Not quite. Legal availability to new user is a different thing. Game preservation is about preserving the game itself. As long as somebody, somewhere, obtained a digital copy and kept it, the game itself is preserved, while a physical copy has a certain lifespan, at some point the original media will no longer be usable.

^ Well said. I fully intend to keep a lot of classics I bought on disc in the 2000's in the face of the current remakeitus trend forcibly removing the originals from sale "digitally" (as games in their own right) / bait & switching inferior versions. It's also why I happily donated £20 to the ScummVM team instead of buying Blade Runner "enhanced" edition...

Again, when the Video Game Foundation says that 87% of games have disappeared, they are referring to availability. The fact that a handful of people, who bought them in the 90s, can still play them is irrelevant to most people. Most people cannot buy those games and so they are not being preserved.

What difference does it make to me that you can play the game X and I cannot? The game was not preserved for me.

A hundred years from now nobody will care that you had preserved Game X for your personal use, because nobody will be able to play it legitimately any more.

Game preservation is about availability FOR ALL, not just the early purchasers.

The concept of delisting must die, if games are to be truly preserved. There should be an art preservation law that would FORCE studios to sort out their licensing deals and make EVERYTHING available for sale. If they fail, their work should turn into shareware by law.

If there was such a law, then EA would immediately start selling Alice 1 and Disney, Microsoft and WB would immediately figure out who owns what in terms of NOLF.

Alternatively, a law should be passed that would allow users to trade delisted digital games. Have a feature to transfer a digital license from one library to another.

With a VM, you still have the overhead of a second kernel. This complicates things like scheduling (there's two schedulers involved at the same time), disk access (you need to run the VM on a different filesystem (makes file transfers complicated, making the installation more cumbersome)), and memory (you need to specify a certain amount of RAM, and there's also the fact that that RAM can be swapped to disk by the host).

You also need to run a second init system inside the VM; with some containers (particularly something as simple as a chroot), this is often unnecessary.

Also, 3D acceleration is an issue. If 3D acceleration is required by the game, either:
* You virtualize the GPU, which can cause a loss of performance and capabilities.
* You pass through a GPU. This requires having a second GPU in the system, and is a significantly more complicated setup.

With a container, you don't have to do anything like this, and you don't have those other sources of performance loss, as the software can just run natively on the system, just with a different userland.

Freeware, not shareware. And yeah, that'd be nice.
But on the preservation issue, the fact remains that a DRM-free digital copy made at some point will still be around. And note that I wrote obtain, not legally purchase, necessarily. And, either way, that copy will still be around if and when such legislation will be enacted, or it may at some point be obtained by some library or museum and therefore preserve public access at some level at least. If it's tied to specific physical media and that goes, it's gone for good, even if it'll be made freeware by law later, even for "pirates", gone is gone, there will be nothing to access, legally or not.

Most classic games that aren't on gog are like that because they have a hard time removing the drm from the games.

I think a better solution would be to reduce copyright terms to something reasonable.

Under current US law, all games will eventually be legally freeware...

...after 95 years, which I consider to be far longer than I'd consider to be unreasonably long. Cut it in half twice and then it might be reasonable.

(Note: This is assuming the copyright is held by a corporation; the law is different if it's an individual.)

Then they are using misleading language.
If a film has "disappeared", it means that there are no existing copies of it that anyone is aware of. In case there's a copy that is found later, then it's no longer a lost film.


Preservation refers to something being in existence.
If someone is preserving nature somewhere, the whole effort would be almost pointless if it's only about some individual's access to that natural environment.

What difference does it make? It preserves the culture to future generations, who may choose to play or not to play those games, who knows, but at least they will have that choice.
Without preservation they might lose that, just like we would have lost the ability to read ancient Greek literature, had someone not preserved all that during the course of history.


Having continued access to games is important, but that has nothing to do with preservation.
GOG is cool, but does next to nothing to actually preserve games. GOG (or some third party that GOG is relying on) has modified almost every game they sell significantly.

Software Preservation Society has worded it nicely:
"Preservation dictates that nothing less than authentic representations of the software exist, which are both free of bit rot, and unaltered since the time of production."
http://www.softpres.org

This would, of course, mean preserving the original copy protection. A standard disk image is sometimes not sufficient, as some games did non-standard things (including intentional bad sectors) to make it hard to make a working copy.

Then there's the fact that the game, in its original copy-protected form, may not be good for someone playing the game casually. For example, in the original release of Star Command, you're asked copy pritection questions when you try to save the game, and if you fail to answer the question twice in a row, you don't get to save, which means losing progress. The GOG version removed that, so while it's no longer faithful to the original, it's certainly much more convenient to actually play.

There's also the issue of load times; should those be reproduced?

Naw, it's complex legal issues or the current rights holder just not caring (like Microsoft)

Why mouse, and why is your avatar that of the character Loimu?

Many emulators offer that option, yes.

This whole notion is pedantically silly; all computer games are digital, and therefor must be preserved though some means, lest their data be lost.

Even punch card games and type in games can be lost!

"Digital games can't be preserved"
Pirates:
https://aaronsoundguy.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/famous-characters-troll-face-challenge-accepted-256559.jpg?w=1024

I just use it for looking around in-game and aiming/firing weapons...I find the game a bit more enjoyable that way.
As for the character: didn't know who that was/is, just thought it'd make a nice avatar for a bit :)