For those who enjoy vintage gaming, and don’t feel like trying to track down decades old hardware know the joy of emulators. Just download a program, find yourself a set of ROMs, and you’re reliving the good ol’ days. When gaming was all about plumbers jumping on turtles, and fighting 8-bit animated terrorists.
Researchers at Portsmouth University are looking to preserve the history of our software past, by creating an emulator that could read any software dating back to the 70′s. Yea, I wish I could get in on some of that research as well. Maybe test some games out, make sure they work. Hey, somebody has to do it.
The emulator is part of an European program called KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable), who’s initiative is to make sure that everything is being done to make sure digital media is being kept safe and will always be available for years to come. The project goes beyond games, and will be able to read text, sound and image files, multimedia documents, websites, databases.
Dr David Anderson, one of the head researchers of the project provides insight into the reasons behind the project, “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”
That’s quite an interesting take on the idea behind how we treat digital media. Just look at cassette tapes. They are hardly more than a decade out of being a prime source of media, and now it’s a dinosaur format. I’m sure most of you, and myself included have no idea where any of our tapes are. But how important are they in terms of defining our culture, and painting a portrait of life in the 80′s and 90′s?
I’m definitely going to be keeping up with this research project, and see how far they can take it. Trying to develop a device that can read any software from the past 40 years, is a lofty goal indeed. But it’s one that could be very important. Maybe not now, but in the future when our civilization is considered archaic, and kids are listening to music through microchips in their head.
[via: Tech Radar]
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February 14th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Honestly speaking for me video games means those small ones or those games which we play on television with that computer game machine.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
You will never beat the old Amstrad CPC series of computers. They were along the same lines as the old Spectrums and Commodores. Epic retro gaming at their best.
I’ve still got mine in the spare room. One thing that bothers me though is that when I do go and play one of the old games they’re nowhere near as good as I remember them to be.
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Every time i come here I am not dissapointed, nice post
April 6th, 2009 at 7:36 am
True; we need to preserve the software history. We would loose all that we had during our humble beginnings.
July 10th, 2009 at 1:54 am
I agree with you there, one time I visited this blog, and a blogger there once asks whether an old software that he found in his attic can be considered as a collector’s item.
April 2nd, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Thanks for sharing this. I love playing old school games.
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