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Reviving Old Computer Games |
by:
Daniel Punch |
Remembergood old days of gaming, when there were only five pixels inprotagonist and your imagination could turn them intoheroic figure of Schwarzenegger proportions? Whenenemies andheroes were distinguished by colour and you only needed one button onjoystick? Well times have changed and technology has moved on. Pulling my old Commodore sixfour or Atari out ofback ofcupboard and setting them up often takes more time thannostalgic pang lasts. I’ve also noticed that some of my old disks are starting to age and become corrupted. EnterInternet.
The wonderfully technologically gifted and giving Internet populace is out in force in their attempts to preserveolder side of gaming. Remakes and Emulators for almost any old machine can be found aroundInternet. Emulators act aslayer between old software and new hardware allowing modern PCs to run programs that such hardware was never meant to see. Commodore sixfour, Amiga, NES, Master System, Arcade Machines and more have all been emulated andnecessary programs placed online for download, usually for free.
Emulation is notnew idea. I hadhardware emulator forVICtwozero that plugged intoback of my Commodore sixfour and alloweduse ofolder VICtwozero cartridges withnew hardware (I never actually ownedVICtwozero 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 withrelease of Bleem!,Playstation emulator for PC that was released whilePSOne still helddominant share ofvideo game market. Bleemcast (a Playstation emulator forSega Dreamcast) soon followed causing one ofmore interesting video game legal battles as Sony fought to haveemulator shut down. However,emulators havestrong following and very active user base.
Emulators are easy to find and download. Simply search forsystem you want and addword emulator toend (e.g. “SNES Emulator”) and you’ll probably come up withlot of hits. Be slightly wary as some emulator sites will either be false links or may contain pornographic ads. Settingemulators up to run is usually fairly straightforward and there’sfair chance that you’ll be able to find some documentation and help. Some ofnewer systems requireBIOS image to be installed withemulator. This is to get aroundlegal issues raised by Sony inBleem! legal battles by requiring you to be in possession ofPlaystation BIOS (and hence, presumably,Playstation) in order to playgames on your computer. MakingBIOS image to load into your computer will most likely be beyond your technical expertise, butquick check of your console’s case will revealfile you need to get and then it’s as simple as searchinginternet forBIOS image that matchesBIOS you already own.
Of interest arePC emulators now available. Windows no longer has very good support for older DOS-based games so there arefew emulators out there now to emulateDOS environment. DOSBox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/) is probablybest known ofcrop. 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 improveexperience for those particular titles.
Once you have yourselfemulator you’ll need to get yourself some programs to run with it. These programs are called ‘ROMs’ and are images oforiginal storage device thatprogram came on (be itcartridge, tape, floppy or other). The process of creatingROM is probably far too technical forvast majority of computer users so you’re probably going to have to find‘backup’ from somewhere to download. This is whereventure gets slightly foggy. Basicallydeal is that you can only haveprogram ROM if you ownoriginal 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 thatdownloading ofonenineeightseven computer game is of no real consequence tocompany that has in all likelihood closed down, copyright doesn’t actually expire for fivezero years and computer games just haven’t been around that long.
Online ‘emulation’ isnew area now being explored. The idea is that you simply playgame in your browser throughJava applet or Flash application. These might not always strictly be emulated programs but many remakes are feature perfect withoriginals. The graphics, sounds, and game play remain intact. One excellent place to look for online games is Every Video Game (http://www.everyvideogame.com). Whilesite does not in fact contain ‘every video game’ it does havevery large list of old games fromarcades, 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 ofold games have even been remade and updated for this modern world we now live in. Try doingsearch for remakes ofgame title you particularly enjoyed and you may be surprised at what you find. There are games that have been updated to be threeD, such as some old favourites of mine: Pac man (http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/fonetwoninetwo.html) and Barbarian (http://www.dgdevteam.tk/), and while these might not always be brilliant games or remakes in their own right,thought and effort put in often leads toenjoyable diversion. There are also more traditional versions of games that have just updatedcode as well as possiblygraphics so that they can still be run.
So if you’re feeling nostalgic or just can’t gethang of these new-fangled games that require you to push fifty buttons inprecise configuration just to jump, you may like to check outemulation and remake scene. It’s surprisingly entertaining to go back in time to when games were simple yet fun.
Aboutauthor:
Daniel Punch
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