Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

> “We are talking about more subtle things,” Paczynski explains, “like the game not supporting modern controllers, the game not supporting ultra-wide screens or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like being able to minimize the game.”

I dunno if it's really preservation when you have to completely rework the game to work on a screen three times wider and 4x denser than anything that existed when the game was designed, and hack in a completely new way of talking to the controllers. Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day. Even if they're still both running versions of Windows, a 2025 computer and a 1997 computer are completely alien systems that have about as much to do with each other as a 2025 computer and a Nintendo 64.

View on HN

It's probably closer to conservation and restoration. One day there won't be any more working 1997 computers, so getting the game to work on a 2025 computer extends the lifespan of the media by at least 28 years. It's not unlike digitizing VHS tapes.

> Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day.

This is indeed one of the ways GoG ships games, but it doesn't work in all cases.

QEMU does a pretty good job at pretending to be a 1997 computer, or a 2025 computer, and it seems to work well to run QEMU inside of QEMU already, so should be somewhat likely that old virtual machines can be kept alive by running inside of increasingly deep levels of virtual machines running inside of newer virtual machines.

Legal, non-free, operating systems to install in those virtual machines is trickier. No old freeware version of Windows (yet?). Installing a minimal Linux distribution with WINE, for games that can be made to run in WINE in QEMU, might be the most stable way to preserve a 1997-era game. Except for 1997 DOS games (there were surprisingly many still being published in 1997!) that run so well in DOSBox(-X).

Not the GoG way.

I remember working at a library field where there was a tremendous amount of concern that digital assets like floppy disks and files would become 'unplayable' over time.

You might not be able to pay people to do it but the video game emulation community shows that it can be done as a labor of love.

GoG is packaging a large chunk of their library in an emulator already. DOSBox is what got them started, in fact.

Projects like eXoDOS and DOSBox (and its derivatives) have basically allowed most of DOS and win31 games to be in a very playable state. GoG is doing the detective work of finding out who owns it and trying to monetize parts of it as well as fixing some of their own stuff. When it comes to many of the late 90s win9x/winxp games those are in the territory of 'maybe runs'. Due to the way windows is subtly changing the API and what a standard windows install comes with. Also APIs that now return even more stuff than what they tested with. Such as a video caps function may now return 500 items when it was tested to run with 60 and the input buffer maxes at 256. Never mind many of them act totally bugged out if you hand it a 4k screen and you have scaling turned on.

Had one game from a few weeks ago that I could not get to run. Turns out it was an intel video driver bug. Really old intel driver worked. One from 2 years ago didnt. One from a few weeks ago did. Old nvidia worked, newer ones broken. One windows box worked the other didnt. Shims like dgVoodoo2 and dxwrapper help to a point But still have lots of issues. Then on top of that if there is a online component the game will at best hang/timeout at worse crash out. Have one game if I open the leaderboard on it will crash the game. The board was apparently turned off 15 years ago.

Yep, it's like one day we expect an old game to work in VR++ and my 950pi smellovision implant.

If it runs on a runnable emulator of the target platform then we're good.

But we do want that, right? We want people in the future with their unknowable future digital-experience-providing devices to be able to experience the video games of the past/today, right?

So in the interest of making older games future compatible we (those interested in preservation) do need to pursue those things.

How else can we guarantee they'll run on future devices? Emulators are one good way to make things run on newer devices, but emulators will in turn need the features to be able to run on 4K/8K screens, XR devices, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com