There is an interesting paper on game preservation that I've read recently. Being somewhat involved in emulation I decided to comment. Not that anyone would even consider my opinion but I feel like sharing it with you people anyway :P
To sum up the thing:
- computer games are considered a cultural heritage
- that legacy should be preserved for future generations
- there is no established way of doing just that
- problems arise, both hardware/software related as well as legal ones
The main issue here is most existing emulators are running on a specific hardware/software platforms only. When those cease to be, and the emulator is no longer maintained, the emulated system dies anyway. Not to mention there is hardly any proper documentation - the games are one thing but what about the data carriers, input devices and such. What authors of the paper propose is a virtual machine to run emulators and some additional metadata that would accompany games, to provide information about the emulated system - how it's supposed to work and feel.
Said VM is to be a universal platform, one that runs all emulators without creating any unnecessary hardware dependency. Mind you, that doesn't mean it would run existing emulators, just that any new ones would be made specifically with it in mind. Obviously now that VM itself would be a dependency but it's understood that maintaining just one platform is much more feasible than keeping all existing hardware and software alive.
This is however just an idea for now. Authors offer no explanation on how this virtual machine would come to be, and will it be software-only or perhaps hardware assisted? While it's true that any problem can be solved in software, this approach is usually too slow to properly emulate any but the oldest systems. This is probably a question that MAME guys often hear - how exactly can one claim proper emulation if the game is not running at its nominal speed? After all the interactive part is what makes games unique. If a game cannot be played then it's not really emulated after all. The ability to generate proper visual and sound output is just a step in the right direction but not the target.
On the other hand, any hardware-assisted emulation will again create that unwanted dependency, though again, having just one hardware for all emulators wouldn't be a bad thing I guess. Question is, since we know that current PCs can't exactly cope with that, what would it take to create such a virtual machine?
If only a handfull of institutions could afford to run this uber-emulator then what's the point? Libraries would be useless if one couldn't just go there and borrow a book for reading. While some of the books might be simply too valuable to part with them, there is an option of making a copy - paper or phtographic/digital one.
A book, unlike a poster or a movie, is a media that requires exclusive access - so every person would have to get one, or wait for it to became available. Even more so with computer games, each set of controls is supposed to be operated by just one player. While there are multiplayer games of course, these require cooperation rather then allow each person to act on it's own. MMOs are different but that's just one category and for now hardly a subject of emulation (not to mention an MMO would need preserving both the game and the playground).
That means the number of systems that can play old games would be _very_ limited, and possibly restricted since anyone could just hog it for days at a time. You can't create copies since the assumption is the emulator will simply not run adequately (if at all) on a standard PC... The way I see it, those games might as well be forgotten anyway then.
Academic projects like these got some nice funding lately. We are talking budgets of millions of Euros in some cases. And rather than try to work with existing developers these guys start evaluating new approaches. While a fresh perspective is always welcome, and a well-thought standard or two (for, say, game data storage) wouldn't hurt, there is also the issue of reinventing the wheel. I simply can't comprehand how anybody could come up with anything useful without first answering a few basic questions:
- how exactly is this system going to work, as in who would be allowed to use it and on what terms
- what about copyright laws and various later additions that do not only prevent bypassing game protecion systems but also pretty much criminalize any attempt of reasearching them
- is the original system documentation, often being originaly offered only under NDA, going to be publicly available and to what extent
While it's nice that someone is doing something, the problems that need to taken care of first are not hardware or software related. It's the legal issues and general lacking of sensible laws that prevent any sort of emulation, for academic purposes or otherwise. Unless that is sorted out nothing will really change. Then again, I guess government sponsored projects might be silently "exempt" from those pesky laws...
I fear this is just another money hole, one that will take years to fully develop and will not produce anything useful. In the meantime emulators will continue to be made and die, some gaming systems might end up being lost forever, and people will still have to keep illegal copies of the games to play them.
Authors of the paper do notice that most emulators are not commercial, and hence there is little incentive to continue to develop them past a certain point. What they fail to do is to connect the dots here. No emu dev can officially sell his/her project even if it is a fruit of their hard work. Reverse engineering might be legal but as I said various EULA statements, software and hardware patents and informations obtained from leaked documents make it next to impossible not to break any laws.
I might sound bitter but so far the guys behind all those "preservation projects" have yet to make anything useful beside stating the obvious. They've only begun to scratch the surface - what about all the actual work on researching or preserving the game systems in question?! If it wasn't for the efforts of us, hobbyists, there wouldn't even be anything left to save anymore. We don't get any funding and apart from any donations have to make do with what we can afford to buy. We need to keep low profile and are often driven away by a single cease & desist letter, even one we feel is unfounded.
By the time they publish their next, equally irrelevant, paper on this envisioned virtual machine and generic ideas about metadata enhanced byte streams I might be in jail for simple possesion of games that I need for research and emulator testing. For I don't get to claim preservation. And this is what emulation really looks like, folks.
Source:dknute.livejournal.com
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