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Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."

Comment Re:Vista left me with a 3rd degree burn (Score 1) 554

by plisskin (#28805847) Attached to: Gaming On Windows 7
But at least with Windows 7 you can use the RC for free until Q2 2010. I never used Vista until I bought I new PC about 15 months ago and never had any issues with it. With Windows 7 RC, I have Firefox crashing quite a bit but for the most part I like it a lot. If you can try it for free, why not?

Comment Re:Self domesticated (Score 1) 503

by plisskin (#28695193) Attached to: Cats "Exploit" Humans By Purring
When camping one time at a semi remote location (3 hr hike in up a mountain) the squirrels there were used to humans enough to crawl inside my shorts pocket to get at some sunflower seeds I was eating (and tossing a few to him or her). I almost tried petting it but was a little too concerned for my own set of nuts in said shorts. Probably wouldn't take too much to get him to allow me to pet it though. I would think that a baby squirrel raised by humans wouldn't have a problem with this.

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