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VIDEO GAMING ARTICLES
Reviving Old Computer Games
by: Daniel Punch
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.
About The Author
Daniel Punch
M6.Net Web Helpers
http://www.m6.net
danielp@m6.net |
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