No abstract

Interactive fiction and video games are part of our cultural heritage. As original systems cease to work because of hardware and media failures, methods to preserve obsolete video games for future generations have to be developed. The public interest in early video games is high, as exhibitions, regular magazines on the topic and newspaper articles demonstrate. Moreover, games considered to be classic are rereleased for new generations of gaming hardware. However, with the rapid development of new computer systems, the way games look and are played changes constantly. When trying to preserve console video games one faces problems of classified development documentation, legal aspects and extracting the contents from original media like cartridges with special hardware. Furthermore, special controllers and non-digital items are used to extend the gaming experience making it difficult to preserve the look and feel of console video games.This paper discusses strategies for the digital preservation of console video games. After a short overview of console video game systems, there follows an introduction to digital preservation and related work in common strategies for digital preservation and preserving interactive art. Then different preservation strategies are described with a specific focus on emulation. Finally a case study on console video game preservation is shown which uses the Planets preservation planning approach for evaluating preservation strategies in a documented decision-making process. Experiments are carried out to compare different emulators as well as other approaches, first for a single console video game system, then for different console systems of the same era and finally for systems of all eras. Comparison and discussion of results show that, while emulation works very well in principle for early console video games, various problems exist for the general use as a digital preservation alternative. We show what future work has to be done to tackle these problems.

Accessible emulation is often the method of choice for maintaining digital objects, specifically complex ones such as applications, business processes, or electronic art. However, validating the emulator's ability to faithfully reproduce the original behavior of digital objects is complicated.This article presents an evaluation framework and a set of tests that allow assessment of the degree to which system emulation preserves original characteristics and thus significant properties of digital artifacts. The original system, hardware, and software properties are described. Identical environment is then recreated via emulation. Automated user input is used to eliminate potential confounders. The properties of a rendered form of the object are then extracted automatically or manually either in a target state, a series of states, or as a continuous stream. The concepts described in this article enable preservation planners to evaluate how emulation affects the behavior of digital objects compared to their behavior in the original environment. We also review how these principles can and should be applied to the evaluation of migration and other preservation strategies as a general principle of evaluating the invocation and faithful rendering of digital objects and systems. The article concludes with design requirements for emulators developed for digital preservation tasks. ACM Reference Format:Guttenbrunner, M. and Rauber, A. 2012. A measurement framework for evaluating emulators for digital preservation.

Abstract. Digital preservation research has seen an increased focus is on objects that are non-deterministic but depend on external events like user input or data from external sources. Among those is the preservation of scientific processes, aiming at reuse of research outputs. Ensuring that the preserved object is equivalent to the original is a key concern, and is traditionally measured by comparing significant properties of the objects. We adapt a framework for comparing emulated versions of a digital object to measure equivalence also in processes.

Abstract. Evaluating the results of a digital preservation action, be it migration or emulation, is a complex task. The usual approach for migration is to evaluate object properties after the migration. For emulation strategies the result of the rendering of the object is evaluated. In this paper we argue that the change of object properties when migrating is not sufficient evidence if a digital preservation action is successful or not. Even for migration the rendering process of the digital object is crucial, and as such evaluating object properties is not enough. The difference in evaluation between emulation and migration as a strategy for digital preservation becomes blurred as migration results have to be compared based on the rendering of the target format and the environment used to render the migrated digital object. Evaluation of object properties when migrating will only validate a necessary condition for preserving significant properties, i.e. whether the information underlying a specific property is still present in an object after migration. It cannot guarantee that the rendering based upon the migrated object will exhibit a specific significant property. In this paper we show the view-path of digital objects and explain how emulation and migration actions affect it. We then compare the changes that occur in the view-path and show that these are at least as severe when migrating a digital object as when emulating its rendering environment.