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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?"
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.
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.
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).
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.
Stefan Axelsson
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.
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?"
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".
Free Martian Whores!
>>>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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving.
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.