't get played much cuz my 800 kicked its ass), a Vectrex which I played until it died and actually cried when it quit working when I was 16. I loved that thing. It was so unique and fun to play. I got a 5200 later which was cool but after I figured out that the games were direct ports of my 8-bit computer games I didn't play it all that long.

A 2600 is a good first game system for a 4 yr old since the games are so retardedly simple due to system limitations that even my dog could figure most of the games out quickly. As a game system for somebody who genuinely likes games and plays for extended periods, the 2600 got old real quick in a week or 2.

Re:Vectrex

[ogdenk]

I didn't mean literally everything but we can certainly preserve quite a few working examples of everything. Especially something as world changing as computing.

For example, there should be a couple working GE mainframes capable of booting Multics once in a while.

The history and design notes can be easily preserved as well.

A couple German U-boats should be in seaworthy condition. And at least a few ME109's. Just because they lost doesn't mean we should erase them.

What we think is worthless or not worth it now will be highly sought after 20 years from now. It happens every time. Most people don't realize the importance of events or things they've built until much later down the line when the earlier history has already hit the dumpsters.

Re:Vectrex

[Rival]

That's one small museum dedicated entirely to bad art that relatively few people know about. It in no way reflects the cultural attitude towards art preservation.

Yes, you're absolutely right. But I thought it was important to note the effort to document the "bad" art, however small.

Negative examples are powerful, whether they be in art, history, programming, or any other branch of human endeavor or record keeping. If we "forget it and remember the stuff worth remembering", then we are doomed to repeat it.

Re:Vectrex

[neolith]

One of the coolest moments at this years inaugural PAX East was getting my hands on an original Vextrex machine to play frogger and moon lander. It was lovingly maintained and restored, and the detail and some of the effects they pulled off were amazing. Don't get me wrong, it was crude as hell, but the effect of your frog dying, how it kind of shriveled up and deformed into a single point of light was the kind of awesome you're never going to see again.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

I meant PC/mac can not recreate the music video with only 7 megahertz and 1/2 megabyte. Why? Because they were both inferior in the 1980s.

Woosh

Re:Vectrex

[Snowmit]

Pompei is an instructive example and I'm glad you used it. Archaeologists learned an ENORMOUS amount about how people lived in that era because the lava essentially flash-froze a city. The arbitrariness of Pompei was enormously beneficial to posterity because as it turns out the people between us and them had no idea what the future would want to know about the past or didn't care.

Humanity has a long history of burning, tossing, losing, and destroying its cultural history only to have scholars hundreds or thousands of years later lamenting that loss. It's unknowable what we lost when the Library of Alexandria got burned down. We nearly lost the ability to read hieroglyphs, but for the partially shattered Rosetta stone. The BBC Domesday laserdiscs were created and lost within living memory and there's no question that it would have been valuable to have kept them.

Accurate, robust, valuable archives do not work well with the stochastic market- and whim-driven collective approach that you recommend. Over and over again, the things that are uninteresting NOW become things that are extremely interesting in the future.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

People who care about things make noise and draw attention to the thing they care about, so even if they lacked the skills to save it, they would have drawn attention to it and tried to get it saved. Look at emulator development, and you can sometimes see that even when the coders aren't able to get chip-perfect results, they often go for the most desired games or their personal favorites.

Re:Vectrex

[RocketRabbit]

Actually, the grand majority of 80s arcade machines did conform to the JAMMA standard. You could usually pop open a Galaga machine, pop in a newer board with a totally different game on it, and be off and away.

It was quite common to see a machine that was popular get really worn and beat up, and then the next day see that game inside of a machine that has totally different logos for a completely different game, often from another manufacturer.

Re:Vectrex

[IntlHarvester]

The 2600 sucked ass.

Bullshit! The 2600 came out in 1977 and had enough power to translate most 1970s arcade games. For example, 2600 Space Invaders was in many ways superior to the arcade version.

The 2600 didn't fall on its ass at the end of its lifecycle -- blame Atari marketing because they didn't know when to quit. (Pretty much instigating the video game crash of '83 in the process.)

Re:Vectrex

[IntlHarvester]

A decade ago, Generation X was going through its nostalgia phase and there was a huge demand for Vectrex stuff. Back then you could buy pre-printed overlays, but I have no idea if the service is still offered.

(obconfession: for about $200 I picked up a Vectrex and a "multicart" with almost every game on it.)

Re:Vectrex

[crossmr]

You're not going to get someone who doesn't care about obscure system X to volunteer their time and resources making an emulator for it just because you made some noise on a forum.

Re:Vectrex

[Richard Steiner]

I think I only paid $100 for mine, and for me the main advantage of the Vectrex was portability. It didn't require a separate TV ... the monitor was built in. :-)

My Vectrex made quite an impression in the dorms when I was in college. I mean, it was an ARCADE game that looked like one, did smooth shape rotations, and not just a crappy pixel-fest.

Re:Vectrex

[poetmatt]

what was the stealth? I said please forgive the godwin. It was to make a reference to the statement, not to distract the debate.

Re:Vectrex

[poetmatt]

really? lots of people care about their civil liberties but do you see them drawing attention to them or even doing anything about it? no.

Re:Vectrex

[poetmatt]

just because you fail to find a value for this information doesn't mean there isn't one to someone. this is the ignorance of it all.

if anything, it shows that things haven't changed a whole lot since pompeii.

Re:Vectrex

[Nyder]

I have fond memories of playing the Vectrex console when I was a kid - I suppose there must be a few working units floating around out there but based on the way the graphics worked I wonder if you could ever truly emulate it on a PC.

Even if you could emulate the graphics you couldn't emulate the clear plastic templates you had to mount on the screen depending on the game :)

So your saying, that with our greater resolution video displays that a PC couldn't emualate a Vectrix, and on top of that, it wouldn't be able to emulate the clear plastic templates you put over it.

Do you even know what year it is? Not only has people made emulators for it, what you are asking for is very trivial to do.

Not sure why your "fond memories" part got informative, because of the rest of it's just wrong speculation.

Re:Vectrex

[Anonymous Coward]

He said emulating the display was the problem, not the graphics themselves.

Re:Vectrex

[cgenman]

True, but JAMMA is basically a standard plug for monitor-and-controller. It helps simplify power management and other key issues, but if a transistor goes on your game board, you're in trouble. You can't simply swap the ROM into a new generic system like a dead console, and emulating the arcade unit is still generally specific to a particular game. It will be a help to museums who have to deal with things like dead monitors. But it won't help them deal with static-fried board parts.

Re:Vectrex

[ogdenk]

It was still far less powerful than their subsequent platforms released a year later. And in '82 the 400 wasn't a helluva lot pricier than a 2600.

The 2600 is too limited for any games that are remotely immersive or involved.

The Atari 400/800 were much better machines with a similar CPU (not crippled however). The Atari 2600 of Star Raiders compared to the 400/800 version is a good example. The 400/800 had a programmable GPU and used bitmap graphics instead of chasing a scan line. Also had a separate "CPU"/microcontroller to handle multichannel sound, joysticks, the keyboard and paddles.

And with the exception of Space Invaders, most Arcade ports sucked.

Lemme see a 2600 do "Rescue on Fractalus".

Re:Vectrex

[IntlHarvester]

Never mentioned anything about "Rescue on Fractalus" (boring game btw), just that 2600 was fine in its day for contemporary arcade games.

Of course, if Atari had any brains, they would have realized that a 1970s system couldn't last forever and phased out the 2600 in favor of the 5200, rather than shoving the retail channel full of obsolete and flickery games.

Also you should see someone about that 30 year old stick shoved up your ass :)

Permanent archiving is impossible

[JeffSh]

Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. I'm not convinced that it is a practical or necessary goal to hold on to and remember every little thing, especially video game heritage.

Some people may choose to make it a hobby, or an obsession, and that's their prerogative, but as a society and as a species there's certain things that once they're lost they're just gone. And future generations will not be robbed of some great cosmic truth when there are no longer any more NES machines capable of playing an NES cartridge. We will keep this memories in our own minds until we ourselves perish, and then the next generation takes over and creates something new themselves. I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the fact we forget is the very reason we end up reliving the same nightmares over and over again. I'll forgo the foray into politics...

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[localman57]

The problem as I see it is that we, now, don't know what will be valued in the future. Whatever clown decided to make the same rock with Hieroglyphs, demotic, and greek would have no idea that at the time he was creating one of the most important archiological artifacts ever.

In short, preserve it now, let future generations decide what to study and what to ignore.

By the way, I wonder what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time. It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this. Ah well. One can only dream...

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[eldavojohn]

I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.

Well, if you firmly believe that video games and the digital interactions they provide to the player are art and part of our culture (and I personally do) then yes it does make sense for society to have a prerogative to save these video games. Why give up on video games when we've spent so much time, money and resources saving the Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, the Statue of Liberty or old phonograph recordings of dead musicians? Your view is quite callous to the hours spent developing and imagining these video games as well as the hours spent enjoying them.

Whatever plan that can be instituted to save games should be done now before too many consoles are lost to the ages.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[LordPhantom]

That's a bit short-sighted, don't you think? Do you similarly think we shouldn't attempt to preserve the works of Beethoven or Picasso? There may not be a great cosmic truth contained in many different works of art but that doesn't mean there isn't irreplaceable creative value in it.

That's not to say that every game was noteworthy, but there are some that are worthy of preservation, not because of nostalgia but because they have value inof themselves.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

You are absolutely right! The games are not to be remembered forever. The same like books or music. They are merely a pieces of experience we live through this life and they either change us a bit and leave something good in our subconsciousness, or they don't. Mankind shall yet discover those great cosmic thruths and this is really more important then trying to preserve every bit of art or fun media.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Monkeedude1212]

Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. [...] I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.

Wow - way to attack every single historian, archaeologist, paleontologist, archivist, librarian, and anyone interested in history in the planet by basically boiling it down to "It doesn't matter". If thats what you think, your history teacher wasn't very good. We learn from the past, we learn from history. Not just the mistakes, but also the successes. Not just the massive events, but also the mundane.

To say that "Forgetting" is in our DNA does not make a connection that "It is meant to happen" - that correlation needs to be shut down right away. Cancer is in your DNA. Ironically fitting, so is Alzheimers, which you may or may not get, which affects your memory. In fact, one of the greatest attributes humans have that give them an advantage over every other species is our memory.

If you don't care about your heritage, than you basically don't value your society. If you don't care that your grandparents fought in a war for YOUR freedom, you wouldn't value your freedom, because you wouldn't know you had it. Keeping Super Mario Bros. 3 in its original state might seem like a ridiculous goal now - but 3 or 4 generations from now, people will ask "What did people do with all their spare time?". It'd be great if we had that stuff in a museum for them to research, so that they can care about their heritage.

And like someone else said - let them decide what's important. Perhaps entertainment will be the main industry in the future, once industries are farmed out to robots.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Attila Dimedici]

The problem as I see it is that we, now, don't know what will be valued in the future. Whatever clown decided to make the same rock with Hieroglyphs, demotic, and greek would have no idea that at the time he was creating one of the most important archiological artifacts ever. In short, preserve it now, let future generations decide what to study and what to ignore. By the way, I wonder what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time. It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this. Ah well. One can only dream...

You do realize that it is not practical to perserve everything? That some things will have to be allowed to be lost to history?

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[phantomfive]

Digital. Unless you want to carve it on stone, then digital format is the best way.

The advantage of digital is that, although CDs decompose, and hard drives rust, you can always copy it to a new format with absolutely no data loss. Analog formats, like high quality film, slowly decompose, and every time you make a backup, there is some data loss. Some digital format is the best way.

The only drawback is you can't stick your hard drive in the ground and expect it to be readable a hundred years from now. You need to keep on top of it and constantly move your data to the latest media.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[SilverHatHacker]

what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time

Answer: Facebook

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[marcosdumay]

"It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this."

There were some of them already. None of them got out with any usefull idea.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[MozeeToby]

Obviously he thought it was pretty important, hence going through the extra work of carving it into rock rather than writing it on papyrus. Besides, the reason that we think those artifacts are important are because they happen to be what survived. If the Egyptians had made a conscious and honest effort to preserve what they thought was important we'd undoubtedly have a clearer picture of their culture and history. In fact, just knowing what things they thought were important enough to preserve would probably tell us more than we know about their culture from the artifacts that we find relatively randomly today.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[PrecambrianRabbit]

If only we had a way to preserve "Ask Slashdot" topics for the benefit of future posters!

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, I read that slashdot story too. It's a crock. You are quite literally arguing FOR ignorance.
Imagine if the investment bankers (or better yet the politicians who deregulated them) had remembered the horrors of the great depression.
Imagine if people had remembered Vietnam when we went in and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. (or even just when the Russian got tired of dying in Afghanistan)
Now, our "video game heritage" isn't nearly as important or weighty as that. But I like the patent for a hammer-mill strapped to a Cadillac that my grandfather had framed. I like the old silverware dad brought back from Thailand. I even like his super-ancient record of "the electric prunes".

So I really don't get the glorification of forgetting and ignorance. Starting with a black slate sucks.

Although, in an apparent about face, I'd agree that getting rid of useless junk and casting of materialism is a healthy thing to do. But keep the good stuff. (And that old TI machine with munch-man cartridge counts as "the good stuff").

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital. Unless you want to carve it on stone, then digital format is the best way.

The question was what medium, or, to be more precise, what digital medium? CD? DVD? Flash drive? Hard disc? ZIP disc? 5.25" floppy disc? Hell, you could even store it digitally carved on stone. Just carve a bunch of ones and zeros. That can always be copied to a new medium with absolutely no data loss, assuming the stones don't get destroyed, which is true of every other medium as well.

I think the point of the question is, which medium will last and still be readable well into the future?

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[PopeRatzo]

we're supposed to forget

Of course we are. With very few exceptions, video games are popular culture, which means it's disposable. We're no more supposed to archive every video game ever than we're supposed to preserve every episode of American Idol. It's made to be forgotten and replaced by something new. That's how it stays alive.

Just like there are enthusiasts who collect 78rpm records of 1920's blues or 1940's swing, there will be those who have old game systems. Perhaps in both cases, the best way to preserve might be to emulate. Why not use the digital tools we have to keep these things alive for the archivists? Does anyone believe that what made Pong important is the little box that you'd hook up to the TV, or was it the game itself that was important?

But the notion that everything that has ever been made must be available at all times to everyone is cultural self-consciousness that leads to looking backward, not forward. While one can appreciate the art and beauty of work done in an earlier age, nostalgia does nothing but create a cult of death. For the creative person, nostalgia is a very dark place and seldom leads to growth. There's a big difference between celebrating an earlier era and style and living in the past.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Hatta]

By the way, I wonder what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time

Vellum.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[jedidiah]

> I think the point of the question is, which medium will last and still be readable well into the future?

The Cloud.

The point of digital is to not fixate on one single point of failure to but to ensure that there is never any single point of failure. Copy works far and wide until the only way to wipe them all out is by slamming the planet with a rock the size of Texas.

The ancient works we have now did not get preserved because of better media. They were preserved because they were COPIED.

They were copied over and over again in a very labor intensive manner by very dedicated people.

COPYING preserves content.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[phantomfive]

I think the point of the question is, which medium will last and still be readable well into the future?

None of them will. All technology we have now will be obsolete at some point in the future. If you care about your data, you need to keep on top of it and move it to a newer format. It's kind of lame, but the advantage is that your data doesn't degrade one bit, unlike film.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[PopeRatzo]

The problem as I see it is that we, now, don't know what will be valued in the future.

Sure we do. You mention hieroglyphs, but except as a peek into an earlier culture, does a shopping list written in Middle Egyptian have the same value as The Book of the Dead?

In short, preserve it now, let future generations decide what to study and what to ignore.

Does that mean we should preserve every email? Every picture ever posted online? Maybe we should archive forever every blog post every written?

Cultures don't have the luxury of deciding what's important or preserving everything. By preserving what WE think is important, we are telling future generations much more about ourselves than if we simply save everything and let them sort it out. Don't we have some responsibility to let the people from 2150 know that every Tweet wasn't supposed to be part of a sacred text?

I think there's a bigger danger in preserving every trivial artifact from our time than from the remote possibility that we will leave nothing behind for future generations. As always, the most important traditions are oral traditions where we pass knowledge from person to person, father to daughter and down the line. Putting 2010 in a big box saying "this was us" will mostly tell future generations that we were the most self-absorbed culture in history and worshiped the trivial. I guess that might be the most honest representation of our time after all, so maybe I'm completely wrong.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[ultranova]

You do realize that it is not practical to perserve everything? That some things will have to be allowed to be lost to history?

See, the thing is, with exponential growth in storage space it's not only practical, but actually trivial to preserve everything. Well, for the evil pirates it is, anyway :).

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[localman57]

When I asked that, it was supposed to be a joke, but apparently it fell flat. About 6 months ago, it seemed like that type of question showed up every few weeks, to the point that it was getting tagged "notagain".

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, I wonder what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time. It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this. Ah well. One can only dream...

History seems to suggest that carved rock works pretty well. Alternatively, creating cults of semi-isolated religious zealots who meticulously transcribe documents onto archival quality paper and store them in hermetically sealed containers might be even better.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[lgw]

There has been serious research done on this: how do we preserve the basic lessons of science and technology such that they will be readable post-nuclear-apocalypse. The result IIR was metal punch tape - reasonable density (for text), mechanically readable with digital accuracy, but readable by humans with simple equipment is if comes to that.

I can think of nothing else that would survive the fall of our civilization (as every civilization eventually falls, while technology may move forward regardless). All the data trusted to "copy it onto each new generation of hardware" will be lost the moment no one cares to do so.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[bky1701]

The Rosetta Stone wasn't that special, though.

At the time the Rosetta Stone was discovered, there was no such thing as archeology. The knowledge of Egypt that existed at the time mostly came from Greek writings. Nobody really cared enough to go digging around, looking for something that might let them understand the Egyptian writings. People tried to translate Ancient Egyptian languages, because many artifacts made their way to more convenient locations like Paris, but that was only the most valuable artifacts. There could have been any number of Rosetta Stones holding up some goat herder's roof and nobody really noticed or cared.

The Rosetta Stone became a symbol not so much because of itself, but because of the events around it. Napoleon invaded Egypt and actually started digging for stuff. He is considered by many to be the first archaeologist. His scientists happened to find the Rosetta Stone. Being scientists for once, rather than grave robbers, they noticed it might be important and got the information to people who were trying to understand the languages on it. The linguists who looked at it used it to decipher the Ancient Egyptian languages.

So he probably didn't know, but not because he had no idea what might be important to the future. Simply, he had no crystal ball with which to determine a rather convoluted series of events in the far future.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[mcgrew]

Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA.

Yes, but the ability to remember is as well. We remember the important things, while forgetting the trivial things. The problem is, sometimes we can't see what's important and what's trivial.

When I was working at Disney World in the early eighties, an older man pulled out his wallet to pay, and it had a half inch thick stack of $100 bills. I asked him how he got his wealth, and he said that during the Great Depression, an out of work friend needed fifteen dollars to travel by mule cart to California where he hoped to find a job, and sold his old Model T Ford to him. He'd only paid the $15 for it as a favor to his friend, and it sat in his barn until the early '50s, when a stranger spied it and bought it on the spot for $150,000. He invested that cash, and became rich -- from an initial $15 investment was wan't really an investment, but just helping his friend.

I wish I had that old IBM XT I left in the basement of my house on 15th street. Had I kept it, my kids might be rich someday.

The man's advice to me was "never throw anything away".

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[commodore64_love]

It's all pointless. In about 100 billion years even the stars will degrade. The sky will be permanently dark with just a few glowing embers scattered around. Everything we tried to preserve will disappear.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[chrishillman]

I bet that clown got in trouble with his Scribe Project Manager for making such redundant inscriptions.

I search my mind for a time when I looked at my Commodore VIC 20 or 64 and felt I should throw them away.. there was no such time. They just stopped working.

I think this might be the wrong crowd to call to arms to preserve the past. Most of our basements are in the running as computer museums (much to my wife's dissatisfaction).

It would be nice to think that the creators of such "classic" games would preserve the code and copies of their work so that we could revisit the past in legally. My youngest son loves to play the republished Dig-Dug on the old Playstation 2, if only he knew how many quarters I spent playing that game.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[mcrbids]

Lost amidst all of the desire to permanently archive and hold on to every bit of past memory is the idea that we're supposed to forget. It's built into our DNA. I'm not convinced that it is a practical or necessary goal to hold on to and remember every little thing, especially video game heritage.

If it weren't built into our DNA to try to remember stuff, we wouldn't remember stuff. Except that we do, so obviously remembering stuff is "in our DNA".

What I think you are missing is the fact that the way our mind works, every time we remember something, we strengthen that memory. Memories don't really "go away" in a binary sense, they simply fade over time. Similarly, the Internet DOES forget over time the stuff that isn't all that relevant. If some emulation of an Odyssey game is irrelevant, then it will be visited less and less, and fewer links to it will appear on the Internet, (web, ftp, etc) and to that extent, it will be forgotten. Whether or not the Internet forgets stuff that you want it to is, of course, another story.

But actually forgetting something altogether is rarely a good idea, and it's not even how your mind works. If you really REALLY need to remember some detail from long, long ago, your mind can (and does) go into a deep scanning mode. Often, the memory will "come to you" hours or even days later, and if it's really important, it will still be important then when your mind actually manages to find the information.

I see software archives like this working in a similar way. Software emulators of a computer system that originally had 64 Kb of RAM use so little space that the actual cost to society is almost nill. However, this software could have unknown value in the future, so the benefits of archiving it someplace could and will serve some future value that we can only guess today, even if it is to build a history of how Skynet came to be!

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Ed_1024]

I store all my important data in transcendental numbers - at the moment, my hard drive is backed up from the 10^39,845,247th digit of pi...

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

I just had a thought: what if we DID remember every little detail of past history, which caused us to respond sluggishly to threats as we contemplated all of the possible outcomes to every dilemma based on past experience? Not so good when we encounter a tiger in the jungle.

"Well, we could run away, or we could climb a tree, or maybe we....gaaaahhhhhh"

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem as I see it is that we, now, don't know what will be valued in the future. Whatever clown decided to make the same rock with Hieroglyphs, demotic, and greek would have no idea that at the time he was creating one of the most important archiological artifacts ever.

In short, preserve it now, let future generations decide what to study and what to ignore.

Are you kidding? Can you imagine if we actually had all the rocks that every clown ever scrawled a kinda-something on? We probably never would have Hieroglyphs, demotic, or greek - because none of them would have ever become principles in their own right. We'd have an ever growing pile of rocks, all the with the same possibility of someday being "the great thing we almost missed!" instead of actually having those individual, great things

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[tophermeyer]

Agreed. The ability to forget its something that animals developed as a mechanism to recover memory storage from older memories. Forgetting is a fact of organic life because our fleshy storage capacities are limited. Digital storage technologies are not nearly so limited.

Retaining knowledge and passing it along to future generations is what makes societies work. It is a disservice to our descendants to ignore that. Shakespeare wrote his plays 500 years ago, and people are still reading them. Maybe in 500 years people will be looking back at FFVII, Pacman, or Farmville as items of major cultural significance.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[RCGodward]

If the Egyptians had made a conscious and honest effort to preserve what they thought was important we'd undoubtedly have a clearer picture of their culture and history.

I think they did. We call them the pyramids.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[JTsyo]

Where's the +emo moderation when you need it?

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[mcrbids]

As an aside, I wrote a significant project using PHP-GTK (version 1) some years ago. (2003?) Well, the php-gtk project has moved on to newer version (2) and have all but dropped support for PHPGTK1, documentation, everything.

Yet my project is still alive and well on the old version, and I'm doing an update to that program now! My only recourse for the documentation is (of course) archive.org, which has all the old documentation (dating all the way back to 2001) which is, for my purposes, very nearly as useful as the original documentation's website was.

I'd be lost without this archive! IMHO, archive.org should be incorporated into the Library of Congress and treated as an imperpetuity electronic archive of the Internet.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[commodore64_love]

Mods need to develop sense of humor

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[MillionthMonkey]

It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this. Ah well. One can only dream...

That reminds me... hey Slashdot, what should I do with my old Dreamcast?

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[N0Man74]

Actually, the fact we forget is the very reason we end up reliving the same nightmares over and over again. I'll forgo the foray into politics...

Oh now, there's at least a little difference between forgetting the history regarding atrocities committed by a ruthless fascist dictator, and forgetting some trivial details regarding a video game.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Chih]

This should be modded funny, considering the subject of the article and the username behind the post :D

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda reminds me of Star Ocean 3 Till the End of Time.

When they actually step out into the real world, only a handful of people actually have jobs or responsibilities. Everyone is just doing whatever they can to keep themselves entertained and anyone actually having a job, no matter how mundane, is looked on with respect and adoration.

No one has to work, no one has to do anything and most of them are flat out bored out of their minds to the point where people have to be run off from places for attempting to do other peoples jobs just so they can feel important and actually have something to do.

But related to the main post, every video game should be preserved for history, it is a doorway into what entertained us, to what our technology was capable of at the consumer level and who knows, some games might actually be used to help translations later on down the line long after some languages are fading, maybe see them Comparing the US and Japanese versions of Final Fantasy 6 (3 US) to help them figure out some of the forgotten Japanese language. Who knows? And as far as copying into the cloud, it is good for short term storage, but if any cataclysmic event happened that effectively shut down the cloud, most of it would be lost. The cloud is great for short and medium term storage but for immensely longterm, something more is needed, better than the cloud and better than optical discs.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[aquila.solo]

I don't think so. If we don't remember the "trivial" details about some video game, the princess could keep getting kidnapped over and over and... oh. yeah.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[ET3D]

The works of Beethoven or Picasso aren't being preserved. They are alive, people are still interested in listening to them or viewing them. So a good question will be: is it worth saving works of art which are of no current interest? That's a good question, but let's assume for the moment we're interested in works which people want.

If you look just at games which people may still be interested in playing, then emulators work for that. The claim that emulators won't last forever doesn't matter, because if they don't last it means people have lost interest in the platform. Also, I see games more like a play than a book, that is, recreating them is fine, and there's no need to save the exact experience behind the original. It's the game design and writing which makes a game. I don't think there's need to save Serious Sam when there's Serious Sam HD, for example.

I do think that some games need to be saved, but the main obstacle to this is copyright (and possibly other IP). Games which have been released as open source get an extended life. See Quake for example (which is also a case where there are different implementations yet I still consider them the same game). One solution would be for game developers to have to deposit a copy of the source code and art assets into a central library.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Hognoxious]

There has been serious research done on this: how do we preserve the basic lessons of science and technology such that they will be readable post-nuclear-apocalypse.

I wonder who funded this research. Rats? Cockroaches?

They're the ones who'd benefit from making sure that if the monkeys don't wipe themselves out the first time they'll have a better chance for another attempt.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[ET3D]

I think you nailed it: all it'd mean a few generations from now is the ability to go to a museum or see a TV documentary on it, and for that all you need is a clip of gameplay. I'm sure some historians would love to get their hands on a game in its original form, but most people will not care. How many are interested in (or even capable of) reading a three thousand years bible scroll? And that's the highest profile book of all times. So sure, most people are happy when something like that is found, but that's because we know how very little information we have of the past. And still very few would be interested in seeing that.

So while I think that it'd be nice to be able to save video games, I do agree with JeffSh that for most people this will mean very little. Most people want to see new things all the time, or occasionally high quality things of the past, and video games' perceived quality degrades a lot faster than any other form of art.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Attila Dimedici]

So, how old is the oldest piece of software in this download? Now, how old are the pyramids of Egypt? How much other software was created in the same time frame as the stuff in this download? How much of that is still available?
Maybe you don't understand that the games in that download only represent a tiny fraction of all of the things that were produced in that time frame. When I said it is not practical to preserve everything, I meant everything, not just video games.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[FoolishOwl]

It's built into our DNA.

That's a foolish argument. No one designed our DNA, and even if someone did, it doesn't follow that we should obey that design intention.

I strongly suspect that narrative memory is one of humanity's early inventions. That is, we are constantly revising and repeating to ourselves the stories of our lives. If we were not doing this, we would forget. I believe this was actually an invention we stumbled across. We are self-conscious through constructing a narrative model of our identities and criticizing those models. Introspection and internal monologue were the first step; writing was the second.

So, I think we've already socially engineered around that limitation of our DNA, and moreover, most of what we value about ourselves and our cultures is based upon that social engineering.

From that, I think there are two reasons to argue against the value of cultural forgetting. First, it cuts against the logic of what makes modern humans what we are. Second, as the method we use to remember is subject to gradually creeping distortions, it is important to check our narrative memory against material artifacts from time to time.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[FoolishOwl]

The real joke here is, the problem with digital storage is that the only way to preserve digital information in the long term is to make many copies of it, and recopy it frequently. So, the best available way to preserve digitized cultural artifacts -- music, videos, games, etc. -- is to get them out on the peer-to-peer networks and keep them circulating. The "pirates" are doing more for the long term welfare of humanity than their opponents.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[marcosdumay]

Ok, I'll spare wour keys saying it for you: "Wooooosh!" :)

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[grantek]

Does anyone remember those wacky old PS3s you could install Linux on? Ahh the good ol' days :)

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[lgw]

The military, of course - to be sure they were in charge after the fall, no doubt. Still, it's a really cool idea IMO.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[houghi]

What would be the value of that IBM XT if everybody has left theirs in the basement? What would be the value of that model T if everybody would have saved him.

Also you seem to focus on the part where he got his initial investment, not on the fact that his investments made him rich. He could have invested in the wrong things and ended up owing a lot of money and not owning it.

And the 150.000 for a model T? some prices so he was an extremely lucky guy who was good in seeing an opportunity both at buying and selling.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[furbyhater]

Human.

This is one of the things that religions got right.
Actually, religious methods have been a revolution in mental transmission strategy and shouldn't be dismissed just because the message is false.
Transmitting information from human generation through generation is incredibly effective (for example, making youth learn the Koran by heart at the age of 10 years).
The only problem is that you have to decide what to teach to the future generation. But if continued in a consistent way, knowledge can be transmitted in this way for centuries and even millenniums.

Of course, digital storage is the way to go if you want to store arbitrary amounts of information with the hope that future generations will be able to choose themselves which information inside this ocean of knowledge merits their attention.
But most essential wisdom can only be acquired through personal experience. So maybe we should try to confer only the fundamental, essential knowledge (which is necessary to effectively acquire wisdom trough experience) to our offspring.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[garyebickford]

I'm inclined to agree, mostly. Some artists purposely make art that is ephemeral, or degrades over a relatively short period of time. The loss of the item is part of the art. And I wonder what the reaction of an archaeologist in 3510 will think of a Nintendo he finds in one of those 'ancient trash pits'. "Oh, how quaint! A device that used one of those big cathode-ray devices to paint animations under user control!" "Dr. Fooswagen, didn't they have neural interfaces then?" "No, Jovernak, those did not become popular for another 200 years, probably after the great FD Rosenfeld established the first Amregan Empire. We believe that this period also included the first airplanes, and inhaling marjune fumes became a popular family evening pastime for the first time."

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[arkane1234]

We just need to properly preserve the Mayan calendar so the generation alive 100 billion years from now (in whatever species that is sentient...) can dig it up and ponder how much more intelligent our people were and how we knew that the destruction of all life on this planet was cyclical and predetermined!
For once the Mayan calendar would be correct within a couple thousand years ;)

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[arkane1234]

Yes, their entire culture was all documented and inserted into the pyramids.
Or at least the rich people did. Along with a couple of poor saps who were building the final parts of the pharaohs tomb and was closed in lol

It's all accidental culture preservation unfortunately. Their entire life was the belief that the time on earth was torture before reaching the other side with the gods....

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as Daikatana is never included (excpet possibly as a warning to others), I concur.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

"COPYING preserves content."

Blasphemy! Why, don't you know that line of thought is absolutely the antithesis of modern copyright law?

You, you, you.....PIRATE, you!

Why, if we ALL thought that way, then the common man might actually think they have inalienable rights, that culture should be shared, and people should laugh, love, and actually enjoy life. For shame! It's a fundamental reality that all humanity exists to serve corporate profits, how can you not know this?! /end tongueincheek_bogusrant

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[tehcyder]

I just had a thought: what if we DID remember every little detail of past history, which caused us to respond sluggishly to threats as we contemplated all of the possible outcomes to every dilemma based on past experience? Not so good when we encounter a tiger in the jungle.
"Well, we could run away, or we could climb a tree, or maybe we....gaaaahhhhhh"

You seem to think that all actions are based on logical thought, and conclusions are reached after weighing up all available information equally.
Hoiwever, we are not computers, and if faced with a tiger in the jungle, our bodies would react before our brains got involved, I would hope.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[ultranova]

So, how old is the oldest piece of software in this download? Now, how old are the pyramids of Egypt?

Older than the world, according to Young Earth Creationists ;).

How much other software was created in the same time frame as the stuff in this download? How much of that is still available?

Most of it, I'd imagine. Dunno about anyone else, but I still have diskettes from NES era. And of course, once I switched to hard drives, I began copying the contents of the old drive to the new one whenever I switched.

Here, for example, is a site that offers general-purpose C-64 software for download.

Maybe you don't understand that the games in that download only represent a tiny fraction of all of the things that were produced in that time frame. When I said it is not practical to preserve everything, I meant everything, not just video games.

Understood. However, whether it's technologically feasible to store everything and whether someone actually went to the bother of storing every single thing in pre-Internet times are two different things.

I'm basically arguing that storage capacity grows faster than human ability to produce culture, since the former is a function of technology while the latter is a function of the number of people in existence.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[jgrahn]

With very few exceptions, video games are *popular* culture, which means it's disposable.

Things like The Beatles' music are popular culture too ... are we morally obliged to destroy all copies of Revolver and Sgt Pepper? Should we only keep opera, self-referential poetry and sculptures made from human feces?

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[AbrasiveCat]

So, is junk DNA just someones way of preserving a long forgotten game..

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[mcgrew]

Luck always plays a part in all endeavors, especially the gathering of wealth. That fellow was indeed extremely lucky.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes people who violate copyright are benefiting the WELFARE of humanity more in the long run than the producers of that material?

Since when did the looter ideology become so popular on Slashdot.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wow, a live specimen of a person who, unable to learn a real programming language, develops desktop apps in PHP.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

To preserve everything is to preserve nothing. The nuggests of gold will be buried in mounds of trash. Future generations will see the mounds and turn away in dismay. Life is too short to sort dead peoples' sh*t.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[PopeRatzo]

are we morally obliged to destroy all copies of Revolver and Sgt Pepper?

I didn't say they should be destroyed. I believe that these things are already being sufficiently archived by society without having to create some special repository for them.

I believe there is value to Love Love Me Do. I don't believe there is necessarily value to preserving the 45 rpm copy of it.

Re:Permanent archiving is impossible

[FoolishOwl]

If the material produced is lost, it benefits neither the creators of the material nor anyone else.

When I'm talking about the long term, I'm talking about more than one lifetime.

MAME project

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded the paper...

a new paper highlights this problem and explains how emulators fall short to truly preserve our video game heritage

0 hits for M.A.M.E
0 hits for mame

Any "study" about emulation which doesn't talk about MAME autofails. MAME, the emulator which puts "accuracy" over "playability" 100% of the time.

Re:MAME project

[Beelzebud]

Perhaps you should try reading the paper instead of just searching for keywords. Then you'd know that the focus of the paper is on home gaming systems, and not arcade systems... It's not a study on emulation...

Re:MAME project

[Anonymous Coward]

So when is MAME getting around to emulating the SNES?

The article is about console games. Not arcade games.

Re:MAME project

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain the difference as per the subject? The point of the research is retaining access to old software. Actually, there's M.E.S.S which is directly based on the MAME source. It emulates a wide variety of old gaming systems and computers with the same focus on accuracy.

Re:MAME project

[Beelzebud]

Yep, and he mentions MESS in the paper. The difference in the subject is that one set of machines ran at home, and the other in the arcade. He's focusing on the ones that ran in the home, hence he mentions MESS but not MAME... This isn't Rocket Surgery.

Re:MAME project

[Anonymous Coward]

So M.E.S.S then? It also misses the fact that the MAME dudes have recently restructured and are going to incorporate more of MESS. Many of the chips from home computers/consoles etc were used in arcades and the other way around. For example the NAOMI arcade platform is nothing more than a dreamcast with some extra memory. Sega did this with the master system and genesis. Or the nintendo vs is almost the same sort of thing as the NES. Or the playchoice system which was NES games plugged into a backplane with a timer.

However, the hardware on these things will fail eventually. Or even if it doesnt fail you will not be able to use it.

For example wanted to find an intellivision emulator a few weeks ago. Many are written for windows 98. Let that sink in for a min. Many other emulators are made just for DOS a 16 bit computer. let THAT sink in for min. Those programs are already not working so hot on my new 64bit win 7 computer. Yet they worked pretty good on the original platforms. And that is just the emulators. I can fiddle them and make the emulators run in an emulator. Which becomes just finicky but works after a fashion. So even emulation is not the best route.

Never mind the actual controllers just do not work anymore with the plugs we have. Oh you can get adapters for now. But what about 20 years from now? What happens when those adapters fail?

But the GP is right if you do not even mention MESS and MAME what sort of preservation article are you talking about. Many consider these the borg of emulation, and rightfully so. They have done an amazing job of finding out how these things really work with a staggering amount detail and volume. As crazy as they are I expect in the next few years they take it to the next level of gate level emulation. It should also be interesting when they go after the PS1, PS2 and n64. But that is probably a few years off. I could give a fig about the games its the amazing finding out all the cool stuff those 'cheap' boxes could actually do.

No fear.

[Pojut]

There will ALWAYS been crazy collectors that keep these things working, even if it means having parts custom made. If people can still own old automobiles that are drivable, they can still own old gaming consoles kept in tip-top shape.

Re:No fear.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is easier to find parts for my 1929 Model A than it is for my '06 Taurus.

I'm not joking.

Re:No fear.

[us7892]

I'm holding onto my Atari 2600 console, and basket of games to sell to one of these collectors someday. Alas, only worth about $23 on EBay. Oh well. http://cgi.ebay.com/ATARI-2600-Video-Game-System-controllers-and-games-/190421866960?cmd=ViewItem&pt=Video_Games&hash=item2c560719d0#ht_522wt_935

Re:No fear.

[localman57]

It's easy to have custom parts made for things like the Atari 2600. It's engineering is relatively straightforward. Contrast that to a PS3, which specifically is designed with security in mind. Duplicating some of the parts there would be much, much more difficult.

Re:No fear.

[Pojut]

True, but the technology behind the product is much more advanced as well (not to mention far less physical components present). I would think that a PS3 would survive sitting unused much longer than an Atari would, if for no other reason than at least because there are less objects inside that could fail.

Re:No fear.

[Captain Splendid]

That's because the Model A is a historical touchstone and the Taurus is a piece of shit.

/ex-Taurus owner

Re:No fear.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try finding parts for my '82 2DR Celebrity with 81k and factory chalk marks still on the firewall.

Re:No fear.

[Hatta]

There are too many 2600s in existence for the console itself to be worth anything in our lifetimes. And new hardware is still being produced. Although, if you have any funny looking T-shaped cartridges, you might be in luck.

If I were you, I'd take it out and play it. Now is a great time to enjoy 2600 gaming, as there's a flash cart that will play every 2600 game (even supercharger!) for the price of 1 or 2 carts back in the day.

Re:No fear.

[KDR_11k]

Electronics aren't as easy to custom-make as mechanical parts. Especially vector screens aren't something you can make with your standard workshop equipment.

Re:No fear.

[Anonymous Coward]

A piece that can go air born and not break, leak oil and the engine still goes, do hollywood style corners and the suspension holds. Sure, it's a piece, but it is a solid piece.

Re:No fear.

[Khyber]

Try finding parts for a 1937 Mercer with the original Coventry Climax engine.

I'm still stuck with a damned project car and no parts.

Re:No fear.

[Monkeedude1212]

If people can still own old automobiles that are drivable, they can still own old gaming consoles kept in tip-top shape.

What was the last car you saw that was OLDER than the Model T?

They are very very very few and very very very far between. Video games in the 80's and 90's were only just starting to penetrate the market broad enough to be considered a household item. When you look at Cars older than those that were mass produced, you have trouble finding a collector for them.

Older consoles might share the same fate - replacement parts for the crazy collector require an equally crazy technician to create the parts that have been now rendered obsolete.

Re:No fear.

[Pojut]

Pfft. That's nothing. Try finding parts for my 2004 RSX Type-S. Good luck with tha-...wait...

Re:No fear.

[PrecambrianRabbit]

It's one thing to get a custom part made for a classic auto, but it's another thing to get a custom VLSI chip produced. Not to say that it couldn't be done, but you'd need some fairly dedicated enthusiasts with relatively deep pockets.

Re:No fear.

[darjen]

Perhaps it would now. But 50 or 100 years from now, it may not be all that difficult.

Re:No fear.

[fractalus]

An Atari 2600 is so amazingly simple that there is little in there to fail. The PS3, on the other hand, has a bazillion failure points by comparison...

Re:No fear.

[Brit_in_the_USA]

Electronics aren't as easy to custom-make as mechanical parts. Especially vector screens aren't something you can make with your standard workshop equipment.

I would argue that a projector screen ($50), a bright Semiconductor visible laser ($10) and a home made "MEMS" device (small mirror with X, Y analogue control) driven with appropriate analogue circuit could be used as a modern stand in ($100-200).

Re:No fear.

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily, the last quality console video games were made over 10 years ago. The PS3 will not be missed.

Re:No fear.

[quanticle]

There's a difference between an automobile and an integrated circuit. An IC is a black box in both the literal and figurative sense. With an automobile, if a part is missing, you can usually figure out what the missing piece is. If an IC is missing of faulty, it can be very difficult to reverse engineer its functionality.

Re:No fear.

[mlts]

Don't forget that newer stuff has DRM and suicide batteries which will make things almost impossible for future people to be able to keep today's stuff working.

Suicide batteries are a "feature" of newer arcade games, where after a couple years, essentially the whole arcade game bricks itself.

Re:No fear.

[quanticle]

Well, that gets back to the issues highlighted in the article. Your 1929 Model A comes from an era where cars were still relatively new and finicky. Owners were expected to have the requisite skill to repair their machines. That, combined with the relative lack of faith in the reliability of the system meant that manufacturers made the engine and drivetrain easy to service, and also manufactured lots of spare parts. In short, the Model A is like a PC - a relatively open system where third parties can make parts that fit just as well as those made by the OEM.

Your '06 Taurus, on the other hand, is more like a console. These days, cars are expected to be reliable, and most owners are not mechanically proficient enough to service their own automobiles. That, combined with the increasing prevalence of electronic controls means that systems in modern automobiles are packaged up as black boxes with proprietary interfaces. This makes it very difficult for third parties to build replacements, while the lack of mechanical proficiency amongst the owners simultaneously reduces the demand for those parts. With all that in mind, its no surprise that its more difficult to find parts for your Taurus. Open systems will have larger ecosystems than closed systems, whether its a mechanical system (Model A vs. Taurus) or an electronic system (PC vs. console).

Re:No fear.

[Wesley Felter]

I would think that a PS3 would survive sitting unused much longer than an Atari would, if for no other reason than at least because there are less objects inside that could fail.

I wouldn't assume that. Equipment from the 70s/80s was vastly over-engineered because AFAIK the computer industry hadn't yet adopted "optimized" manufacturing processes that produce cheaper but just-reliable-enough hardware. That's why Apple IIs are still running but many later PCs are not. Or maybe it's all an urban legend.

Re:No fear.

[d34dluk3]

Fortunately, a little thing called the Wii has ensured we will never run out of spare PS3s.

Re:No fear.

[cgenman]

Look at the gigantic size of the metallic components in a 2600. The solder joints, heat dissipation, overall speed all lead to higher durability. Remember, that was a system that gave code direct control over the beam during every scan line, because there wasn't anything like a graphics processor or a display buffer.

The newer, more advanced technology tends to stress hardware more and die faster. I would be surprised if many 2600's died of natural causes. I'd also be surprised if more than 80% of the original batch of PS3's were still around.

Re:No fear.

[aquila.solo]

Bravo! I believe that is the best reverse car analogy I've ever seen.

And it illustrates so perfectly why I stick with PCs for games. That, and the fact that PCs are easier to justify as having "legitimate" purposes. ;-)

Re:No fear.

[Anonymous Coward]

An Atari 2600 is so amazingly simple that there is little in there to fail.

You've obviously never seen the insides of the plastic Atari joysticks that the Atari 2600 and the Atari 400/800 computer systems had in common.

They're simple, alright ... but it's almost as if they were engineered to fail!

The problem with closed-source code

[Anonymous Coward]

When companies die, the code can be lost with them. Video games are not even the tip of this iceberg.

Re:The problem with closed-source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I weep for the fact that I can't walk into a Best Buy and buy an RCA phonograph. Close the history book, gramps.

So what

[Anonymous Coward]

So what. I have some floppies I can't read, too. And some PATA hard disks that will be useless shortly.

Re:So what

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a floppy drive then. Nevermind the skeptics that say 5.25" floppies are screwed forever and are too late for rescuing, that's just bull oni. I just recovered 34 out of 34 5.25" 360k disks from 1982-84 with not a single bad sector *last week*. These disks aren't even well stored beyond the usual jackets in a cardboard box for so many years.
Those who always say there's no hope for the floppies are just lazy know-it-alls.

Re:So what

[silverglade00]

And some PATA hard disks that will be useless shortly.

Hard drive enclosure will help with that.

Fair use

[Jiro]

Copying a game you own in order to run it on a different machine is fair use and doesn't require permission from anyone. The writers of this paper seem to take Nintendo's word as to what type of emulation is actually legal.

But then again, what do you expect from a paper that uses the term "128-bit system"?

Re:Fair use

[Darkness404]

Look at Atari vs JS&A, where a court ruled that even though you were able to get backups making them themselves are illegal.

Re:Fair use

[TheRaven64]

Copying a game you own in order to run it on a different machine is fair use and doesn't require permission from anyone

That's not quite so clear cut, but even if it were, it doesn't really solve the problem. I have a few hundred C-64 games in my attic. They won't go out of copyright until, what, 2100? Maybe longer if there are more copyright extensions. So, I copy them, then what? I have to hang on to them for another 90 years before I can give a copy to a museum to preserve?

Re:Fair use

[ultranova]

I have a few hundred C-64 games in my attic. They won't go out of copyright until, what, 2100? Maybe longer if there are more copyright extensions.

Disney doesn't look like it's going to go bankrupt anytime soon.

So, I copy them, then what? I have to hang on to them for another 90 years before I can give a copy to a museum to preserve?

Or you could simply screw copyright and put a torrent on the Pirate Bay. If you are afraid of copyright cartels coming after you, you could use Freenet.

Museums are places to keep old physical items; for computer games, the best way is to simply let anyone who pleases copies for themselves and run them with an emulator./p

Perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps these things are not valuable enough to be preserved?

Virtual Boy

[Drakkenmensch]

The virtual boy console from nintendo, due to its 3D nature and unique hardware, is simply impossible to emulate and will eventually vanish like it never existed. Oh wait, that's a good thing!!!

Re:Virtual Boy

[Lunix Nutcase]

And yet here are 4 virtualboy emulators.

Re:Virtual Boy

[Beelzebud]

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/tech/index.php?sec=emus&eid=rdragon http://www.goliathindustries.com/vb/index.html Two emulators running Virtual Boy games. They aren't perfect, but it shows the games aren't "impossible" to emulate, and they won't vanish.

Re:Virtual Boy

[Hatta]

It is impossible to emulate perfectly, but not entirely possible to emulate at all. The mednafen WIP has virtual boy emulation that works with anaglyph glasses.

Re:Virtual Boy

[HelioWalton]

Impossible to emulate? There are at least 3 emulators for the VB that support 3D. Just grab a pair of Red/Blue glasses, or Cyan/Magenta, and you're good to go!

Re:Virtual Boy

[drinkypoo]

If stereo HMDs become more readily available it seems it ought to be fairly "trivial" to use a dual-output video card with one to get a very good representation of the Virtual Boy that permits you to move your neck while playing. (I have at least one around here somewhere, and will sell the second one if I can dig it up again.)

Re:Virtual Boy

[KDR_11k]

Didn't they have HMDs for PC gaming back in the nineties? If nothing else you could probably use those.

Re:Virtual Boy

[Drakkenmensch]

But does it replicate the searing neck pains and retinal burns?

Re:Virtual Boy

[HelioWalton]

Burning eyes - Yes (Damn those anaglyph glasses) Neck pain -It can be achieved through appropriate hunching (Although I don't ever have neck pains using my actual VB)

Re:Virtual Boy

[Servaas]

And either way once every monitor we own supports 3D, and they will eventually, whats people to stop from making a true virtual boy?

Re:Virtual Boy

[dzfoo]

Hey, I had one of those! I bought it at a game store for about 20 bucks (I later had the feeling that had I haggled a bit, the guy would have pay me to take it, but I didn't know what it was at the time).

I thought it was awesome... for about 15 minutes. That's when the headache kicked in. Me and my girlfriend played it a few times, and thought it was rather fun, but couldn't get pass the eye strain and headaches it induced.

Ah, memories.

        -dZ.

Re:Virtual Boy

[cgenman]

Don't worry: 3D TV's will soon allow you to turn your $500 PS3 into a $20 Virtual Boy.

Kidding aside, Wario Land and Teleroboxers are both worth owning on the Virtual Boy. And 3D Tetris in 3D is rather fun.

Re:Virtual Boy

[Jesus_666]

If you can find a compatible GPU, that is. Even back then shutter glasses were notoriously hard to get working with anything but the three or four supported cards from the glasses' manufacturer. Unless you can find something like a working ASUS or Elsa GPU from that time and build a system around it it's highly unlikely that you'll get the glasses to work without having to reverse-engineer them and write your own driver.

Re:Virtual Boy

[noidentity]

Do not look into Virtual Boy with remaining green/blue vision.

Re:Virtual Boy

[jandrese]

The thing is, there should be a lot of near mint Virtual Boy hardware out there just waiting for someone to be interested in it.

Re:Virtual Boy

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing special about 3D displays ( my Atari used a COLOR display!!!). The virtual boy could be emulated if anyone cared.

Emulators

[Kenja]

Legal or not, there are emulators and rum dumps out there of every system I can think of.

Re:Emulators

[Kenja]

rum, rom, what eva'.

Re:Emulators

[inerlogic]

but what about when the ROM is gone?

WHY'S THE ROM GONE?!?!?

Re:Emulators

[Khyber]

Good luck finding Action Maxx emulators or ROMs. You needed a VCR to play.

Re:Emulators

[Kenja]

Its laser disc, not VCR. And an emulator exists.

http://www.jaegertech.net/software/singe

Re:Emulators

[logjon]

But why is all the rum gone?

Re:Emulators

[ultranova]

Good luck finding Action Maxx emulators or ROMs. You needed a VCR to play.

Here, emulator and all released games. It took all of 2 minutes of Googling "Action Maxx" and following a link from the Wikipedia entry, which was the first hit.

Welcome to the Third Millenium.

Re:Emulators

[Khyber]

Incorrect. The Action Maxx (which came with Sonic Fury) used a VCR. I still have the tape.

READ THE ENTIRE PAGE NEXT TIME.

Re:Emulators

[Khyber]

According to the very page you link: 'While the emulator isn't technically a true emulator'

And that is because it's impossible to recreate the VCR head in emulation. It's POSSIBLE to play the titles, yet they are not emulated.

And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[mykos]

It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.

Thanks to emulation, many of these older games have secured their spot in the memory of a digital society. Shame that the current generation of consoles is locked down in every way imaginable; perhaps historical obscurity is getting what they deserve. They will be remembered for their litigiousness rather than their art.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[localman57]

They want the old games to be forgotten. They want you to buy new ones. Unless, of course, they can find a way to monitize the old ones, such as the various new "Arcade" style stores that let you download old stuff for a price.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[Lunix Nutcase]

It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.

You are making a big assumption thinking that almost any of these game companies care about such a thing.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[DerekLyons]

It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.

As much as you'd like to believe that - it's not at all true. Screenshots of the games will survive, as will reviews, walkthroughs, blog posts, etc... etc... While I'll grant these are nowhere as good as the game itself, it's foolish to believe the inability to play the game itself equates to being forgotten and failing to leave a mark. Even if the rare corner case where absolutely nothing survives - the games it inspired (if any) will leave accounts and traces.
 
And historians are long used to, and well experienced at, working backwards tracing such chains. It's what historian do after all.
 

Thanks to emulation, many of these older games have secured their spot in the memory of a digital society

If they are only remembered because they can be played, and not for the impacts and traces mentioned above, then probably they aren't worth remembering.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[phantomfive]

It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.

heh.....in all honesty, if it came to a choice between having millions of dollars now, and being remembered by history after I am dead, I will take the millions of dollars now. It's not that I'm desperate for money, and I dislike DRM for other reasons, but being remembered by history 100 years from now does not matter to me at all.

Heck, for that matter I'd give up my place in history right now in exchange for a nice, slow cooked, savory cut of filet mignon. Hmmmm. Delicious. Yes, I am hungry right now, why?

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[Garwulf]

I'm sorry, but what a load of crap.

Disclosure time - I'm 33 years old, and my family had a Colecovision. I remember the age of the video arcade, as I grew up in it. I remember Cosmic Avenger, Gorf, and Qbert. And emulation had NOTHING to do with securing "their spot in the memory of a digital society."

What secures their spot in history was that they WERE played and enjoyed in their day. Whether there's an emulator out there for them now is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that they were played in their day, and the people who grew up playing them remembered them fondly. Emulation today is nothing more than a footnote.

Aside from which, a lot of the companies that made the original games went out of business years ago. Remember, the video games market crashed around 1990 or so. Nintendo survived, but very few others did. The Atari of today is not the Atari of back then. So who is fighting to keep them from being spread?

Now, there are some game companies that are still around, and yes, you may have to wait a while for a re-release of Final Fantasy III or the Legend of Zelda. But, seeing as I know of at least one Xbox release of classic arcade games, conservation work of a sort is happening.

And as for the current generation of consoles, they're right now the king of the hill. Furthermore, they are able to operate without the extensive DRM that is seen in computer games - and because they have a single platform to support, they work now and they will always work when plugged into a compatible system, which is more than can be said for computer games. With few exceptions, the big games are all for the consoles right now. I don't think obscurity is likely at all at this point.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[mlts]

Having games forgotten about is what is wanted. If a game gets forgotten about, it can easily be recycled and the IP reused. Because people vaguely heard about it, it can be, updated for the latest consoles and slung at the masses again. Maybe toss in a character that suits the gamers of the day, ship a beta copy, promise to fix any bugs, and then once it gets out on the market, move to something else, and hope the DRM is sophisticated enough to deter pirates that the game is again forgotten about.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[quanticle]

Its not in the manufacturer's interest for you to be able to play your old games. They would much rather sell you the same game over and over again (e.g. Virtual Console).

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[jedidiah]

> Cosmic Avenger, Gorf, and Qbert

Cosmic Avenger? Never heard of it.

Gorf, I remember.

I only remember Qbert because I thought it was terribly lame.

Of these, only Gorf will ever see the light of day with the next generation or even so much as be mentioned once in passing.

Qbert will go the way of the Safety Dance.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[Garwulf]

Hey, you should have seen Smurf Rescue! That had killer small fences, gentle rises, and tufts of grass...

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[dzfoo]

I don't know about Q*Bert in the ColecoVision, but the arcade version was very popular. It is still one of my favorites, along with Pac-Man and Joust.

I think I'll fire up MAME when I get home tonight.

Damn! there goes the week. Thanks for that.

      -dZ.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[afidel]

Completely offtopic, but slow cooked and fillet are antithetical. You slow cook to soften the meat, fillet is already as soft as it will get so the best way to prepare it is with a quick seer.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[cgenman]

Also to be fair, the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are the executives who are focused on the bottom line. Most creative professionals I've met are more sympathetic, as their driving factor tends to be more about audience size. Of course, that's why executives are the ones we trust to keep companies solvent.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[Nephilium]

Ahh... Q-bert... the game that emulated the sound of a quarter being dropped in, and had a mechanism to hit the bottom of the cabinet when you died...

And a really horrible... horrible cartoon made of it...

Nephilium

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[FoolishOwl]

The game publishers fight against the spread of the games they published. I expect that game developers are divided on the subject, but that at least some of them agree with us and would prefer that their games be given away freely and appreciated in perpetuity.

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, the video games market crashed around 1990 or so.

1983

Re:And to think emulation is fought fiercely

[Jedi Alec]

It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.

The corporations liberally sprinkling DRM all over their games aren't making art, they're selling an entertainment product with a limited lifetime.

So who knows, maybe 2000 years from now game historians will look back at our age and wonder at all the wonderful digital art(indie games) we entertained ourselves with. ;-)

Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

If they properly document the systems they create (along with their eccentricities that programmers take advantage of) then it wouldn't be such a big problem... but when you get cases such as the PlayStation 2, which Sony can't reliably emulate, that's where you have a problem.

Re:Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a large difference between emulating something reliably and emulating something reliably at a non excessive cost and at the correct speed on hardware made for a different purpose. I believe the main problem with emulating ps2 on the ps3 is the raw power may or may not be there, but the radically different architecture would require too much money, and besides. everybody has a ps2. THATS WHY WE MADE THE PS3!

New isn't always better

[unixguy43]

There's lots of cool games and game systems out there now, but in my mind nothing beats the old ones.

Compared to today's multi-player, multimedia extravaganza's, the old games and consoles may be low-tech, but they still have a lot of fun and enjoyment for all ages. There's a lot of nostalgia around the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision and Nintendo NES, and I'd love to have a few of them to play around on again.

Choppy graphics and cheesy music may seem pretty awkward in today's gaming arena of digital audio and photo-realistic video, but I'd take the old games anyday.

Re:New isn't always better

[easterberry]

That's not because the games are better. It's because of nostalgia.

Re:New isn't always better

[Khyber]

No, the games were better. Games today rarely require you to think or use imagination, with all the focus being mostly on graphics.

Re:New isn't always better

[unixguy43]

Nostalgia plays a part, but I'm hard pressed to find a modern game that can hold my interest for hours on end like the older games.

I've got nothing against the fancy graphics and surround sound audio, but I think that newer games lose some of their playability in lieu of presentation.

Re:New isn't always better

[Hatta]

But then you find old games that you never played back in the day. Personally, I never had an Atari 2600. There's no nostalgia attached to it for me. I still think that Yar's Revenge is one of the finest games ever created.

Re:New isn't always better

[easterberry]

What imagination is required to play mario? Megaman? Sonic? They were just pattern recognition and learning through rote made arbitrarily more difficult via level cap. YOU used more imagination because you were a kid. Just like I used more imagination because I was a kid. I loved Contra when I was little but that doesn't make Contra better than Bioshock. Give someone who has never played any videogames, and therefore has no nostalgic investment in anything related those two games and I all but guarantee they'll say bioshock is better.

Re:New isn't always better

[easterberry]

I have over 1000 hours clocked on TF2. I have dozens on Fallout 3. Hell, Star Craft, Diablo and Diablo 2: compares to the consoles being discussed, they're new games. Portal, Castle Crashers, Psychonauts. I can go on. These games are all amazing and relatively new. There were shitty games for the old consoles. PILES of them. But we don't remember them because... they were shit. WE only played them once or twice tops.

Re:New isn't always better

[Applekid]

While most of the new commercial stuff is crap, take a look around the indie game circuit. There's a lot of really imaginative games and interesting game mechanics out there. For example, Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, VVVVVV, Warning Forever, and more.

Re:New isn't always better

[unixguy43]

And for every game you mentioned, there's piles of crappy games as well. But that doesn't detract from your enjoyment of the ones that you consider to be "jewels".

StarCraft is probably the only "modern" game that's really held my interest in the same way that some of the older ones did.

Re:New isn't always better

[easterberry]

Yes, there were crappy games then and there are crappy games now. But my point is, the games have gotten better, you just like them less because you grew up and life isn't magical anymore. Give someone who has never played either Bioshock and Megaman and I'll bet you they prefer Bioshock.

Re:New isn't always better

[Quiet_Desperation]

See, I don't get that. *Nothing* beats the old ones? Mass Effect. Heavy Rain. Limbo. Civilization. Starcraft II. Silly Wii party games. WOW. Western RPGs. Japanese RPGs. The range is enormous. There's so many games out these days that there has to be something for everyone.

Well, everyone except those weirdos who don't like to play games. Ever meet one of those? Seriously, what's up with those poeple? Not even card games or checkers. It's like they are missing some part of what makes us human. :-\

I started with the Magnavox Odyssey in 1974, but I love every generation of gaming even better. I have all three current gen consoles and a gaming PC. Yeah, once in a while I go play something old. I D/L Final Fantasy 1 from the Wii store because it was the one FF I never played. It's fun for a bit, but soon I'm like, eff this, where's Fallout: New Vegas already?

The only games I go back and really play are ones I missed the when they were new, so they are at least new to me. Steam and GOG are handy for that.

Re:New isn't always better

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar situation for me. I never played a Contra game until I found a copy of the original at a garage sale a few years ago, what a blast that is. I never played the Monkey Island series until they were re-released on Steam, and I fell in love instantly. Games simply have different things going for them now than they did back then, and neither is really a replacement for the other. Some old games are crap and some of them are timeless. I don't necessarily think that "games were better back in my day," but I certainly don't buy the "If anyone ever plays a game more than a day old it's because of nostalgia" logic either.

Re:New isn't always better

[Anonymous Coward]

Some games age better than others. Final Fantasy 1 is practically unplayable now, but Super Mario Bros. 3 is as fun now as it was the day it was released.

Re:New isn't always better

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved Contra when I was little but that doesn't make Contra better than Bioshock.

You're right, that's not what makes Contra better than Bioshock.

Re:New isn't always better

[ultranova]

See, I don't get that. *Nothing* beats the old ones? Mass Effect.

OK as a game, but it's really the story and universe that drive it.

Heavy Rain. Limbo. Civilization. Starcraft II.

Isn't Civilization quite a bit older than the rest of these ?-) It was released at 1991, after all...

Silly Wii party games. WOW. Western RPGs. Japanese RPGs.

All of these, with the expection of WoW, are game genres. In fact Western RPGs are amongst the oldest games (Colossal Cave Adventure), and Japanese ones date to the NES era.

And party games existed before Wii. In fact Pinball dates back to 1777 (!)

The range is enormous. There's so many games out these days that there has to be something for everyone.

True, however the size and scope of modern games tends to work against them. An old classic had so few elements it could get everything perfect; a modern game almost certainly has problems in some aspects simply because there's so bloody many of them.

Also, old games were relatively cheap to make, while all the bling - and the actual gameplay, too - requires a lot of money. This, in turn, means that it pretty much takes the resources of a corporation to make a game, and since corporations are huge organizations, they tend towards mediocrity. Add the fact that games are an artform, and art and beancounting don't tend to mix well yet the latter is absolutely unavoidable to produce a modern game with a $10,000,000+ budget, and of course we don't get as many true game-changers as we used to.

Well, that and the fact that games were younger then, and fewer of them had and were being released, so of course it was easier to stand apart from the crowd.

Well, everyone except those weirdos who don't like to play games. Ever meet one of those? Seriously, what's up with those poeple? Not even card games or checkers. It's like they are missing some part of what makes us human. :-\

Maybe they just like playing with your head ?-)

Re:New isn't always better

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparing Contra and Bioshock is a lot like comparing apples and livers, but in terms of pure fun factor, there's no contest - Contra wins by a long-shot.

Re:New isn't always better

[Anonymous Coward]

you just like them less because you grew up and life isn't magical anymore

Not necessarily. There are a lot of games that I loved as a kid, but I would never touch now because they aren't half as good as I remember them being. Then there are also games that are truly timeless, which I play regularly because they're simply more fun than most anything being released today. Many of these are games that I had never heard of growing up.

I love both Bioshock and MegaMan. Bioshock has a lot going for it, including things that simply couldn't have been done in the 8-bit era, but MegaMan is still more fun to play.

Re:New isn't always better

[Anonymous Coward]

Western RPGs

Probably a bad example. Western RPGs will never, ever be as good as they were in the late 90's and early 2000's. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I won't be. Mass Effect? Fucking clown shoes, give me Planescape: Torment or Arcanum. Fallout 3? Shit, how about Fallout 2?

Re:New isn't always better

[Anonymous Coward]

This probably applies to JRPGs, as well. Find me a JRPG for a modern system that's better than Chrono Trigger or Earthbound. You can't, because there aren't any.

Re:New isn't always better

[Khyber]

Umm, Crystalis certainly wasn't pattern recognition. Nor was Final Fantasy, nor Castlevania II.

And of course someone without any experience today would say Bioshock is better. They have NO EXPERIENCE therefore their words pretty much mean jack.

Computer Games Too!

[painandgreed]

Hell, I'm even worried about computer games. I collect old Macs and games to play on them. While the machines are still out there, various accessories for such are getting harder to find as are the actual games. While on the PC, theoretically, they'll play on a newer machine, the Mac platform has had a couple of changes of processor types that make sit hard to carry software over. Classic isn't even an option on the Intel Mac. There are tons of old games for the Mac toasters alone that formed a good deal of early computer gaming history and are still fun to play: Net Trek, Lunar Rescue, Ancient Art of War, etc. Every now and then I find a copy to buy, but I don't even have the games I played on an those old Macs, let alone the ones I never got to play.

I bet that even really old PC games have lots of issues, if you can track them down. I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

emulators

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Hatta]

Hell, I'm even worried about computer games. I collect old Macs and games to play on them

I hope you've changed the capacitors on them. After 20 years or so, they can leak and ruin your board.
Also, remove the batteries from any computer or console that's not being regularly used. They can
also leak and ruin the board.

I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.

It's not that bad actually. There were labs full of Apple IIes in just about every high school in
the country. With software like ADTPro, it's easy to dump disk images from your computer to a floppy.
Amazing really.

Re:Computer Games Too!

[PrecambrianRabbit]

Emulation is really the way to go here. In fact, in many cases it improves the experience. I remember that getting Ultima VII, Serpent Isle running on hardware at the time of its release was a nightmare of customized bootdisks. Once Windows 95 came along it was basically impossible to run the game anymore, without maintaining a separate DOS boot environment. With emulation I can be up and running in a couple minutes!

Re:Computer Games Too!

[painandgreed]

Emulation is really the way to go here.

I'm sorry, but that's like telling a classic car enthusiast that the way to go is modern kit cars that look like Model T's, Old Ford Trucks from the 30's, and Studebakers. Yes, emulation is better than nothing and would help with saving the software, but that's only part of the situation.

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Monkeedude1212]

Thing about PC's is that they are built so abstractly that they can emulate older PC's. You'll notice its no longer really a DOS prompt it's just a Command prompt - despite emulating the behavior, they really could make the console any way they wish but they keep it the same old DOS looking prompt.

I'm not too familiar with Mac's, but I'm not sure there is an issue so long as you have virtualization. You look up the specs of old Macs, plop that into a virtualization client, run the proper boot disk and you're good to go, you've emulated an old Mac on a new mac. Same goes for PC's.

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Fallingcow]

The real difficulty I see right now in playing older games is with Win95/Win98 games. Dos games? 99%+ of them work fine in Dosbox. Every console up to and including the Playstation 2? Emulated, and getting better with each passing year. Old Macs? Amiga? Well emulated.

Win95/98 games often can't be played--at least as best I can tell--without original hardware, which is getting damn old. Installing Win95/98 on modern hardware won't work, since drivers will be absent, and even if you could install it many of the games would still refuse to work because they'd be confused by the graphics card.

Virtual machines (VirtualBox, VMWare) can run the operating systems, but I have yet to find one that emulates an early GeForce or Radeon card, instead using some sort of custom 3D layer that many games refuse to or are unable to use.

Fewer of these games run with each new release of Windows. I've got several games that I used to love but haven't been able to find a way to play aside from buying 1995-2000 vintage hardware, and others that require their own software life-support system to get running (Grim Fandango for example), which, having so narrow a focus, is at risk of no longer being updated some day. I wish I could find an emulator or VM that could run these games, or some sort of tiny, cheap little box that had had a modern re-creation of the old hardware in the vein of those NES/SNES knockoffs (hell, you could probably put something like that in a machine half the size of a Mac Mini these days, and it'd be less powerful than a Sony PSP so I'd expect it to cost no more than that).

Re:Computer Games Too!

[PrecambrianRabbit]

Fair enough. In my first reading of your original post I didn't gather that you were an enthusiast for the old hardware as well. For my part, I don't really care about the hardware; the software's the draw for me.

Of course, I usually prefer playing the original version of the software, as opposed to fan remakes or even new official releases. Those versions definitely fall under your "modern kit car" analogy. They may be nice enough, but they serve a different purpose.

Re:Computer Games Too!

[diamondsw]

Sheepshaver, Basilisk, and Mini-vMac will keep you going on for classic Mac stuff. I actually have a copy of Ancient Art of War on my shelf, as well as a working Mac Plus. However, mini-vMac plays it just fine on my 2010 MacBook Pro.

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.

http://www.virtualapple.org/

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that a lot of times, old games that cough up errors or simply don't run on the latest Windows work fine in Linux under Wine.

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Dadoo]

The real difficulty I see right now in playing older games is with Win95/Win98 games.

Interesting you should mention this, now. In the past five days, I've managed to get the original Myst, Myst III, and Civilization II working on Linux, under Wine. I'll be honest and admit it did require a fair amount of futzing, but once I did, but I was able to play a game of Myst all the way through. The only thing I haven't resolved, yet, is getting Intel's Indeo video drivers working, for Civ2. (The game is still playable, I just can't see any of the video portions, which aren't really that important for the gameplay, anyway.)

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Xarius]

DOSbox does a really good job with older PC games, and WINE can probably do marvellous things with old windows games :D

Do the old Mac operating systems not have a WINE/DOSbox equivalent?

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet that even really old PC games have lots of issues, if you can track them down. I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.

* puts on Apple ][ hobyist hat

Apple ][s are very easy to emulate accurately ( a fast 386 is sufficient ;) and a large library of games (complete with ugly intro screens) are available thanks to warez scene of years past. Apple ][/ ][+ are also very easy to keep running as they are made of completely off the shelf parts. Almost all of my floppies still work, many approaching 30 years old! (5 1/4 low floppies seem much more robust than 3 1/2)

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Lord Kano]

Do the old Mac operating systems not have a WINE/DOSbox equivalent?

No, but there are VirtualBox equivalents. SheepShaver and BasiliskII emulate old Mac hardware pretty well. But there is something about having the actual hardware that the emulators haven't been able to duplicate. Namely some of the control panels crash the emulators. For firing up an old game or two it's not so much of an issue, but it's different than the original in some way.

LK

Re:Computer Games Too!

[Nyder]

Hell, I'm even worried about computer games. I collect old Macs and games to play on them. While the machines are still out there, various accessories for such are getting harder to find as are the actual games. While on the PC, theoretically, they'll play on a newer machine, the Mac platform has had a couple of changes of processor types that make sit hard to carry software over. Classic isn't even an option on the Intel Mac. There are tons of old games for the Mac toasters alone that formed a good deal of early computer gaming history and are still fun to play: Net Trek, Lunar Rescue, Ancient Art of War, etc. Every now and then I find a copy to buy, but I don't even have the games I played on an those old Macs, let alone the ones I never got to play.

I bet that even really old PC games have lots of issues, if you can track them down. I don't even want to think about what has happened to hardware and games for the old Apple ][s.

Okay, first off, all the old software, C64, Apple II's, Mac's, PC have been saved. They are online in various places. Some illegal, some legal, but you can get them.

As for working hardware, I have working C64's, Apple II's, etc. And guess what? People still make hardware for them. I recently bought a card to put into my apple's that lets me use compact flash cards.

And guess what? Those old macs? You can still find them, for cheap and working.

I think the problem is, you start assuming and don't bother doing any checking. In other words, you accept a conclusion that you made that was based on you being too lazy to actually do any real checking on the subject.

Intellivision Baseball

[singingjim1]

We used to play that for hours and hours. There's something fun about the simplicity of it compared to the bloat of options that now rule sports games. That rotating disc to control the players was certainly a pain in the thumb, but turning a double play from left field was a thing of beauty.

Re:Intellivision Baseball

[Sturm]

I loved Intellevision as well but speaking of "preserving" games..

Intellevision added another level of complexity with the controller overlays. They would eventually crack or be lost and although we might remember the control numbers for a while, it was almost impossible for someone unfamiliar with the game to play it correctly without the overlays.

Oh, and while I had a love hate relationship with the disc on the controller, it was those damn thumb buttons on the side that STILL give me nightmares. My right thumb is getting numb right now just thinking about it...

Re:Intellivision Baseball

[Hatta]

Yes, this is still one of the best sports games of all time. Controlling an entire field of players with the numeric keypad is an experience unmatched by any game since. Each player has his own button, there's never any ambiguity about who you're selecting.

Re:Intellivision Baseball

[dtolman]

Great game - only shame about it is the lack of fly vs ground balls. I should really see how much it costs to get the new baseball version they published in the mid-80's... my intellivision console works and still I play it now and then (including baseball - just a few months ago).

MAME does it right

[deweyhewson]

There's only one emulator out there which does it right, in my opinion, and that's MAME. Their goal is preservation, not playability, which they still maintain is a nice "side effect" of the code.

Most emulators have it the other way around, and use whatever code hacks or tweaks they can to get the most popular games up and running, replete with all of the glitches and inaccurate emulation which inevitably follow. Instead, they should follow MAME's example, and code for 100% perfect emulation relying solely on hardware guaranteed to be consistent (meaning the CPU). The tradeoff is that more technically advanced games take extremely powerful hardware to run - see Gauntlet Legends or similar games - but when they do they run perfectly, preserving the experience for future generations.

Preservation first, playability second.

Re:MAME does it right

[localman57]

Different emulators have different goals. Mame isn't in it for the money. Contrast this to an emulator such as the one used by Nintendo for the Wii. Their goal is to provide an acceptable level of emulation, at the lowest possible cost.

Re:MAME does it right

[dzfoo]

I thought we were talking about preservation. His point was that, emulators claiming that their existence is for the sake of preservation should emulate* MAME in that regard.

        -dZ.

* Sorry, no pun intended.

Re:MAME does it right

[b4dc0d3r]

You're think of MESS, the sister project to MAME that shares code.

MAME painstakingly reverse engineers every system into a generic machine definition which emulates the hardware, followed by specific driver code for every arcade game independently. Sometimes the driver is a mere tweak, like Galaga on Namco hardware has more memory than Pac-Man but is otherwise the same machine. (I just made that up as an example).

Console emulation is a different thing entirely. I assume if you read the article, since the summary mentioned SNES specifically, you'll start to appreciate the difficulty. The hardware itself is one problem, which is fairly easily emulated. But every game comes with its own data banks and memory control. The 8-bit NES has something like 200 different known "mappers" which react differently, so you can't just build a perfect NES and throw games at it. Some games will share mappers since it's obviously easier to reuse technology. But if a game needs something different, like larger levels or more sprites or better sound or anything really, the "mapper" changes. It's very much like building a generic hardware emulator and having every game plug in its own driver. Some will work, others won't. The early NES emulators didn't plan for this, the later ones built this in from the ground up. Most NES emulators didn't even know they were supposed to be doing it this way.

SNES is similar, logic in the console as well as the cartridge. I don't think there will ever be a fully complete NES or SNES emulator because it's just way too much work, and it's no longer popular. Check out the state of N64 emulation - similar hurdles, only N64 is a lot more complicated. Most N64 emulators do the basics and rely on plug-in libraries to handle things. If a game doesn't work, you change the audio processor or video handling plugin and try again. Compatibility is in the toilet. Many people have abandoned the N64 generation and moved on to the CD-based games, specifically because there is less code in the game. Emulate the hardware and most games will work, exactly like MAME. For many systems, you emulate the hardware and nothing works but the most basic day 1 games because it's all still in the game.

Now you're thinking to yourself, if the hardware can be generic enough to handle the mapper, why can't the emulator be generic enough to run the game? You need to learn a bit about roms and dumping to answer that. Grab a torrent of NES games and see how many [b] for bad dumps there are. More bad than good dumps, because you have to know the mapper in order to even dump it. Then you have the ROM data only, not the mapper which is baked in silicon in the cartridge. Somewhere, somehow, you have to have the schematics of the cartridge defined in a way that the generic hardware can read, understand, and interact with the virtual cartridge. Emulators solve that by adding the mappers to the emulation.

The only solution to this is to be able to define a virtual logic chip that interacted with the data in a "black box" kind of way, one chip per game (or each game can specify the virtual logic chip used, which incidentally was the plan for an alternate NES game format, in a way - unf - but it doesn't have the logic defined, just a reference to it). NES, SNES, N64, SMS, Genesis, I'm not sure what all else has this problem.

It's not all just hacks and tweaks, it's the difficulty of implementing silicon logic as machine code. MESS is slow, and compatibility is poor, because most people who do emulation want it done with their design, not a generic box. But it does advance as open source emulators improve and ideas or code gets moved over. But you still have to decode every cartridge's internal function - you can't just take data and throw it at a black box.

some arcade games used home gaming systems and hom

[Joe The Dragon]

some arcade games used home gaming systems and home pc systems.

old games

[Anonymous Coward]

let us not forget the RCA studio 2 game system.

Problem-Solution gap

[BobMcD]

There exists a wide gulf between the problem ('how do we store this stuff in a museum') and the proposed solution ('make it playable in the future'). It isn't as if the any of the aircraft in the National Air and Space Museum, for example, is ever taken out and flown by the museum guests. Does anyone really expect us to believe that seeing the Spirit of Saint Louis hanging up there is anything at all like the experience of crossing the Atlantic in it?

An adequate solution would be to record samples of the gameplay onto more future-proof media, blow up huge screenshots, and otherwise fabricate museum exhibits out of what we have left. This would mirror exactly the way we preserve everything else.

Typical geek silliness, if you ask me.

Re:Problem-Solution gap

[shadowrat]

Interesting. I think a screenshot of metroid would hardly do the game justice. The art of the game is more than just how samus looked or how the platforms floated in mid air. The true nature of the game was how high you could jump, how fast you fell, how the different weapons opened up new areas to explore.

I don't know if a couple of screenshots, or even gameplay videos really preserve the work. You wouldn't think a select handful of notes from a symphony or some stills and the trailer to a movie are an adequate way of preserving the work.

In the case of the spirit of st louis, or the apollo spacecraft, i think there is a desire to convey how small this plane was, how cramped in there the astronauts were, etc. It's impractical to let anyone who wants to fly the plane across the atlantic, but i think the museum does expend a lot of resources on movies and exhibits and models trying to convey the experiences of the past to museum goers in the present.

it seems like ensuring there is an emulator capable of running metroid 100 years from now should be an easy task and preserve the game really well. Even better, the code should be preserved.

(i just picked metroid at random)

Re:Problem-Solution gap

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing a game is very different than piloting an aircraft, at least in the sense it doesn't require a large anount of resources and training.

I don't see why we should limit ourselves to just having videos and pictures when we can make the full experience available. A game can only be fully experienced by playing, although even then it might not be enough, like in the case of an MMO, that needs a large community to provide the complete experience.

Museums should be looking for ways of providing a richer experience, not crippling the experience by restricting it to screenshots and videos, just because "that's the way we do everything else" . Especially in the case of gaming, of which recreating the original experience is relatively easy (at least once there are emulators available).

That reminds me of a podcast episode I've listened to lately A Life Well Wasted ep.02: Gotta Catch'em All

Re:Problem-Solution gap

[quanticle]

It isn't as if the any of the aircraft in the National Air and Space Museum, for example, is ever taken out and flown by the museum guests.

Maybe none of the aircraft in the National Air and Space Museum are flown by the guests, but at every air show you'll see a large number of historical aircraft that can and do fly by the attendees. There's always value in having a "fully operational" version.

Re:Problem-Solution gap

[businessnerd]

The thing is, a lot of the way we preserve other things is simply because we couldn't do any better given the age of the artifact or the practicality. Some artifacts are too fragile to actually experience. Go to Thomas Edison's workshop and they will show you the early prototypes for sound recording/playback, but they will not record something and play it back on those devices (at least not the very earliest ones). They will, however, playback a digital copy of what is considered the very first recorded audio (Edison's "Mary had a little lamb") so you get an idea of the quality. But think about what more you could learn by physically handling the equipment, going through the process of recording something and playing it back. You would have a greater understanding of how far we have come given the issues inherent with those first prototypes. These are things you would not get from a simple look and listen demo.

We can do a better job at preserving things if we start before they become antiques. Find a good working example of the tech now while it is still common and begin preserving it so that in the future, the only example we have is a half broken console discovered in someone's attic. Cars are a great example of what can be done. I was flipping through the channels the other day and Discovery had a show on about a guy who restores cars. He had done a restoration of an 1960's (I think) Chevy Impala and was taking the customer out for the first drive. The woman commented as they drove along that she felt like she was being transported back to her teenage years, when everyone would cruise around (a la American Graffiti). It's not just the visual, it's the full immersion. The feel of the car for both the driver and the passenger. The smell of the interior and the emissions. The sound of the engine. The best way to teach someone about the history of something is to fully immerse them in it.

Re:Problem-Solution gap

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd think reproductions of many of these machines could be made at minimal cost, like the fairly common NES/SNES clones. A lot of these systems have less power than many calculators. All but the most recent are weaker than a Nintendo DS, which is a very cheap system.

Hell, the PSP is basically an original PlayStation shrunk to handheld size--imagine how many 8-bit and earlier systems could fit in a box the size of a Wii, if made with modern technology. The real limiting factors on size would be the original media, and having to accommodate it. Controllers could also be problematic.

Re:Problem-Solution gap

[Anonymous Coward]

Only because we can't copy paste an airplane (yet). Electronic hardware is easy to duplicate in functionality if you have the specs on the original, while rebuilding an entire airplane from scratch is a very expensive venture.

Re:some arcade games used home gaming systems and

[Beelzebud]

Yeah well the point remains that the paper is focused on home console games, not arcade games...

Pinmame and Visual pinball have there full code ba

[Joe The Dragon]

Pinmame and Visual pinball have there full code base in the open so they can live on!

Decapping

[snarfies]

There's a very interesting project aimed at "decapping" chips from arcade motherboards. They burn the tops of the chips off with fuming nitric acid until the silicone is exposed, and the silicon is then put under a microscope, and the resulting image is then somehow processed to obtain the ROM's actual contents. I don't see why it couldn't be applied to consoles as well, if necessary. See http://guru.mameworld.info/decap/ for more details (and how you can help).

As to the article's position that emulation is not "good enough," well, perhaps not. Even assuming we have the exact decapped ROM contents, full documentation, and an absolutely perfectly coded emulator, we would still lack the original hardware - specifically the controllers and display. I used to play games on my Commodore with an old Atari 2600 joystick in a little 13-inch television. Its a tad different with my USB gamepad on my 22-inch widescreen LCD monitor, and there just isn't much for it.

Re:Decapping

[Monkeedude1212]

Saying that emulation doesn't cut it is kind of like saying that project to digitize the Titanic is pointless because we can't take a crane and pick it up and put it in a museum.

You work with what you got, and what makes practical sense.

Electronic handhelds

[michaelmalak]

Even more at risk are the electronic handhelds of the late 1970's (P.S. it was so long ago now that I feel compelled to include the century), in the manner of Mattel Football and Simon, but more obscure titles. I remember that whereas Mattel Football and three lanes of LEDs, there were knockoffs that had four or five lanes. And I recall a Bandai basketball game that had fully-drawn figures that would light up on a flourescent display. And then in 1981 there was a tabletop football game that sold for $70 at the time ($300 in today's dollars) for two simultaneous players -- I saw it once in a tiny midwestern town and never anywhere else.

Rare old Consoles

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Colecovision and a Wonderswan. How's that for obscure?

Their evaluation of emulators

[Eightbitgnosis]

Would be quite apt....if this were a decade ago

Zsnes does an amazing job of recreating Snes games, and even has graphical engines to IMPROVE the existing graphics. Gens32 rocks for Genesis games and even displays games with the trickiest mappers(I.E Warsong). Fceu replays all my old NES games with great graphical and sound support.

So, as a great warrior poet once put it, "Stop your whining!"

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Khyber]

Gens32 sucks - get Kega Fusion

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Hatta]

Zsnes is great, but not a model of accuracy. The audio accuracy is especially poor. It's also written partly in 32-bit x86 assembly, so it's only going to be with us for as long as x86 is.

bsnes on the other hand is written to be cycle accurate. Everything the hardware does is emulated, with no shortcuts. That is what we really need from emulators. Plus it's written in portable C++, so it will be around forever. The downside is that you need a fairly hefty machine to run it.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[hibiki_r]

and yet, Zsnes has not received a release in years, and lacks a quality OSX port.

Most of the last decade has been a disaster for emulation, as emulators of ancient systems aren't in as good a shape as they should. Even those emulators that work are typically not even thinking of multi-core, which leads to entire generations of games where there's been very little improvement in years. 5 years ago, you could try to play the arcade version of NFL Blitz, but it'd be too slow to understand the experience. Today, we are in the same boat, since, for the emulator's perspective, a Core i5 is not really that much faster than the single cores we had in 2005.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[joeflies]

has graphical engines to IMPROVE the existing graphics

Although I tend to agree with you, I think that's the precise arguement they're making on why emulators are not the real thing.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Anonymous Coward]

Emulate the x86 hardware too? This is starting to remind me of a stack of turtles.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Greyor]

Zsnes is great, but not a model of accuracy. The audio accuracy is especially poor. It's also written partly in 32-bit x86 assembly, so it's only going to be with us for as long as x86 is.

bsnes on the other hand is written to be cycle accurate. Everything the hardware does is emulated, with no shortcuts. That is what we really need from emulators. Plus it's written in portable C++, so it will be around forever. The downside is that you need a fairly hefty machine to run it.

Speaking of bsnes, byuu, its creator, is working to preserve SNES games and their history -- he just began a massive undertaking to catalogue, photograph, and document all known SNES games. Cf. here for more info. If I had access to my old SNES games (stored thousands of miles away at my parents' house), I'd help him out, but maybe you and some of the ./ crowd may be able to be of some help.
I used to be able to run bsnes without any real problems, but I think my desktop is getting old, and I've fallen back on ZSNES for the time being, unfortunately.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[orthicviper]

x86 has been kept around this long because of all the x86 apps people still want to use. decades of x86 software development means there'll always be a market for x86, or at least an x86 emulator so we can emulate those assembly-programmed game console emulators. or so i hope.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Carnildo]

Emulate the x86 hardware too? This is starting to remind me of a stack of turtles.

Been there, done that. I used to work at a company that had an x86 emulating something 68k-based emulating a PDP-11 emulating some custom hardware that controlled a fatigue-testing machine. These days, I think they're using something x86-64 based running a DOSBox derivative, so they've added an x86-emulation layer to things.

The IO layer also has a bit of emulation going on: a USB connection emulating a parallel port emulating a proprietary interface.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[orthicviper]

i'm not really nerdy enough for news for nerds, so i have to ask this question: in an emulator emulating hardware that had a single core processor, can the emulator split up the instructions designed for a single-core processor across multiple cores on modern hardware? i'm also curious about this because of ps2 emulation on a ps3. ps3 cant emulate ps2 on a single core but if the data can be spread to all the SPU's then i guess so. it seems to me like it would either be impossible or way too complex.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Anonymous Coward]

The language it was programmed in is irrelevant. If it's "portable C++," we still can't magically make it run on another system if we don't have the source code. If we do have the source code, even if it's in x86 assembly, it can be rewritten in another language.

Re:Their evaluation of emulators

[Anonymous Coward]

Portable C++, ha ha ha!
I'd be surprised if it still runs tomorrow.

It's a digital copy on the net

[Sycraft-fu]

It is never going to be gone. It is resilient by virtue of getting copied millions of times all over the world.

Emulators?

[bluefoxlucid]

http://cgi.ebay.com/FC-TWIN-VIDEO-GAME-SYSTEM-2-1-NES-SNES-PEARL-/270611106201?cmd=ViewItem&pt=Video_Games&hash=item3f01adc999

Re:Emulators?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly good enough. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Twin#Compatibility

Re:seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I do! The idea that my daughter will not know what it was like playing tank on an atari whatever-the-fuck-number-it-was just wrings my insides into knots. A vital part of our shared cultural heritage is lost. How can we even think of moving forward in our couch-potato life-style if we do not know from whence we came? Our children will grow up to be bereft of the cultural heft of our accomplishments as a people and have absolutely no sense of context as they help guide Mario around on his little kart. An absolute shame, that is what it is. Now excuse me as I curl up in a little ball and quietly sob in the corner while rocking back and forth as my child ignorantly continues to play some insipid bowling game.

Magnavox Odyssey

[RealRav]

This past weekend I went to a record store in downtown Paris, Texas. They had 3 fully functioning Magnavox Odysseys for sale. They also had a Ti99 4A which was very interesting to me as it was my very first computer.

Re:Magnavox Odyssey

[Khyber]

Hunt the Wumpus FTW

CD-Interactive

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of my most interesting game time as a kid was spent on our Philips CDI. How many hours we spent on Laser Lords! Alice and Wonderland was a delight, Zombie Dinos from Planet Zeltoid (I kid you not) for some educational fun, the two worst Zelda games ever made, but I enjoyed them nonetheless... Fond memories. I brought out the unit a couple years back to relive some of them - the controller had seen better days, but it still worked! I wish more people could have experienced some of these games, it was such a niche system (I never knew anyone else who had one) and it didn't last long...

Yes, I remember the Odyssey

[russotto]

IIRC, the Odyssey and its many clones were all based on a special-purpose General Instruments Pong chip. Maybe that's only the later ones, and the earlier ones were discrete. (ah, a web search confirms this; the GI Pong chip came after the originals, which were discrete). There's no copyrighted code to extract, and if you were to clone the hardware for preservation purposes, nobody's going to bother suing you.

I also remember an electromechanical Pong game, but nobody seems to care about that one.

And if some of this stuff really is lost, it's no big deal.

Re:Yes, I remember the Odyssey

[weszz]

I loved my Odyssey... it was a simple time.

One game you just went around kicking monkeys for points... they would turn red and jump all over really fast trying to get back at you, but you just avoid them for a while, and then kick them again when they cooled off...

it. was. awesome....

Re:Yes, I remember the Odyssey

[sewiv]

I have both an odyssey and one of those electromechanical pong games, both in working order.

Re:Yes, I remember the Odyssey

[Hatta]

You must be thinking of the O2. There were no representational graphics on the Odyssey. Just white dots and plastic screen overlays.

Re:Yes, I remember the Odyssey

[Anonymous Coward]

You could also de-program and erase the lines/platforms the pissed off monkeys were using to get back to you - and they would fall. haha. Also you could kick a monkey against the wall repeatedly while falling from the top of the screen and try to make record scores, you died of course, but you could kick it a couple hundred times during the fall. =)

Monkeyshines

So?

[Thyamine]

I'm a gamer who grew up with an Atari 400 and an NES and down the line, but I don't really see how this ranks in the importance of things. I've gone back to re-play some of my favorite games and it's just not the same. The memory I have is always better than really playing it again, and no one today cares about how great that original version of Spy Hunter was. Ask your nephew to play and see how he feels about it if you don't believe me.

Troll ahead: There are a lot more important things out there disappearing: cultures, languages, random little insects I've never heard of, etc etc. I'd rather see effort on preserving things like that than how can we keep playing these games in the future. Keep talking about them, document them, tell fun memories of them, but why such a concern about being able to play them?

Re:So?

[Red_Chaos1]

SO you not caring somehow means nobody should care?

I still play and greatly enjoy many of the games I played as a kid, and indeed they give me just as much joy now as they did then.

Frankly *I* don't give a shit if one of my ignorant younger siblings/relatives doesn't give a shit, he was weened on a fucking Xbox or PS2, so of course he not going to have any appreciation for how awesome the NES was. That doesn't make the NES or other older games not worth appreciating just the same.

To sum it up your whole argument is flawed. Come back when logic isn't eluding you.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it's because you could probably fit *all* the old cartridge console games and 8bit computer games onto a single SD card nowadays.
If it's so easy to preserve billions of hours of people's work, and some fantastic art, music and gaming ideas, we might as well do so.

Preserving a single sand castle for a thousand years would probably be more expensive than preserving the entire history of 8bit video games.

The next generation is too dumb to care

[NiceGeek]

I submit this comment from the article as proof:

"Who cares
The aging gamers who enjoyed the magnovox or gleco vision wont be around much longer so what's the point in preserving shitting games? I know that they must feel nastalgia for these cause i just bought a sega collection disk for my 360 but i could careless if the games on that disk are gone in the future cause there will be way better games. Frankly its a waste of time to emulate all this simple games like pong or those super super garbage rpgs. Ya for nonresponsive controls and pixelated graphics!!!"

Re:The next generation is too dumb to care

[stagg]

I submit this comment from the article as proof:

"Who cares The aging gamers who enjoyed the magnovox or gleco vision wont be around much longer so what's the point in preserving shitting games? I know that they must feel nastalgia for these cause i just bought a sega collection disk for my 360 but i could careless if the games on that disk are gone in the future cause there will be way better games. Frankly its a waste of time to emulate all this simple games like pong or those super super garbage rpgs. Ya for nonresponsive controls and pixelated graphics!!!"

But they don't remain teenagers forever. ;)

Re:The next generation is too dumb to care

[Anonymous Coward]

The next generation is too dumb to care

And right there — despite all insistence to the contrary by those afflicted, right at that very moment — was where the next generation of old curmudgeonly geezers started.

Because remember, the next generation's too dumb to care. Tell me, grandpa, how DID you deal with blisters from ergonomically hostile controllers back then? Oh, please, don't answer, I'd never understand it, because I'm too fucking STUPID to even see the inherent SUPERIORITY in having to blow dust out of a goddamned cartridge to make it work right, if it even would then.

That's right, the next generation's made of morons who don't WANT frustration and physical pain with our leisure activities. Man, what're we thinking? We could've stopped twenty years ago and gone on with faulty 10NES chips and dying battery backups! We could've wasted time and paper writing down a damn password when the developer was too cheap to even have the battery, just like the happy old days! That'd be SO much better!

But I guess we'll never understand this, because we're too dumb, just too motherfucking STUPID to care about it. Fuck off, old man. We're busy actually enjoying our games.

Re:The next generation is too dumb to care

[NiceGeek]

Easy sunshine, I was talking about their inability to spell or form coherent sentences. Guess you didn't notice that huh?

Mattel Intellivision

[dgr73]

Intellivision is a console I was forced to buy "in the flesh" because it just can't be emulated properly. And i'm not talking about the software, for which there is several emulators.. i'm talking about the controller. The baby packs:

16 directional control disc
0-9 numpad with Enter/Clear buttons
Plus a few "non-specific" buttons

Also considering how the controller is used, with overlays on the numpad, it just makes it that much harder to have anywhere close to the same feel or layout on PC joysticks or any Mouse+KB combination.

not all emulators are bad

[Michael Kristopeit]

many emulators are designed from the ground up to match the original hardware's capacity precisely... this article is FUD.

Relavent?

[SOULFLAYER]

All things change, nothing is extinguished. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement. -Ovid (BC 43-AD 18) Roman poet.

The future looks worse...

[wjousts]

And now with DRM schemes that require software to phone home, once the servers used for authentication are retired, those particular pieces will be much more difficult to preserve. And let's not even get started with online only games like WoW. How would you preserve a MMORPG when the servers no longer exists? And even if you somehow manage to recreate a server, without the players, it's not the same experience.

Re:The future looks worse...

[genner]

And now with DRM schemes that require software to phone home, once the servers used for authentication are retired, those particular pieces will be much more difficult to preserve. And let's not even get started with online only games like WoW. How would you preserve a MMORPG when the servers no longer exists? And even if you somehow manage to recreate a server, without the players, it's not the same experience.

Having been on a few unofficial ultima online servers I disagree. Many of them manage to attract a large community.

It's called progress...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get over it.

CRT look

[Mprx]

The article mentions attempts at simulating CRT display artifacts, but it doesn't mention the most serious problem. CRTs light up each pixel for a very short time as the beam crosses them. LCDs keep all pixels lit constantly. This makes a big difference to motion, especially scrolling as found in 2D games. The CRT will always look sharper because there is no error with respect to time for each frame. Each frame is shown as single point in time, and the human visual system is very good at reconstructing motion from that kind of sampling. With the LCD style sample-and-hold display you can think of each frame as being composed of many samples spread over time, all except one of them being incorrect (shifted into the past or future). Visually this shows up as blurring. It's completely independent of the response time of the display. Even with instant pixel switching speed you'd still see this kind of blur.

You can see diagrams explaining the problem here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/temprate.mspx

Re:CRT look

[jandrese]

Um, the phosphors don't dim instantly when the beam moves on, especially with older televisions. Heck, some old computers made use of this fact (and specially designed long delay phosphor displays) to let the screen update at a much slower rate than would have been otherwise necessary. That said, some LCD displays do have a relatively high switching delay, so there can be some noticeable changes when you go from one to the other.

Re:CRT look

[Mprx]

Phosphor decay is exponential, so you'll see a faint glow for a long time after the beam moves on, but this isn't enough to cause visible sample-and-hold blurring. Even on old televisions the phosphors will have decayed to less than 10% brightness in a few hundred microseconds. Blurring caused by LCD switching delay is completely different.

Emulator experience

[jridley]

They're right, the emulator experience is not the same.

To really be accurate, the emulator would have to crash a bunch, require you to spend hours cleaning contacts with pencil erasers, screwing with cassette deck head alignment, beating on flaky equipment with your fist, and having to buy replacement cables every few months.

Kids these days don't know what they're missing with stuff that just works. I sometimes want to slap them around when they complain about hard drives that crash every 10 years on average. I had stuff that crashed every 10 minutes and I paid 10 times as much for it.

Re:Emulator experience

[NiceGeek]

Yeah we're so lucky to have those bastions of reliability the Xbox 360 and the PC.

Re:Emulator experience

[PrecambrianRabbit]

I was playing Final Fantasy on an NES emulator the other day, and I had to smile when I went to an inn and the NPC reminded me to "Hold Reset while you turn Power off!" I still don't know what the hardware reason for that was, but suffice to say that I don't have to do it anymore!

Re:Emulator experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Prevents glitches that could cause the PC (or IP if you like) to move to a region of ROM where it writes to NVRAM for the few milliseconds before power is completely off. Among other things.

Re:Emulator experience

[GoChickenFat]

I had stuff that crashed every 10 minutes and I paid 10 times as much for it.

There it is...I've been searching for my generation's "walked to school up hill both ways in a snow storm"... now I have it.

Re:Emulator experience

[Fallingcow]

I'm guessing it gave a less noisy supply of power to the savegame memory chips in the cartridge during the shutdown process. I never had Final Fantasy, but I only recall the handful of games with on-cartridge saves (e.g. Zelda II) saying that.

FWIW, I never did it but never had a problem.

Re:Emulator experience

[CraftyJack]

"Hold Reset while you turn Power off!" I still don't know what the hardware reason for that was

I don't know what the *real* reason for it was, but I do know it made the game impossible to finish with a Game Genie.

Re:Emulator experience

[Dwedit]

Holding reset ensures that the RAM chip isn't being written to or read from at the time you turn it off.

Re:Emulator experience

[jridley]

You laugh, but the PC is many orders of magnitude more reliable than any early computer I had. I can't even remember the last time I had a PC crash; it's been years. Even when a program crashes, it's just that program, not the whole system. Back in the 80s I was happy if the system only locked up 3 or 4 times a day.

Re:Emulator experience

[NoZart]

And the emulator should demand you to blow really hard at the ROM files for them to work!

Arcade systems based on console systems

[tepples]

MAME emulates the NES; it's called a PlayChoice. MAME emulates the Super NES; it's called a Nintendo Super System. MAME emulates a PlayStation; it's called a ZN-1.

Re:Arcade systems based on console systems

[VGPowerlord]

How many games out of the NES, SNES, and PS libraries do they play?

There were, what, 10 Playchoice games?

Re:seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerds.

The obvious solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Preserve the specifications of the machiens as well so that interested hobiests can build reproductions.

Justice is expensive

[tepples]

Copying a game you own in order to run it on a different machine is fair use and doesn't require permission from anyone.

Doing it without access to a rainy day fund to pay your lawyers to defend you in court requires permission.

Not a problem.

[Fantastic Lad]

Check out this. . .

http://www.chiptune.com/

Amiga Workbench in HTML 5! (At least a cosmetic version, but you get the idea.)

If you dig around, you'll find that somebody, somewhere who cares will have ported some version of it along. I remember hankering for one of my old and obscure Apple ][ games and I actually found the darned thing along with an emulator. (Rescue Raiders).

-FL

Re:some arcade games used home gaming systems and

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah well the point remains that MAME is the gold standard when it comes to talking about preserving old video game hardware.

All of the issues that this paper is talking about (Documentation of original hardware, Preservation of Game Code, (roms/optical media/web data), look and feel, overlays, special controllers, multiplayer, display types, legal issues) have all been addressed years ago by the MAME community.

That's why it's relevant, and that's why it's crazy that they didnt mention MAME.

So?

[Locke2005]

Our rich heritage of sidewalk chalk art also quickly disappears, as do sand castles and Buddhist sand Mandalas... why can't people just accept the fact that everything is transitory -- including video games?

history never was permanent before

[Anonymous Coward]

History was never permanent before, why the sudden expectation that it should be preserved forever now? Very few artifacts survive the years, can't imagine why some obscure video game system would have make the cut when thousands of photos, songs, plays, and even the actual names of our ancestors are lost already.

100 years from now...

[NevarMore]

..historians will be sitting around looking at archives of late 90's advertising wondering "Man, Duke Nukem Forever must have been an epic game if these ads are true. Too bad those jerks from the 21st century didn't think to save a copy of it on media that didn't rot away".

Hunt the Wumpus

[snookerhog]

Oh, what I wouldn't give to be able to play Hunt the Wumpus again on my TI99 using a crappy old 11" monitor.

I would also pay for the cheezy digitized Hall of the Mountain King theme song to use as a ring tone.

Re:Hunt the Wumpus

[Wraithlyn]

Source code, knock yourself out: http://internet.ls-la.net/folklore/wumpus.html ;)

Eh. It's not that big of a deal

[SteeldrivingJon]

This is just an impulse towards hoarding.

Nothing new under the sun...

[happy_place]

The old games are preserved in the new, as most of the new stuff is just a clone or improvement of the old.

Compare to antique tractors

[ewg]

Compare to antique tractors: requires dedicated hobbyists to maintain old equipment in working order.

The angry gamer

[xmorg]

The angry gamer on youtube preserves all great console classics in all their quaintness.

Video Game Museum

[joeflies]

I read that there is an Video Game Museum in New York, although I haven't visited it.

I think the mistake the Emulators are not preservation pieces of material they are a way for people to reasonably have access to it. It's the same with a photo of a paintiing - not everyone has access to see the Mona Lisa, and although a photo is a poor subtitute for seeing it in person, the photo does accomplish the purpose of making it broadly available to understand what it is in lieu of actually flying to France to see it.

Need a law for disclosing old source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Both patent and copyright systems were put in place to secure some compensation for the author, while not hindering dissemination of the knowledge.For example, a patent encourages the inventor to make his invention public, while ensuring he gets some royalties if it proves useful.
On the other hand, software copyrights limit both dissemination and creation of similar alternative, while providing NO UPSIDE for the public.
Making simulators to preserve ancient items is difficult. Why not use the copyright for what was its original intent: disclose the source code!
Game Maker: hello, i would like to copyright this new title: "Leapfrog of Doom". I want both to get paid and make sure there is no competition of leapfrog games
Copyright Officer: Sure. The state will provide protection for you, in exchange for full disclosure of the source code and all the art works. The people should have access to it after the copyright is through, and will grant you protection in exchange.

Why protect stuff that's hidden in the basement? Also, someone needs to put and end to all the bogus lawsuits about copying code that was never published in the first place. I mean, FTW?

CD-i

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember the Phillips CD-i? I had one of these growing up and the memory of this console has stuck with me for 19 years now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i

Value of historical items and data

[bobcat7677]

While I am all for attempts to preserve history in general, I have to mention another perspective...

When we as a society become "packrats" and attempt to preserve every obscure product, prototype, document, and recording of things of the past, it dilutes the value of the things preserved overall. You get to a point where the volume of items is overwhelming to someone wishing to do legitimate historical research and the "collector" value from a monetary perspective is also diluted as the object becomes just "one of many examples surviving of this ____ (fill in the blank)." So I pose the question: "Might it actually be healthy for things of a bygone age to naturally 'decay' over time in to a more manageable and valuable sub-set?"

Just like anything else....

[Itninja]

They [collectors, hobbyists] can rebuild it them. They have the technology. Heck, people even work to rebuild the ancient Harwell.

Asteroids

[speedlaw]

I miss the "real" asteroids, the one with the x-y monitor that no longer exists. There was also a fantastic version for Mac back in the System 6 and 7 era, a shareware whose name escapes me. The various versions of Asteroids which were licensed made a simple game overcomplicated. Is there any version of Asteriods worth playing in OSX land ? I wasted a lot of quarters back in the day.....

Weeping with ironic nostalgia

[Jawnn]

...or is that nostalgic irony? At any rate, [off-topic warning] all this memory lane trodding makes me remember the underground Atari 2600 title that came out in the late '70's - "Custer's Revenge". I'll spare us the details of the politically incorrect gameplay, but given the 2600's crude graphics and the wide array of..., let's just say "lurid", games available now, the whole public outrage thing around "Custer's Revenge" seems quaint now.

Digger!

[kuthkameen]

Anyone play Digger? I used to love it as a kid, and its been reverse engineered and ported to many OSes......it still works pretty well. http://www.digger.org/

RE: the post

[Seismologist]

Nice article title. Video games, rotting, and heritage in one formulation (I do believe that would be a more correct order of the words). Now all you have to determine is which heritage to pick that applies here... I'm at lost because I frankly don't see any heritage associated with video gaming, other than perhaps a heritage of a western-industrialized pre-pubescent through early 30's typically male individual, growing up with some or a lot of free time to paly games THAT COMES AFTER school/university/job/relationship/family obligations.

My thoughts of instilling a frame work that would preserve games more readily might be something akin to Valve's Steam content management system. Reason being that you purchase a title at it stays with you even over different computers installations and upgrades. Valve also seems to be upgrading older games such as Half-Life 1 (1999) to accommodate recent architectures implementations (such as mandatory SSE2 cpu instructions, though I don’t see the benefit of this with HL1) as well as a new OS’s (such with Apple/Intels). I realize this framework also relies on the continued operation of Valve as in painfully potent of a reminder when the Steam authentication servers go down (you can’t play any of your titles, at all, even if you are already in game).

Perhaps the best way to preserve game older titles is as many here have already suggested is through emulators.

Bally Home System Circa 1979?

[obiquity]

I spent oh so many misspent hours playing with the Bally Professional Arcade system, also called the Bally Astrocade. It had a pistol grip joystick and the resolution and speed was so far superior to the much more popular Atari systems that came out later.

A great example of poor marketing and or timing, I guess. I have yet to meet anyone else who played this system 30 years later...

Re:Bally Home System Circa 1979?

[Red_Chaos1]

Where do you live? We could meet up. ;)

I had one, but it got stolen from me. Luckily I had the chance to play games on it before that. I was 15 in a group home when I got it, it had been left behind in a shed by someone. I had it in my possession for maybe 2 years. Had 6 or 7 of the games with it, and 3 controllers. The game I liked the most was some Wizard type game and you shot a beam out at enemies to clear maps. Was kind of Pac Man-ish. Was an awesome system for what it was, even though at the time The Playstation and Saturn were the newest systems out.

I did see one on eBay ages ago, but I've only found games and controllers since.

Re:Bally Home System Circa 1979?

[phlack]

There goes my moderating for this thread.

I still have my Bally system sitting on a shelf. When my kids get slightly older so as to not break it, (They use the Wii just fine, but if they break a controller, I can easily buy a new one) I'll bring it out, along with my Intellivision, Vectrex, and Sega Master System (yes, all the systems that weren't terribly popular...Intellivision being the most known). Hopefully it still works.

I had the Blue Ram accessory, as well as two of the BASIC cartridges (the original, and the next one that had the cassette port right on the cartridge). A whopping 2K of RAM! I never did get the Keyboard, though, but I knew people who did, along with the modem.

I remember subscribing to newsletters "The Arcadian" and "The Basic Express". I'm surprised I remembered those names, from like 30 years ago.

I liked the controller. Fun times that system was! It was my first game console.

Re:some arcade games used home gaming systems and

[Anonymous Coward]

Try MESS, it's an emulator using MAME core to emulate home systems (or every other thing that's not arcade really).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESS

http://www.mess.org/

The older generation is dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

I submit your comment as proof.

I submit this comment from the article as proof:

"Who cares
The aging gamers who enjoyed the magnovox or gleco vision wont be around much longer so what's the point in preserving shitting games? I know that they must feel nastalgia for these cause i just bought a sega collection disk for my 360 but i could careless if the games on that disk are gone in the future cause there will be way better games. Frankly its a waste of time to emulate all this simple games like pong or those super super garbage rpgs. Ya for nonresponsive controls and pixelated graphics!!!"

Stanless steel lasts forever

[mangu]

I wonder what medium we should use if we want to store data for a really, really long time

If I were rich enough, I would develop something like a CD made of stainless steel. There's a nickel-iron meteorite that lasted over 100 million years after falling on the earth surface. I believe that's the oldest object found where the original material is intact, not fossilized.

Nickel iron meteorites are a natural form of stainless steel. There are many different steel alloys called "stainless" with different corrosion resistance. My own choice for something that I wished to last forever would be Hastelloy B2 which is, AFAIK, the most corrosion-resistant non-precious metal alloy known.

Re:Stanless steel lasts forever

[The Wild Norseman]

There's a nickel-iron meteorite that lasted over 100 million years after falling on the earth surface.

A hundred million years? Sweet! Just a few more years and it'll be in the public domain!

Re:some arcade games used home gaming systems and

[Beelzebud]

I've used MESS for years. I even have a port of it on my modded Xbox. This paper even mentions MESS.

Look, my original comment was to the AC that searched for MAME as a keyword, and then complained when it turned up no results. He missed the complete point of the paper. It wasn't a study on emulation in general, but focused on home machines. He mentions MESS a few times in the paper, so I'm not sure why he should focus on MAME when it really doesn't have anything to do with the topic he focused on.

Intellivision

[GoChickenFat]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision My uppity neighbor had one...tried to claim it was better than my 2600...probably was.

Emulation is no longer possible

[Myria]

Emulation is no longer possible for new consoles. The last console for which a feasible emulator could exist (and in fact does) is probably the Wii.

Emulation requires that the emulating machine be several times faster than the emulated machine, because there is effort required in translating the original assembly code to the target processor's code. For older consoles, this isn't a problem. But consider emulating something like the Xbox 360: a tri-core 3.2 GHz PowerPC. In order to emulate one of the cores of such a system, you need to have a CPU that is several times faster than 3.2 GHz, even with advanced optimizing recompilation.

Such systems do not exist. It comes down to the fact that computers are not getting faster, but getting more parallel instead. Emulation of a serial instruction stream cannot be parallelized in software.

People generations from now will be able to play Contra but not Call of Duty Modern Warfare.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[KarlIsNotMyName]

DRM requiring online connections will have the same effect for PC games. When the servers doing the authenticating disappear from the Internet, the much older games will have outlived the new.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[The Spoonman]

Such systems do not exist.

Yet. The systems capable of running Atari 2600 emulators didn't exist at the time, either.

It comes down to the fact that computers are not getting faster, but getting more parallel instead. Emulation of a serial instruction stream cannot be parallelized in software.

The Xbox & Xbox 360 are nothing more than PCs running a super-specialized version of Windows. As mentioned, the Wii is emulatable. Future consoles will no doubt use technology similar to what's in your PC (multi-cored, like the PS3 potentially could've been with the Cell processors). There is no reason to believe that what's available today will not show up as an emulator in the future.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Reapman]

How many years did it take between the release of the NES and the release of a full speed NES Emulator? And your saying that because right now, and probably not next year either, we can't emulate the 360, emulation is dead?

Got a long ways to go before calling this one. In fact in some ways emulating the 360 on a PC might be even easier, there's a lot more similar between a modern PC and a 360 vs a PC and the NES.

Give it time. if you think we've peaked our CPU output I think your in for a suprise.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[orthicviper]

"Emulation of a serial instruction stream cannot be parallelized in software." thanks for killing my dream of a ps2 software emulator on ps3 :'( and also for killing my dream of a ps3 emulator on pc. ps2 might be the last generation of consoles to be emulatable on pc since speed increases just come from adding more cores, mainly.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[ComfortablyAmbiguous]

Emulation is just going to need a re-think. In the future emulators will likely consist of one core doing the converting from ancient to modern while a second core handles the actual execution. In fact, multiple cores could be used to do the converting. As long as at least one core executes native code at the speed of the original you're good to go.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Anonymous Coward]

"Emulation of a serial instruction stream cannot be parallelized in software."

Why not? Don't CPUs do this all the time by having long pipelines and decoding instructions out of order?

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Myria]

"Emulation of a serial instruction stream cannot be parallelized in software."

Why not? Don't CPUs do this all the time by having long pipelines and decoding instructions out of order?

True, that is one possibility. However, such a system would require extremely fast communication and synchronization among cores to a granularity of a few assembly instructions, far out of reach in current multicore systems.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Mad Merlin]

Emulation is no longer possible for new consoles. The last console for which a feasible emulator could exist (and in fact does) is probably the Wii.

That's silly. A single core of a 3 GHz i7 is already several times faster than a single core of a 3 GHz Pentium 4.

Emulation of a serial instruction stream cannot be parallelized in software.

This is incorrect. Not only is it incorrect, but almost every x86 chip produced this century will prove you wrong. See speculative execution and out of order execution, for example.

Emulation requires that the emulating machine be several times faster than the emulated machine, because there is effort required in translating the original assembly code to the target processor's code.

Direct emulation of the hardware isn't the only option. You can also reimplement the API(s) provided by the console, for which there need not be any noteworthy processing overhead. This is the approach that Wine uses. Of course, this is generally a more labour intensive approach, but for a static API, far from unattainable.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Myria]

Emulation is just going to need a re-think. In the future emulators will likely consist of one core doing the converting from ancient to modern while a second core handles the actual execution. In fact, multiple cores could be used to do the converting. As long as at least one core executes native code at the speed of the original you're good to go.

The modern consoles currently out of reach of emulation also have a useful property for anti-piracy / anti-homebrew reasons: they do not allow self-modifying code. This means that only static recompilation is required for emulation. Recompilation to the target machine code can be done offline and take arbitrarily long - it isn't necessary to recompile at execution time.

The problem then reduces to taking a block of code for one processor and converting it to code for another processor of similar speed that runs equally fast or faster. That is very, very difficult.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Myria]

Give it time. if you think we've peaked our CPU output I think your in for a suprise.

Even if I'm wrong about exactly when emulation has ended or will end, it will end at some point. That is the problem with exponential growth in a finite world.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Myria]

That's silly. A single core of a 3 GHz i7 is already several times faster than a single core of a 3 GHz Pentium 4.

This cannot continue forever - it's exponential growth in a finite world. I may be wrong about when the limit is reached, but not about whether.

This is incorrect. Not only is it incorrect, but almost every x86 chip produced this century will prove you wrong. See speculative execution and out of order execution, for example.

For this to work, radical processor redesign would be necessary to allow communication and synchronization among cores down to the level of a few machine language instructions.

Direct emulation of the hardware isn't the only option. You can also reimplement the API(s) provided by the console, for which there need not be any noteworthy processing overhead. This is the approach that Wine uses. Of course, this is generally a more labour intensive approach, but for a static API, far from unattainable.

It's not the API that is the problem, it's the instruction set. All three major consoles of this generation have PowerPC CPUs. Wine doesn't have to worry about emulating the instruction set of the source processor, just like WOW64 doesn't. If consoles have the same instruction set as PCs, emulation can and probably will be done.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Mad Merlin]

This is incorrect. Not only is it incorrect, but almost every x86 chip produced this century will prove you wrong. See speculative execution and out of order execution, for example.

For this to work, radical processor redesign would be necessary to allow communication and synchronization among cores down to the level of a few machine language instructions.

Yes, it does, and work started on it over a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, we've been reaping the benefits nearly as long. Aside from L1/L2/L3 cache, the overwhelming majority of the real estate on the i7 or the Phenom II is dedicated to various superscalar duties.

Obviously, there are diminishing benefits to superscalar technology. However, given the improvements we're currently getting, it's naive to say that we're anywhere close to a limit in that respect.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[evilviper]

Even if I'm wrong about exactly when emulation has ended or will end, it will end at some point. That is the problem with exponential growth in a finite world.

You're right... Sometime approaching the heat-death of the universe, emulating video game consoles will become impractical. Sad that.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Xarius]

Call of Duty Modern Warfare doesn't need to be emulated, as it's already on the PC.

As console hardware becomes more and more similar to that of a desktop computer, where would the difficulty be in porting the game itself--rather than emulating the hardware it runs on--actually lie?

I understand it would rely on the source being released, or the owner of the game porting it themselves.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Yaos]

Sure Intel, the clock speed determines the power of the chip.

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'd rather get the non-Steam version of it. Because how do we know that Valve/Steam will be here in 50 years? 200 years? 2000 years?

Re:Emulation is no longer possible

[Miamicanes]

Someone please mod this up. The games in danger of fading into oblivion aren't Pac Man, Dig Dug, and Centipede... or even the more obscure games from that era, or even the 90s. The games in danger are the DRM'ed MMORGs that have no existence independently of the company hosting them online.

Historically, most preservation is done by people who aren't the official owners. Just look at Hollywood -- execs used old, only-existing-copies of silent films from the 20s to start bonfires at beach parties for years. Most of the old films we have copies of came from private collectors, many of whose copies were technically (if not outright) illegal for them to own.

It's one reason why librarians are more than slightly disturbed about predictions that ebooks will replace bound, printed volumes. It's not that they're anti-technology... it's the fact that books have a way of persisting and remaining accessible long after whomever owns the copyright has lost interest in them for any purpose besides random windfalls due to infringement lawsuits. In contrast, DRM-protected content can go away for reasons ranging from active neglect all the way to intentional retraction. It's pretty much a given that cracking 1024-bit encryption will be do-able 50-100 years from now, but the danger with digital content is the combination of its short media life and persistence of copy protection. If ebook readers protect content not only by encryption, but by copy-protection as well, and the media doesn't retain its integrity long enough for the DRM itself to be crackable... well, the problem is obvious.

What about the rituals...

[Stick32]

What about the time honored NES ritual of taking the game out, blowing on the cartridge, putting the game back in, pushing down, raising the game, lowing it back in, power on, power off, raise, lower, raise lower, power on and IT WORKS!! That's an experience you just can't get on modern consoles... Or what bout save game codes and how you would have em scribbled all over your desk on scraps of paper making your parents wonder if you were paranoid schizophrenic... memories...

Re:What about the rituals...

[SleazyRidr]

My parents probably still have the notebook with all the game codes for all the games I played.

Good times, good memories.

Value is relative to difficulty level

[bussdriver]

Easy task have little value while difficult tasks have much value.

I have (almost) no sense of accomplishment beating a lego themed video game other than tolerating it for so many hours with the kids who don't know better. While a REAL video game can be frustrating and require development of some skills when you finish that there is a sense of a valuable accomplishment; as far as game playing goes... I may have beaten the thing 1 time or was close to it 1 time and I remember that when I fail miserably to repeat it decades later and lack the time and motivation to do it again when I now "have a life." Besides, I did it before... which is where less difficult games become the ones played the most like Super Mario Brothers or Tetris where one can create more difficulty if they wish, but it is not required and its not so lame that it has no value.

Re:Value is relative to difficulty level

[easterberry]

Yes. You can create more difficulty if you wish. You can impose a cap on the number of times you die before you restart from the beginning, but the game doing it is just needless frustration. You can not save the game ever. This doesn't mean that games that forced those restrictions weren't adding needless frustration for those who didn't have time to play all the way through or weren't as good.

Re:Value is relative to difficulty level

[lena_10326]

Easy task have little value while difficult tasks have much value.

Not always the case. It's possible for hard tasks to have very little value. This occurs when the task is hard for the sake of being hard or hard due to poor design or implementation.

Silver Surfer for the NES. One of the most difficult NES games ever made yet it is a piece of trash because it is almost impossible to win. The game isn't worth playing because the reward is not proportional to the difficulty level. Many parts of the game existed only to make the game difficult--not to advance the story or make for engaging game play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvnRBywkUZ0/
http://www.retrojunk.com/details_articles/2161/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Surfer_(video_game)#Difficulty

Re:Value is relative to difficulty level

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how in the first sentence, you state 'lego video game', and then in the next you say it isn't a 'real video game'.

Just because you may not like them doesn't make a game not a game. You may prefer your precious blizzard game, or call of duty of war 12, but that doesn't somehow magically make other video games not games.

Re:Value is relative to difficulty level

[bussdriver]

Its not a game if you just aimlessly push buttons as the kids do in those lego games. It shouldn't be so open ended that no challenge exists other than what you make up yourself. They continue regardless as if it was a broken DVD player where you have to keep pressing play to keep it moving forward.

The darn things are the most popular ones and I think they undermine any skill building exercise.

Tic Tac Toe - it always ends up in a draw so its no longer a game but an exercise in futility. No difficulty no value. But young children enjoy it because its difficult to them.

Re:Value is relative to difficulty level

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Back to the Future for NES? I can't believe anybody finished that game without cheating or lying about cheating.

prototypes are disposable

[Anonymous Coward]

Consoles still exist today. The fact that a specific console has faded away should be no more mourned than a newspaper or the fact that the last issue of a specific periodical went up in a house fire. Human beings don't hang around for centuries, why should specific instantiations of our toys?

Hopefully, we and our tools constantly evolve. Hopefully, we've incorporated most of the significant lessons to be learned into our newer technologies already. If not, no huge loss. Just another set of lessons that we'll have to relearn, as we've relearned lessons all through history. "back in my day" is a useless exercise. Your day is gone. Today is a new day, with a whole new set of circumstances.

The only useful part of the past is what we can learn from it. Those lessons very rarely require accurate replication of capabilities.

Video Game heritage??

[nurb432]

ALL of our past is rotting away. Mostly due to our throw away culture.

ICHEG

[The Spoonman]

International Center for the History of Electronic Games. I've been in the "private lab" area. Every single game you remember is preserved.

AVGN

[stumblingblock]

As long as we have the Angry Video Game Nerd and others like him, these games will always be playable.

A Slightly Different Take...

[Tickenest]

Since I think it's completely on-topic, I'll mention my QuakeWorld Team Fortress Archive. Team Fortress was originally a mod for Quake and it had a thriving clan scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it's largely forgotten thanks to the success of TF's later incarnations. I decided a couple of years ago to put up video of every single QWTF match I could find from that era on YouTube since otherwise, these matches and this era would be almost completely forgotten.

Almost as important as the games themselves in some cases is how the games were played. I'm hoping to preserve at least some sense of the community that grew up around QWTF and show off some of the tactics and strategies from the time. I think it also gives people a look at how a game like TF evolved over time.

Is there really a problem?

[MaWeiTao]

Are they serious? There are more avid collectors of classic gaming than there have every been at any time in the past. I have a friend who owns quite a few rather obscure consoles and I can assure you they aren't rotting away. There are countless resources out there for getting old units repaired. We've got eBay, but visit Japan and it doesn't take a lot of effort to find some obscure stuff. There are quite a few stores in Japan that specialize in used electronics and it's possible to find some amazing deals on old stuff. And that's for actual, physical original consoles and games.

Then you've got emulation. It's still relatively easy to find ROMs although it certainly is nowhere near as easy as it used to be. But even with these crackdowns on emulation it's not like collections have suddenly disappeared. There are tons of countless collections out there. This is best evidenced by the fact that there are plenty of people still building arcade cabinets for emulation-dedicated PCs.

Given that these claims have been made by researchers in Vienna I suppose Europeans are less interested in classic gaming than Americans and so not much effort has been put into preserving anything. If the issue is that museums or governments haven't put the effort into preserving games that they have with other media, we'll that's another story altogether. But the article doesn't discuss that issue at all.

The Vintage Retro Video Game Tech

[Orion Blastar]

Well I own an Atari 2600, Nintendo 64, Amiga 500, Macintosh SE, Macintosh IICX, a 1998 iMac Bondi Blue and MacOS 9 (Can't run Mac OS X for some reason) and all have games on it that can still be played.

Recreating the tech that is used to play it actually costs more than making an emulator and then selling the ROMs, floppy disk images, CD-ROM images and the list.

On the Playstation 3 I bought my son a Sega Sonic Genesis collection (Megadrive in other parts of the world) with 40 Sega Gensis games on it. I assume it is an emulator. I think the software and video game companies that own the old video games should license emulators for those systems and sell DVDs for modern video game consoles with the emulator and 40 ROMs on the DVD disk, then do the same for Linux, *BSD, Windows XP/Vista/7, and Mac OS X as well. My son like the Sonic games and while it did not have Crue Ball it did have Sonic Spinball in it.

A list of olf video game consoles that are dead or dying off:

Atari 2600
Atari 5200
Atari 7800
Atari 400
Atari 800
Atari 1200
Atari 800XL
Atari 1200XL
Atari Jaguar
Atari ST
Atari TT
Atari Falcon
Atari Linx
Atari Linx2

Sega Master System
Sega Genesis
Sega Genesis 32X/CD
Sega Saturn
Sega Dreamcast

Nintendo Entertainment System
Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System)
Nintendo 64
Nintendo GameCube
Nintendo Gameboy
Nintendo Gameboy Color
Nintendo Gameboy Pocket
Nintendo Gameboy Advance
Nintendo Gamebuy Advance SP

Sony Playstation (Original replaced with smaller Playstation One system)
Sony Playstation 2

Coleco Tank Combat (B&W video games had two up and down controls to simulate driving a tank and shooting at the other player)
ColecoVision
Coleco Adam

Mattel Intellivision
Mattel Intelivision 2

Game.COM unit
Various Tiger hand held games too many to mention
Mattel Aquarius

TI 99/4A

Spectrascope

TRS-80 COCO/COCO2/COCO4
Tandy 1000 series

Amiga 1000
Amiga 500
Amiga 2000
Amiga 3000
Amiga 4000
Amiga CD32

Commodore PET
Commodore Vic-20
Commodore 64
Commodore 128
Commodore 16
Commodore Plus/4
Commodore Colt series (Commodore based MS-DOS PC machine using 80X86 chips)

Apple I
Apple II series
Apple III

Yes some are computers but they played games as well as the game consoles, so I added them.

Apparently recreating replicas of old 8 bit computers appears to be going on someone can do a different business to make replicas of the old video game consoles and see how well that works.

No one's forgetting anything.

[John Pfeiffer]

Okay, that may be overstating. I'm sure the Odyssey and those other semi-obscure Atari-age consoles are probably going to fade from memory eventually. But the Nintendo? The Super Nintendo? The NEO-GEO? No way. Not a chance.

The NEO-GEO is pretty obscure compared to the other 16-bit era systems, yet it still has a massive userbase. Not to mention the fact that a new game just came out for it a couple months ago. Even with the almost absolute death of the arcade in America, it wouldn't surprise me if the NEO-GEO MVS actually has a larger operating userbase than the home console at this point. And the NEO-GEO userbase is hardcore. They know how to fix their hardware when something cocks up, so they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. And people are still coming out with hardware mods, improvements, and hacks.

Speaking from personal experience, I have over a dozen NEO-GEO MVS motherboards in various states of repair, as well as a fully working 4-slot cabinet and over 40 game cartridges. The cabinet runs pretty much 24/7 and I still feed it quarters on a very regular basis. On top of that, I'm working on an LED array replacement for the horrible EL-panel titlecard backlighting. I also have some interesting ideas about network-enabling the hardware, shared high scores, and other features. ;)

I want to do my part to preserve the rest of gaming heritage though, such as getting a full set of Famicom and Super Famicom hardware and refurbishing them to better-than-new with things like RGB video output for the SuperFami. I still have most of my old Super Nintendo carts, but my console itself is long gone.

Honestly, I don't think anything is gone as soon as 'the last working piece of hardware bites the dust'. Didn't some guy just emulate a Sega Genesis in hardware on an FPGA? Hell, didn't some guy build a working 68000 computer in wire-wrap not too long ago? As long as people remember how the hardware works, it's possible for crazy hackers with wire-wrap guns to make new ones. Besides, I have NEO-GEO MVS hardware schematics. :) (Before anyone asks, they're like 3rd generation photocopies in PDF format, and I plan to redraw them in EagleCAD when I have the time.) Other 16-bit consoles like the Super Nintendo may be harder to do, but the NEO-GEO is just a 68000, a Z80, a Yamaha sound chip, and a bunch of off-the-shelf components like logic ICs. The BIOS and other ROMs are available anywhere on the net. Even the 'custom' chips on newer boards are just a bunch of off-the-shelf stuff consolidated into single IC packages.

But hey, all this is just my two yen, adjusted for inflation.

Typical

[byuu]

The PDF article purports to be analyzing emulators for their ability to preserve the original hardware; yet on page 20 their choices for SNES emulation are ZSNES, Snes9X and MESS.
The article fails to do proper research on the one system they chose to specifically single out.

ZSNES and Snes9X are emulators created from the 90s, and were meant to perform the bare minimum necessary to play the games at fullspeed on then-current hardware (think 166MHz Pentium systems.)
For popular games with problems, these emulators apply game-specific hacks: adjusting CPU timing, disabling certain parts of the hardware, etc. For less popular games, like Sink or Swim, most people just don't notice that they don't fully work.
The original developers for both of these projects have long since vanished. They move at a snails' pace now because nobody fully understands their code to perform the substantial rewrites that are necessary to match the knowledge we now have about how the hardware really works.

MESS, like MAME, gets much ado about accuracy. And it is clear to me that their teams really do care about it. But quite frankly it is a jack of all trades, master of none situation. The SNES module in MESS has been worked on by a dozen people who take interest in it for a few weeks, and then all progress stops for a few more. Where MESS excels is only where there are no alternatives: such as for the Super A'Can. MESS has yet to even get close to ZSNES or Snes9X on the SNES.

So this article looking into digital preservation of games completely ignores bsnes. I've been working on it for six years now, and at this point I have a known compatibility of 100% with zero known bugs and zero game-specific hacks. I've emulated so many hardware quirks, many that are never used by any games even though they cause massive slowdowns to reproduce, that I've lost count at this point. I've analyzed just about every possible edge case, and I emulate everything at the raw clock/oscillator levels.
There are only three games that do not run, and that is because all three games contained special DSPs on the cartridge PCBs that contained embedded programs that can only be dumped by melting off the IC's cap and reading out the data with an electron microscope. A task that we can't find anyone willing to do. So you could argue that compatibility is at 99.89%.

I'll admit bsnes is not ultra-popular like ZSNES. I don't know why that is. Probably a case of not being around when SNES emulation was in its heyday, and people sticking with what they know despite there being new alternatives. Think of the inertia at first in getting people to move from IE6 to Firefox. The system requirements are also high. I find that most people's reaction to realizing their machine is not fast enough is to belittle the software as being shit; rather than taking the time to understand why the software is so much more demanding, and that it's extremely well optimized for all that it does. But even with that, I can assume at least half of the SNES emulation users out there are capable of running it at full speed. So yeah, I don't know.
It's certainly popular enough that if this "journalist" spent more than five minutes looking, he would have found it.

There's something funny about some random journalist commenting on the perceived accuracy of emulators by just observing the games running. It'd be like asking a young child about how the sun produces light, instead of asking an astronomer as you should.
Of course, perfect emulation is impossible. In fact, the game companies themselves can't even make two runs of the hardware without there being differences. I am very confident that the differences between the original SNES and the SNES Jr are greater than the differences between the original SNES and bsnes.
Further consider that these days no two consoles even act exactly the same. The SNES contained two oscillators in the 21MHz range, and as any EE knows, there is a tolerance to these chips. By having more than one tim

Re:Typical

[byuu]

And to provide a bit more context:

The article in question points out that Starfox is reproduced well on ZSNES. This despite the fact that ZSNES runs Starfox more than twice as fast as it runs on the real hardware.

The primary slowdown in bsnes comes from the video rendering. Rather than generate entire scanlines at one time, I actually calculate and draw each individual pixel one at a time. This requires 1,364 times the synchronization overhead of a scanline renderer, but is required for a single known effect: if you play Air Strike Patrol, your plane's shadow is drawn on the ground via raster effects. That is, it adjusts the screen brightness register to start drawing the shadow, and adjusts it back to stop drawing it. A scanline renderer like every other SNES emulator uses completely misses this. You may find such minute details unimportant. Unless you spent hundreds of hours playing the game as a kid, you may not even notice. In fact, nobody did for a few years. But when you play the game with this shadow in bsnes, you find the game is now substantially easier. It turns out the shadow is a great visual indicator of where your bombs will drop.
Another good example is Speedy Gonzales. Due to a bug in the game, it completely locks up when you hit a switch in level 6-1 in any other emulator. The reason it works on the real system is due to an extreme edge case, a mid-frame HDMA transfer huring Hblank updates the CPU's memory data register with the required value to break out of a loop that is reading from open bus.
There are hundreds of examples of bugs like this, and dozens of game-specific hacks. Yet for some reason, when Joe Sixpack loads up Zelda and Metroid and sees that they run, he loudly declares that ZSNES et al provide perfect emulation.
And it's not just the video rendering that is so precise. I also emulate all 32 cycles executed between each audio sample generated, rather than generating an entire sample at one point. I break down opcodes into their individual operation cycles, and I then break those down to support the bus hold delays requires for reads and writes to propagate to their inter-connected chips.
So I provide anywhere from 32x to 1,364x the synchronization between each processor; and people are shocked to discover that the system requirements are 10x higher than ZSNES, and 3x higher than Snes9X.

I know, I sound like an asshole here. In fairness, ZSNES and Snes9X are amazing software programs that fill a vital role in enabling those without fast computers to relive the classics. To get compatibility as high as they have, with all the shortcuts they took for speed, is quite an achievement. But they do not belong in an article discussing accuracy and preservation; just as mine would not belong in one discussing emulation speed.

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working on it for six years now, and at this point I have a known compatibility of 100% with zero known bugs and zero game-specific hacks.

What about Uniracers?

Re:Typical

[byuu]

No, there is no code that acts differently when Uniracers is loaded.

Odyssey

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my neighbors had an original Magnavox Odyssey when I was a kid (we had an Odyssey 2, which was just a glorified Pong). Never could get him to break out the cellophane screen overlays, though.

I'm sure it's long-since gone to the landfill. Shame.

all come from dust, and to dust all return

[ZombieBraintrust]

18 I also thought, "As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. 19 Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath [b] ; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. 20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal [c] goes down into the earth?" 22 So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him? http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+3&version=NIV

Re: The Cloud

[Doctor O]

The Cloud? Are you kidding?

I would advise you read the threads here where people ask how to build a "time capsule" to preserve digital data for 20 years or so. The essence is that preserving digital data is *hard*. Once the power goes off, 20 years later you'll probably have difficulties getting the stuff to run again, under *optimal* conditions, leave alone with stuff getting wet, rusting, heating up because of lack of A/C...

We are talking about archeology here. If we somehow manage to go extinct, and power goes off, "The Cloud" will be lost pretty soon. You can bet if somebody/something were to find our heritage even only some hundred years later, there will be nothing left of "The Cloud".

I mean hey, this article talks about stuff only 20-30 years old and how it's getting lost already.

That said, you're correct that copying preserves stuff. If the copies last.

A Future Exchange

[Zancarius]

Thanks to emulation, many of these older games have secured their spot in the memory of a digital society. Shame that the current generation of consoles is locked down in every way imaginable; perhaps historical obscurity is getting what they deserve. They will be remembered for their litigiousness rather than their art.

I can almost see it...

Son: Daddy, what's that?
Father: That, son, is your grandfather's NES. It still works. Let me show you.
Son: COOL!
*some time later*
Son: Daddy, what's that?
Father: That, son, is your grandfather's SNES. It still works. Let me show you.
Son: COOL!
*some time later*
Son: Daddy, what's that?
Father: That, son, is your grandfather's XBOX 360. He said it was broken, but I think gaming consoles just took a huge step backward and that it's actually a game box where you have to play with three red lights on the front and maybe make them change to some other color...

I still have my Yellow Magnavox Odyssey..waiting..

[Anonymous Coward]

for price to go up. Last I checked you could greedbay one for about ~USD20

Game types are what I enjoy most

[failedlogic]

To me, I do have nostalgia for certain games. But, what I liked more about the 80's and early 90's video games was the range of games. Platform (which are virtually non-existant), shooters (like T2 in the arcade) instead of the 3D FPS, and of course the adventure games. Wing Commander and XWing are memorable as well. The stories in some of these games were much deeper (or at least not superficial) like a good portion of the games today.

Re: The Cloud

[jedidiah]

> We are talking about archeology here.

Nothing that survived the centuries did so because of "archaeology". It survived because people thought it was worth copying and taking an active interest in. Dead culture DIES. It doesn't matter what the storage medium is. Vellum will turn to dust. It just takes a little longer.

Geeks copying things is why any trace of ancient Greece exists.

Zenith console.

[DoninIN]

I had some kind of Zenith console that was just the single coolest thing ever, before the Atari 2600, I had an oddessy to come to think of it..

1980's 3D game

[LongearedBat]

I remember, in the mid-late 1980's, trying a small console with a 3D screen. It had it's own screen that was set back into a black, plastic box, slanting slightly upwards for viewing ease. It came with a pair of "glasses" that used a spinning disk with holes in it to help with the stereo vision (instead of todays' polaroid filters). The game I tried was a space game that used vector graphics. I think it had a few colours, though I don't remember for sure. It worked really well. I have no idea what it was called.

Mini Arcade Emulators?

[antdude]

Do Coleco mini-arcades emulators exist? If so, then I am looking for Coleco's Ms. Pac-Man and Frogger games -- http://www.miniarcade.com/coleco/coleco.htm ... I used to play them a lot in the 1980s/80s. :)

http://www.miniarcade.com/why.htm says emulators are impossible, but then this Web site hasn't been updated for over four years and two months. :(

Thank you in advance. :)

Limited Lives

[merauder]

I had to re-read that a couple of times. First time through I was thinking, yes most of us on here have limited lives to play video games. Then I realized you were referring to the amount of lives in the game haha.

As foretold by Gil

[ThatsNotPudding]

"These Coleco's will rust up on ya like that!"

ugh

[Yaos]

"As with the 16-bit era, the console video game systems of this era were advertised as being 128-bit consoles..." Remember how the Dreamcast, Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube were all advertised as 128-bit consoles? Neither do I. How can you trust anything else in the paper if they just make things up?

Arcade links?

[outlander78]

A bit off-topic - can anyone suggest good, legal online stores for buying old games? Steam has a few, and Gog offers a lot of quality games up for sale - are there any others?

Not our heritage

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a fuck if proprietary shit rots away. It's only good for everybody.

AVGN

[lexcyber]

AVGN at http://cinemassacre.com/ have singlehandedly done what the OP is thinking is a problem. HUGE database of documentation about various consoles. Including the odyssey etc. - Can't just the spend a couple of millions on AVGN and That Guy with the glassed ( http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/ ).

-L

And nothing of value was lost

[Anonymous Coward]

And nothing of value was lost