Digital Preservation Using Emulators
Created by Paige Kelly
Definition of Project
This bibliography is focused on the digital preservation of video games using emulators or modular emulators. As Bettivia states in her article “Video games have become recognized as cultural artifacts - not just technical inventions, but designed experiences for numerous communities of players.” (p. 18). The articles agree that emulators are the current best solution for preserving complex digital objects like video games. But there are many other factors to consider for successful digital preservation using emulators like the different user audiences and experiences, challenges and limitations, legal and copyright issues, and best practices and the importance of metadata. To find the articles, I used the search terms video games and emulation and video games and preservation. I narrowed my search to recent articles published in the last eleven years from peer-reviewed scholarly journals or academic research.
Annotations
This article ends the debate between migration versus emulation while also making the point that some emulators will eventually need to be migrated. It discusses the KEEP project in which a virtual machine is developed as a “platform on which emulators will be written (or ported) to run” (p. 115). It provides a working framework for emulation and advocates that for it to succeed it should follow an emulation metadata model and a game specific preservation metadata schema.
Bettivia, R. (2016). Enrolling Heterogeneous Partners in Video Game Preservation. International Journal of Digital Curation, 11(1), 17-32. DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v11i1.339
This article is based on the Preserving Virtual Worlds II (PVWII) project data. While it’s primary goal is to point out “the need for a creation of reference guidelines for the creation of artificial boundaries on nebulous digital objects like games for the sake of comprehensive and transparent preservation’ (p. 30), the author has several great examples of emulation in use like comparing the user experience of sound emulation of a video game. It supports that emulation, not migration, is the best strategy to preserve the code but that many other significant properties should also be considered.
Carta, G. (2017). Metadata and Video Games Emulation: An Effective Bond to Achieve Authentic Preservation? Records Management Journal, 27(2), 192-204.
Carta defines the value of his paper as “to provide insights on video game properties that can help to refine the debate on emulation” (p. 192). It certainly does as the most current article written last year with 55 references and further reading suggestions. There is a brief , compelling section on why video games need to be preserved and immediately jumps into the emulation versus migration debate citing numerous authors that emulation is regarded as the best approach. Authenticity is described as the important parameter to judge the quality of a digital preservation practice. Carta explains that this concept in term of game emulation “can be read as the capacity to retain the gameplay and performance of a given object as close as possible to the original....authentic emulation should preserve the whole set of aesthetic, functional and interactive characteristics of the game. However, applying this notion to complex objects like video games can be a very tricky task” (p. 194). There are many factors that must be taken into account like multiple versions, peripherals, and different user communities. The lack of video game metadata standards is reviewed along with emulation frameworks, schemas, and projects like KEEP, TOTEM, BwFLA, and Internet Archive and that every digitally preserved game needs to have some basic features and it should be possible to “distinguish essential characteristics from significant characteristics” (p. 199). Carta’s conclusion is that emulation alone is not the solution that non-textual metadata is required for successful digital preservation of video games.
This article provides an evaluation framework and a set of tests that can be used to assess how well an emulator preserves original characteristics and significant properties of digital objects. While the focus is not solely on video game emulation, video games are mentioned frequently.
Heiberg, C. (2013). Building a Strategy for Digital Game Preservation Based on the Practices of Communities of Players. Master’s Thesis UNC Chapel Hill.
This thesis is based on an interview and observation-based study and literature review in which an emulation based preservation strategy was created. The focus is on retaining the video gaming original context and ephemera through emulation. In order to do that the author maintains that with emulation you need to also preserve the original platform’s complete experience as she explains “a game preserved without as much contextual information as possible is in danger of not being fully understood” (p. 23).
McEniry, M., & Cassidy, R. (2015). How the new generation of consoles have accelerated the need to preserve digital content - part 2. Library Hi Tech News, 32(2), 10-13.
This article is the second part of an article series and in the first part, it focused on the history and impact of video game consoles. Both articles are written by academic librarians and intended for an audience of librarians and archivists. Its significance for the bibliography in that it defines emulation as the primary method of digital preservation and clearly and simply explains the five main levels of emulation: application level, operating system level, computer architecture level, interface level, and environment level.
Murphy, D. (2013). Hacking public memory: Understanding the multiple arcade machine emulator. Games and Culture, 8, 43-53.
This is a case study about the multiple arcade machine emulator(MAME). The author’s position is that the significance of online emulation practices has been downplayed due to legal and copyright issues which he thinks is wrong. He eloquently describes video game preservation using emulation in that he defines an emulated game as a “zombie code running without knowledge of its platforms death” (p. 45) and that emulators “are clever cheats that allow game code to be accessed after it’s platform has broken down (p. 47).
van der Hoeven, J., Lohman, B., & Verdegem, R. (2007). Emulation for digital preservation in practice: The results. International Journal of Digital Curation, 2(2) 123-132.
This is the oldest article in the bibliography and is a great reference to see how far emulators and perceptions of using emulation for video game preservation have come in the last eleven years. The focus of the article is Dioscuri, the first modular emulator created for the digital preservation of video games. The article describes the design strategy, how it was developed, and the importance of reference material.
Watson, D. (2012). Preserving video games for posterity. Multimedia Information & Technology, 38(2), 30-31.
This short article provides a succinct overview of academic and institutional archiving projects focused on emulation like MAME, Preserving Virtual Worlds, KEEP, POCOS, & NVA. Watson compares the challenges of preserving the video games comparing the hardware versus the code and feels the code is more important and can be played on emulated machines. He highlights the inherent problem of emulators in that they can produce a different feel and face legal and copyright issues.
This paper is an extensive literature review of about 85 resources on video game preservation. It’s significant for this bibliography as it identifies emulation as the most widely recognized preservation solution for video games and reviews modular emulation and the Universal Virtual Computer(UVC). It defines UVC as “ a virtual machine that was specifically designed to preserve digital objects held by libraries and archives. This method is based on emulation, although it does not require specialized hardware or full emulation. Instead, the UVC combines elements of migration and emulation in innovative ways” (p. 1873). Examples of modular emulation which are described further in the article, are Dioscuri, the first modular emulator, and KEEP, Keep Emulation Environments Portable. The author also reviews the need for metadata game-specific descriptive frameworks, functional requirements for bibliographic records, and improving emulation testbeds to successfully preserve video games using emulation.
