Our Video Game Heritage Is Rotting Away 492
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?"
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Interesting)
Decapping (Score:5, Interesting)
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/ [mameworld.info] 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:Vectrex (Score:5, Interesting)
Bigger problem with the Vectrex is that it used a vector [wikipedia.org] (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 [caextreme.org] (big convention two weeks ago in San Jose) and console [cgexpo.com] (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:Virtual Boy (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Vectrex (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Not a problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Check out this. . .
http://www.chiptune.com/ [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:No fear. (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Vectrex (Score:5, Interesting)
Behold, a CRT vector graphics implementation of Asteroids. [heise.de] The article (in German) [heise.de] 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:Emulator experience (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No fear. (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Computer Games Too! (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Vectrex (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Value of historical items and data (Score:4, Interesting)
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?"
Re:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Vectrex (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>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:Permanent archiving is impossible (Score:1, Interesting)
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:Vectrex (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Emulation is no longer possible (Score:4, Interesting)
Emulation is no longer possible for new consoles. The last console for which a feasible emulator could exist (and in fact does [dolphin-emu.com]) 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:Vectrex (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [pompeiana.org], 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:No fear. (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Their evaluation of emulators (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Computer Games Too! (Score:1, Interesting)
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.