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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?"
It is easier to find parts for my 1929 Model A than it is for my '06 Taurus.
I'm not joking.
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!!!
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.
Do you emulate your Commodore 64?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book