| | Reviving Old Computer Games
Remember the good old days of gaming, when there were only 5 pixels in
the protagonist and your imagination could turn them into a heroic
figure of Schwarzenegger proportions? When the enemies and the heroes
were distinguished by colour and you only needed one button on the
joystick? Well times have changed and technology has moved on. Pulling
my old Commodore 64 or Atari out of the back of the cupboard and
setting them up often takes more time than the nostalgic pang lasts.
I've also noticed that some of my old disks are starting to age and
become corrupted. Enter the Internet.
The wonderfully technologically gifted and giving Internet populace is
out in force in their attempts to preserve the older side of gaming.
Remakes and Emulators for almost any old machine can be found around
the Internet. Emulators act as a layer between old software and new
hardware allowing modern PCs to run programs that such hardware was
never meant to see. Commodore 64, Amiga, NES, Master System, Arcade
Machines and more have all been emulated and the necessary programs
placed online for download, usually for free.
Emulation is not a new idea. I had a hardware emulator for the VIC20
that plugged into the back of my Commodore 64 and allowed the use of
the older VIC20 cartridges with the new hardware (I never actually
owned a VIC20 or any programs for it but that's another issue).
Emulator popularity has been fading in and out for many years, only
coming into many people's attention with the release of Bleem!, a
Playstation emulator for PC that was released while the PSOne still
held a dominant share of the video game market. Bleemcast (a
Playstation emulator for the Sega Dreamcast) soon followed causing one
of the more interesting video game legal battles as Sony fought to have
the emulator shut down. However, the emulators have a strong following
and very active user base.
Emulators are easy to find and download. Simply search for the system
you want and add the word emulator to the end (e.g. "SNES Emulator")
and you'll probably come up with a lot of hits. Be slightly wary as
some emulator sites will either be false links or may contain
pornographic ads. Setting the emulators up to run is usually fairly
straightforward and there's a fair chance that you'll be able to find
some documentation and help. Some of the newer systems require a BIOS
image to be installed with the emulator. This is to get around the
legal issues raised by Sony in the Bleem! legal battles by requiring
you to be in possession of a Playstation BIOS (and hence, presumably, a
Playstation) in order to play the games on your computer. Making a BIOS
image to load into your computer will most likely be beyond your
technical expertise, but a quick check of your console's case will
reveal the file you need to get and then it's as simple as searching
the internet for a BIOS image that matches the BIOS you already own.
Of interest are the PC emulators now available. Windows no longer has
very good support for older DOS-based games so there are a few
emulators out there now to emulate the DOS environment. DOSBox
(http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/) is probably the best known of the
crop. There are also game-specific emulators such as ScummVM
(www.scummvm.org) or DOOM Legacy (http://legacy.newdoom.com/) that
focus specifically on certain games and hence are able to improve the
experience for those particular titles.
Once you have yourself an emulator you'll need to get yourself some
programs to run with it. These programs are called 'ROMs' and are
images of the original storage device that the program came on (be it a
cartridge, tape, floppy or other). The process of creating a ROM is
probably far too technical for the vast majority of computer users so
you're probably going to have to find a 'backup' from somewhere to
download. This is where the venture gets slightly foggy. Basically the
deal is that you can only have a program ROM if you own the original
program. So if you have boxes of old Amiga disks, NES cartridges, or
other old gaming programs stored away somewhere, you're in luck,
otherwise you're treading on legally shifty ground. While it can easily
be argued that the downloading of a 1987 computer game is of no real
consequence to the company that has in all likelihood closed down,
copyright doesn't actually expire for 50 years and computer games just
haven't been around that long.
Online 'emulation' is a new area now being explored. The idea is that
you simply play the game in your browser through a Java applet or Flash
application. These might not always strictly be emulated programs but
many remakes are feature perfect with the originals. The graphics,
sounds, and game play remain intact. One excellent place to look for
online games is Every Video Game (http://www.everyvideogame.com). While
the site does not in fact contain 'every video game' it does have a
very large list of old games from the arcades, GameBoy, NES, and Master
System all playable through your browser. Many remakes can also be
found at Shockwave's site
(http://www.shockwave.com/sw/actiongames/arcade_classics/).
Some of the old games have even been remade and updated for this modern
world we now live in. Try doing a search for remakes of a game title
you particularly enjoyed and you may be surprised at what you find.
There are games that have been updated to be 3D, such as some old
favourites of mine: Pac man
(http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/f1292.html) and Barbarian
(http://www.dgdevteam.tk/), and while these might not always be
brilliant games or remakes in their own right, the thought and effort
put in often leads to an enjoyable diversion. There are also more
traditional versions of games that have just updated the code as well
as possibly the graphics so that they can still be run.
So if you're feeling nostalgic or just can't get the hang of these
new-fangled games that require you to push fifty buttons in a precise
configuration just to jump, you may like to check out the emulation and
remake scene. It's surprisingly entertaining to go back in time to when
games were simple yet fun.
Daniel Punch
M6.Net Web Helpers
http://www.m6.net
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| | Posted 12/3/2007 7:15 AM - 32 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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