The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG. They know that a game released on Steam in 2009 that hasn't received any updates will never be updated to support things like modern controllers, which is why they wrote Steam Input.
Even then, there's so many other things that can go wrong with games. With DOS-era titles, DOSBox does a pretty fantastic job, as long as you use a fork with useful features like DOSBox-X. With Windows titles the possibilities to preserve games is almost endless thanks to hooking. I've spent the past few years compiling a personal archive of games to get them in a playable state. For me, this often involves support for modern controllers and _at least_ natively rendering at a higher resolution. Compatibility shims like dgVoodoo make it easy to bump up the rendering resolution of a game, while preserving aspect ratio for games that may only support 4:3.
Graphics are basically solved with projects like dgVoodoo, and there's numerous dinput -> xinput solutions out there, but that's rarely the whole picture. WinSock could really benefit from a wrapper that tunnels traffic over the internet (VPNs are really like using a steam roller to drive a nail). Registry API calls really could be redirected to read from config files instead of relying on the weird bastardization of WOW64 and the VirtualStore. Hell, even file access could be redirected so we can contain all of a game's files.
I'm actually working towards implementing the latter two as a way to preserve the functionality of installers and allow their reimplementation through something like PowerShell.
I wonder how many games are impossible to preserve because of the copyright system and apathy on the part of rights-holders.
As an example: I look forward to the day when the license to the "No One Lives Forever"[0] franchise gets sorted out. Through acquisitions and divestitures the ownership to the rights for the game and its sequel have been "lost".
I suppose eventually it'll fall into the public domain, society will collapse, or the heat death of the universe will occur. At least one of those is an eventuality, I think.
Japan has a scheme for orphaned games where if you can prove you did due diligence in searching for a rightsholder and couldn't find one, you can go ahead with rereleasing the game and the royalty payments get held in escrow by the government in case the rightsholder comes forward. I wish the US had something similar for cases like these.
Ownership is known - Microsoft/Disney/Warner. For them, it's probably not worth the lawyer time to try to sort out what stake and/or transferring the IP.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: when people tell you the old internet still exists, they're lying. This is yet another site with hundreds of historically valuable articles that I didn't know had disappeared.
The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG. They know that a game released on Steam in 2009 that hasn't received any updates will never be updated to support things like modern controllers, which is why they wrote Steam Input.
Even then, there's so many other things that can go wrong with games. With DOS-era titles, DOSBox does a pretty fantastic job, as long as you use a fork with useful features like DOSBox-X. With Windows titles the possibilities to preserve games is almost endless thanks to hooking. I've spent the past few years compiling a personal archive of games to get them in a playable state. For me, this often involves support for modern controllers and _at least_ natively rendering at a higher resolution. Compatibility shims like dgVoodoo make it easy to bump up the rendering resolution of a game, while preserving aspect ratio for games that may only support 4:3.
Graphics are basically solved with projects like dgVoodoo, and there's numerous dinput -> xinput solutions out there, but that's rarely the whole picture. WinSock could really benefit from a wrapper that tunnels traffic over the internet (VPNs are really like using a steam roller to drive a nail). Registry API calls really could be redirected to read from config files instead of relying on the weird bastardization of WOW64 and the VirtualStore. Hell, even file access could be redirected so we can contain all of a game's files.
I'm actually working towards implementing the latter two as a way to preserve the functionality of installers and allow their reimplementation through something like PowerShell.
I wonder how many games are impossible to preserve because of the copyright system and apathy on the part of rights-holders.
As an example: I look forward to the day when the license to the "No One Lives Forever"[0] franchise gets sorted out. Through acquisitions and divestitures the ownership to the rights for the game and its sequel have been "lost".
I suppose eventually it'll fall into the public domain, society will collapse, or the heat death of the universe will occur. At least one of those is an eventuality, I think.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Fo...
Japan has a scheme for orphaned games where if you can prove you did due diligence in searching for a rightsholder and couldn't find one, you can go ahead with rereleasing the game and the royalty payments get held in escrow by the government in case the rightsholder comes forward. I wish the US had something similar for cases like these.
In meatspace you can take ownership of abandoned land if you maintain it for a time. It's called adverse possession.
Where is the SW equivalent? We should be able to gain ownership of abandoned software.
Ownership is known - Microsoft/Disney/Warner. For them, it's probably not worth the lawyer time to try to sort out what stake and/or transferring the IP.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
We need someone to help us restore servers for Ghost Recon Future Soldier https://github.com/koteykaby/raven we have already built a backend on quazal protocol https://github.com/Phoenix-Network-Ltd/Ghost-Recon-Future-So...
Related:
Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865159
This has also been true for board games.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150927182132/http://www.thegam...
edit: when people tell you the old internet still exists, they're lying. This is yet another site with hundreds of historically valuable articles that I didn't know had disappeared.