Not long ago a film buff turned up a 90 year old film of Charlie Chaplin. It had not shown since 1914, and was utterly
forgotten by film historians – yet because analog film technology has
remained fundamentally unchanged since its invention, preservationists were able to re-debut the movie at a film festival in
Virginia.
If the situation outlined in a new paper on the preservation of console video
games does not change, decades from now similar rediscoveries–of the games
many of us grew up with–will be impossible. And it won’t just be the obscure
titles: 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.
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To arrive at this startling conclusion, a trio of
researchers at the University of Vienna conducted a systematic evaluation of
the preservation methods available for console video games–the kind that run on cartridges that contain microchips that contain
game data, as well as more recent types that are stored on DVDs or some other proprietary
media.
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Their work revealed that only video recordings of
gameplay captured from original hardware satisfactorily preserved the look and
feel of most vintage systems and games, with the major drawback that such
recordings completely eliminated interactivity.
To preserve the playability of the games–so that they might be available in a future “museum of
gaming,” such as the UK’s Games Lounge–the curators turned to
emulation of original game hardware. In this strategy, code extracted from game cartridges and disks can be used on virtual machines running on
contemporary hardware.
This approach has a number of drawbacks, beginning with
the inability of most emulators to faithfully render all aspects of a game.
Most emulators are not developed commercially. Dedicated
emulators tend to receive few updates and are frequently discontinued when the
authors become distracted from development. Therefore, hardly any emulators
exists in a final version that perfectly emulates all games for a system.
Most emulators for systems released after the third era
use assembler language for time-critical parts of the software in order to
achieve the speed of the original system. None of the emulators tested was
using a virtual machine to ensure long-term availability of the emulator, which
is a critical drawback for using them as digital preservation alternatives.
Even if preservationists had the resources to develop the kind of emulators that can stand the test of time, their task would be made all the more difficult by the tendency of game companies to worry more about piracy than preservation. This means that
documentation on how their machines work is either non-existent (if the company
goes out of business or fails to preserve it) or secret, so makers of emulators
must laboriously reverse-engineer existing hardware.
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Finally, there’s the copyright issue. Getting permission
to preserve a game requires signoff by everyone with a stake in it–its
creator, publisher, etc.
Given the current legal situation concerning emulation,
it is not possible to preserve video games digitally using emulators and copy
media to different physical layers without the manufacturer’s agreement.
Establishing responsibility for the preservation of digital data must be seen
as a priority. Awareness has to be raised among the manufacturers of console
video game systems and console video games to reach agreements about how to
preserve their work.
Requests to lawmakers to except video games from
copyright laws making it illegal to extract their contents for preservation
have so far been ignored.
Changes in the legal deposit legislation are necessary
to allow exceptions for memory organizations to archive video games. Legal
deposit laws should be extended to include digital data and the legal situation
would have to be adjusted to enable legal deposits to perform the actions
needed for digital preservation (e.g., copy protection mechanism
circumvention).
The
oldest home video-game console–the Magnavox Odyssey–is now almost
40 years old. In 1972, no one anticipated that any of these consoles could make
it to 2011, and there’s no telling how much longer they’ll last.