[SPG_Active_Members] Saving video games

[Randall Neff]

>From Techradar.com     linked to from Slashdot.org
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/uk-uni-developing-massive-games-emulator-528487

UK university develops massive games emulator
Videogames are not pulp cultural artefacts and should be preserved

UK researchers at Portsmouth University developing massive, universal
games and data emulator to preserve our digital heritage

Computer historians and researchers at Portsmouth University in the UK
are developing a software emulator that will recognise and play all
types of videogames and computer files from the 1970s through to the
present day.

Remember all those videogames from your childhood and teenage years?
Want to play them all again, without having to download umpteen
different emulators?

Of course you do!

"Early hardware, like games consoles and computers, are already found
in museums. But if you can't show visitors what they did, by playing
the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical
instruments on display but throwing away all the music. For future
generations it would be a cultural catastrophe," according to Dr David
Anderson from Portsmouth University, who is heading up a remarkable
new project to save all the digital info and games created since the
1970s.

"A vast bank of information needs to be catalogued and stored," adds
researcher and computer games expert Dan Pinchbeck.

"Games particularly tend not to be archived because they are seen as
disposable, pulp cultural artefacts, but they represent a really
important part of our recent cultural history. Games are one of the
biggest media formats on the planet and we must preserve them for
future generations."

Digital black hole

Computer historians Dr David Anderson and Dr Janet Delve see the
project as a "rescue plan to recover and safeguard the rapidly
vanishing technology and cultural information about the generation
born and brought up in the digital age."

They are aiming to build "the world's first general purpose emulator"
which is described as "a piece of software which can recognise and
'play' or open all previous types of computer files from 1970s Space
Invaders games to three-inch floppy discs."

While there are many emulators that are specific to certain types of
media or platform, the unique selling point of this massively
ambitious project is that it will be able to emulate media in any
format.

Aiming to 'rescue' digital files from a black hole, the initiative is
part of the Europe-wide KEEP project (Keeping Emulation Environments
Portable), with the objective to "develop methods of safeguarding
digital objects including text, sound and image files, multimedia
documents, websites, databases and video games.

"People don't think twice about saving files digitally -- from
snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives,"
comments Dr Janet Delve.

"But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the
technology used to 'read' it disappearing altogether. Former
generations have left a rich supply of books, letters and documents
which tell us who they were, how they lived and what they discovered.
There's a very real risk that we could bequeath a blank spot in
history."

Every computer file recoverable

By 2010 the amount of digital information created worldwide "will be
equivalent to 18 million times the information contained in all the
books ever written."

The researchers note that "Britain's National Archive holds the
equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias of information in file formats no
longer commercially available" and add that "research by the British
Library suggests Europe loses £2.7bn each year in business value
because of difficulties in preserving and accessing old digital
files."

"We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information.
It's a very real and worrying problem. Things that were created in the
1970s, '80s and '90s are vanishing fast and every year new
technologies mean we face greater risk of losing material," says Dr
David Anderson.

By Adam Hartley