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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
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 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.
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!
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)
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