UK university developing PC games emulator for classics from 1970 till now
Researchers at Portsmouth University are developing a massive, universal games and data emulator that will preserve every video game ever made from 1970 until the current day in a database of epic, planet-crashing proportions. The program 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,” reports techradar.
The emulator itself will be able to recognize and play every type of video game file ever made in order to preserve these digital videogames for future generations even as the hardware to play them has long since become absolute and/or disappeared from the face of the earth.
To quote from the Techradar article: “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.
“A vast bank of information needs to be cataloged 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 artifacts, 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.”
They see the massive 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.”
“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.”
It’s interesting to note that 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 encyclopedias 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.
