3 ms·

I address this near the beginning - and you are correct that there are some examples that can have a significant impact on the resulting experience of the softw

I address this near the beginning - and you are correct that there are some examples that can have a significant impact on the resulting experience of the software. Emulation is not a 1:1 recreation of the original experience including all of its intricacies. But I'm thinking extremely long-term here, far beyond "what our kids will think about the games we played". I'm thinking about what historians of the distant future could learn from our creations, due to how well they can be preserved compared to other forms of media. Ideally people would have an intuitive understanding that input methods and displays make a tangible difference in the experience, and that an emulator is never going to be a full replication of that - so that hopefully they can study and judge a piece of software with those differences in mind. Technically this is true of anything that can be represented digitally, but software's interactive nature gives it a much more profound ability to represent our culture and elicit a strong and personal reaction in those who experience it.

masswerk 7y ago
I totally consent with this. However, doing as much as we can to reproduce the experience is of some importance. E.g., there has been a basic Spacewar! emulator in Java since 1997, but it only recreated the game on an abstract level, missing the intricacies of the display. Many, including myself, somewhat shrugged their shoulders on this. It has only been, since there have been efforts to recreate the display experience on a more or less analog level that the game is appreciated for what it is, a quite perfect beginning, not to the least for its esthetics. (Disclosure, the web emulation of the PDP-1 running Spacewar! is by me.) Based on this experience, I'd say, there's need to constantly update emulators to the current state of technical media representation. We are never on the safe side… This will only become trickier as any original hardware and/or media recordings of the software running are lost. Much will be lost in translation, since software has context.
- deltaryz 7y ago
  > there has been a basic Spacewar! emulator in Java since 1997, but it only recreated the game on an abstract level, missing the intricacies of the display Did this version actually emulate PDP-1 machine code, or was it a purely mechanical clone? Because if it's the latter, then that isn't an emulator. Either way though, Spacewar is definitely one of those examples where the hardware directly impacts the experience. This is also why I am saddened by the fact that the only truly good CRT emulation I've personally witnessed is from Super Win The Game!, and since I believe that game is closed source, it unfortunately cannot be repurposed for other games or emulators. Unless you happen to know of a particularly good reshade implementation or something. For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way - I would argue Spacewar does lose a core part of its experience without that iconic display, and I absolutely believe we should make an effort to preserve that experience.
  - masswerk 7y ago
    Regarding the Spacewar! emulation: The original one was by Barry & Brian Silverman and Vadim Gerasimov (in fact, every PDP-1 emulation, including simH, is based on this code). The Java emulation was a bit clunky on average machines (this being 1997), but later they ported it to JS and the HTML5 canvas [1]. It does instruction level emulation of the original code, but doesn't emulate the specific display, thus having to clamp two frames into one and halving the frame rate. My version [2] built on this (with kind permission), adding further instructions and some enhanced fidelity in order to support a broader range of software. Also, there's now a more accurate screen emulation – well, as good as you could do in 2012 in a web browser on average hardware. Which is also of some importance for running classic "display hacks", which would otherwise just display a cloud of dots without much of a sense or meaning. Generally, I like the media aspect and the material aspect of media, so I tend to put a bit of importance to this. Another aspect is the kind of artistic stroke in these media surfaces. E.g., Spacewar! owes much to the point plotting x/y display, combining both drawing and painted effects, e.g., for the explosions (these were known as painted displays for a reason). Maybe the most interesting video games in this respects are the early Atari coinops, which expose their internal construction in their compositions of counter-based video windows like Gothic architecture. (Something, which is missed as soon as there were bitmapoed graphics.) We should try to preserve this kind of context. Not to the least, binary encoding is nothing without context – there's no clue to what this might be without external knowledge. (Is it a binary image, a music stream, a program, a data set? What is the compression algorithm used? What are the dependencies, on what kind of machine did it run? What was its purpose? Why was it worthwhile? How did it compare to other solutions? What were contemporary preferences?) There's actually an entire encyclopedia to go with every file. Preserving this will be a huge aspect of conservation, as digital artifacts pile up. [1] https://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/ https://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/ [2] https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar [3] https://www.masswerk.at/minskytron https://www.masswerk.at/minskytron Edit, regarding > "For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way" If there's some to "the media is the message", well, this was originally based on a study on the effects of projected media and the value attributed to it regardless of the content. So, yes, the specific mode of projection and the mode of bodily sync might be well the better part of the experience. However, the Great North American Video Game Crash (appropriately spelled and pronounced GNAVGC) may be still an argument to the extent that the contents still matters, at least a bit. :-)

masswerk 7y ago

I totally consent with this. However, doing as much as we can to reproduce the experience is of some importance. E.g., there has been a basic Spacewar! emulator in Java since 1997, but it only recreated the game on an abstract level, missing the intricacies of the display. Many, including myself, somewhat shrugged their shoulders on this. It has only been, since there have been efforts to recreate the display experience on a more or less analog level that the game is appreciated for what it is, a quite perfect beginning, not to the least for its esthetics. (Disclosure, the web emulation of the PDP-1 running Spacewar! is by me.) Based on this experience, I'd say, there's need to constantly update emulators to the current state of technical media representation. We are never on the safe side… This will only become trickier as any original hardware and/or media recordings of the software running are lost. Much will be lost in translation, since software has context.

deltaryz 7y ago
> there has been a basic Spacewar! emulator in Java since 1997, but it only recreated the game on an abstract level, missing the intricacies of the display Did this version actually emulate PDP-1 machine code, or was it a purely mechanical clone? Because if it's the latter, then that isn't an emulator. Either way though, Spacewar is definitely one of those examples where the hardware directly impacts the experience. This is also why I am saddened by the fact that the only truly good CRT emulation I've personally witnessed is from Super Win The Game!, and since I believe that game is closed source, it unfortunately cannot be repurposed for other games or emulators. Unless you happen to know of a particularly good reshade implementation or something. For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way - I would argue Spacewar does lose a core part of its experience without that iconic display, and I absolutely believe we should make an effort to preserve that experience.
- masswerk 7y ago
  Regarding the Spacewar! emulation: The original one was by Barry & Brian Silverman and Vadim Gerasimov (in fact, every PDP-1 emulation, including simH, is based on this code). The Java emulation was a bit clunky on average machines (this being 1997), but later they ported it to JS and the HTML5 canvas [1]. It does instruction level emulation of the original code, but doesn't emulate the specific display, thus having to clamp two frames into one and halving the frame rate. My version [2] built on this (with kind permission), adding further instructions and some enhanced fidelity in order to support a broader range of software. Also, there's now a more accurate screen emulation – well, as good as you could do in 2012 in a web browser on average hardware. Which is also of some importance for running classic "display hacks", which would otherwise just display a cloud of dots without much of a sense or meaning. Generally, I like the media aspect and the material aspect of media, so I tend to put a bit of importance to this. Another aspect is the kind of artistic stroke in these media surfaces. E.g., Spacewar! owes much to the point plotting x/y display, combining both drawing and painted effects, e.g., for the explosions (these were known as painted displays for a reason). Maybe the most interesting video games in this respects are the early Atari coinops, which expose their internal construction in their compositions of counter-based video windows like Gothic architecture. (Something, which is missed as soon as there were bitmapoed graphics.) We should try to preserve this kind of context. Not to the least, binary encoding is nothing without context – there's no clue to what this might be without external knowledge. (Is it a binary image, a music stream, a program, a data set? What is the compression algorithm used? What are the dependencies, on what kind of machine did it run? What was its purpose? Why was it worthwhile? How did it compare to other solutions? What were contemporary preferences?) There's actually an entire encyclopedia to go with every file. Preserving this will be a huge aspect of conservation, as digital artifacts pile up. [1] https://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/ https://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/ [2] https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar [3] https://www.masswerk.at/minskytron https://www.masswerk.at/minskytron Edit, regarding > "For a game like Super Metroid, the "CRT experience" essentially boils down to "a greater sense of atmosphere and an enhanced sense of depth in some of the sprites". Does this arguably improve the experience? Yes. But the core experience of Super Metroid is not lost if you can't experience it this way" If there's some to "the media is the message", well, this was originally based on a study on the effects of projected media and the value attributed to it regardless of the content. So, yes, the specific mode of projection and the mode of bodily sync might be well the better part of the experience. However, the Great North American Video Game Crash (appropriately spelled and pronounced GNAVGC) may be still an argument to the extent that the contents still matters, at least a bit. :-)