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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?"
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
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
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.
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.
Living With a Nerd
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"?
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
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?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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?"
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
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.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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