Communications of the ACM
Game Not Over for Retro Games
Credit: CORDIS
The European Union's Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) project uses emulators to keep classic video games such as Pac-Man, Galaga, and Donkey Kong alive. Since emulators are software, they could also become obsolete, and the KEEP researchers tried to make the emulators future-proof so they would be able to run on future machines. The researchers used the KEEP Virtual Machine as a platform because it can run emulation software and be easily adapted to future unknown computer architecture specifications. "We realized that you cannot rely on obsolete hardware to run the software — the hardware is a historical artifact itself," says KEEP project coordinator Elisabeth Freyre.
KEEP has developed a set of tools that will help archivists extract data from different types of carriers and convert the data into a usable, common coding format, which means the game is no longer bound to the device it was made to run on. The KEEP Media Transfer Tool Framework can create an image of a software carrier and store it on current digital media so it can be used by emulation services.
From CORDIS
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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