Gutenberg of Games - Emulation
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Walter
Apr 12, 2009, 2:57:47 AM4/12/09
to Home of the Underdogs Revival Project
Hi all,
Since discussion seems to have slowed over the last few days here's an
idea to get things rolling again. I liked the 'Gutenberg of Games'
idea Sarinee put forward, I really think that the old site did not do
enough justice to the importance of earlier games and games on non-PC
platforms, and with little effort we could expand in that direction.
Having looked around at various other games related sites, I think
that we should modify the database structure to allow for storing the
idea of a game seperately to its 'releases', ie: different versions on
one or more platforms. The predominant use of the 'technical notes'
field in the excel dump (ie: old site) seems to have been the comment
'CD rip version' or some variation thereof. Perhaps we need to store,
along with the actual files themselves, some kind of platform or
release data. This would also decouple release dates (ie: game
'year') from the games themselves, this data would then have to be
stored against a particular release. It should also be possible to
store the knowledge that a particular release was made for a certain
platform, even if we don't have a download available. Also, the
various extra resources (trainers, level editors, walkthroughs, etc.)
could potentially be version specific, so perhaps they too need to be
stored against releases (with a default value of 'applies to all
releases', rather than being stored only against the game itself.
Further along this line I was talking yesteday with some people about
the MSX platform and tried out the great OpenMSX emulator - which is
really a well written piece of software. I learned that Dune 2, one
of my favourite old DOS classics, did not really establish the RTS
genre but instead actually built on the ideas in 'Herzog Zwei' (some
people have translated this from German as 'Duke 2' .. uncannily
similar or what?), and that in turn, that game was an extension of an
MSX platform game called 'Herzog', which I was able to try out thanks
to OpenMSX.
I really think that tracing the development of major modern gaming
genres is a fascinating area and something that we could do better.
One of the major issues, however, is the currently often painful
process of acquiring decent emulators, ROMs (many of which have
essentially become abandonware), and configuring them to work together
on modern systems.
After thinking about this issue, I had an idea.
How about creating a URI structure very roughly like 'emulate://
<platform>/<software_uri>?<options>', and a cross platform 'protocol
handler' for this type of URI that wraps various emulators and handles
the configuration of the emulator before launch? This way, once
people installed the protocol handler (which would register itself
within their system and/or browser), they would be able to click on
links and (acquire and?) launch games without further pain (ie: none
of the frontendless DOSBox 'mount c /blah/blah;c:;cd blah;dir
*.exe;setup;game' hassle).
The URI could include an explicit adress to download the game (eg:
HTTP URL on HOTU), a torrent, or simply some kind of game identifier.
That way people with legitimate copies of games that are not classed
as abandonware could use it, people who want to run smaller, older
games could grab them via HTTP, and newer, larger abandonware could be
downloaded conveniently by the URI wrapper program via bittorent.
With the number of platforms that are extinct but possible to emulate
increasing, the quality of some of the emulators being as good as they
are, and the cultural significance of some of the old abandoned
software being poorly recognised, this approach would hopefully remove
barriers to people attempting to understand the history of games and
game design.
Just some ideas!
PS: I've fixed some interface issues with my rebuild over the past few
days, and also acquired a great many DOS abandonware games from a
couple of sources and shared them on Brian's FTP to assist with
rebuild efforts. If anyone making a rebuild would like access, just
as Brian.
- Walter
Since discussion seems to have slowed over the last few days here's an
idea to get things rolling again. I liked the 'Gutenberg of Games'
idea Sarinee put forward, I really think that the old site did not do
enough justice to the importance of earlier games and games on non-PC
platforms, and with little effort we could expand in that direction.
Having looked around at various other games related sites, I think
that we should modify the database structure to allow for storing the
idea of a game seperately to its 'releases', ie: different versions on
one or more platforms. The predominant use of the 'technical notes'
field in the excel dump (ie: old site) seems to have been the comment
'CD rip version' or some variation thereof. Perhaps we need to store,
along with the actual files themselves, some kind of platform or
release data. This would also decouple release dates (ie: game
'year') from the games themselves, this data would then have to be
stored against a particular release. It should also be possible to
store the knowledge that a particular release was made for a certain
platform, even if we don't have a download available. Also, the
various extra resources (trainers, level editors, walkthroughs, etc.)
could potentially be version specific, so perhaps they too need to be
stored against releases (with a default value of 'applies to all
releases', rather than being stored only against the game itself.
Further along this line I was talking yesteday with some people about
the MSX platform and tried out the great OpenMSX emulator - which is
really a well written piece of software. I learned that Dune 2, one
of my favourite old DOS classics, did not really establish the RTS
genre but instead actually built on the ideas in 'Herzog Zwei' (some
people have translated this from German as 'Duke 2' .. uncannily
similar or what?), and that in turn, that game was an extension of an
MSX platform game called 'Herzog', which I was able to try out thanks
to OpenMSX.
I really think that tracing the development of major modern gaming
genres is a fascinating area and something that we could do better.
One of the major issues, however, is the currently often painful
process of acquiring decent emulators, ROMs (many of which have
essentially become abandonware), and configuring them to work together
on modern systems.
After thinking about this issue, I had an idea.
How about creating a URI structure very roughly like 'emulate://
<platform>/<software_uri>?<options>', and a cross platform 'protocol
handler' for this type of URI that wraps various emulators and handles
the configuration of the emulator before launch? This way, once
people installed the protocol handler (which would register itself
within their system and/or browser), they would be able to click on
links and (acquire and?) launch games without further pain (ie: none
of the frontendless DOSBox 'mount c /blah/blah;c:;cd blah;dir
*.exe;setup;game' hassle).
The URI could include an explicit adress to download the game (eg:
HTTP URL on HOTU), a torrent, or simply some kind of game identifier.
That way people with legitimate copies of games that are not classed
as abandonware could use it, people who want to run smaller, older
games could grab them via HTTP, and newer, larger abandonware could be
downloaded conveniently by the URI wrapper program via bittorent.
With the number of platforms that are extinct but possible to emulate
increasing, the quality of some of the emulators being as good as they
are, and the cultural significance of some of the old abandoned
software being poorly recognised, this approach would hopefully remove
barriers to people attempting to understand the history of games and
game design.
Just some ideas!
PS: I've fixed some interface issues with my rebuild over the past few
days, and also acquired a great many DOS abandonware games from a
couple of sources and shared them on Brian's FTP to assist with
rebuild efforts. If anyone making a rebuild would like access, just
as Brian.
- Walter
Maedi Prichard
Apr 12, 2009, 4:25:35 AM4/12/09
to hotu-r...@googlegroups.com
"emulate://<platform>/<software_uri>?<options>'" - I think this is a great concept, obviously it would need a lot of work to get this idea of the ground. To make it easier, you could consider emulating this function on the website. For example, when editing a game, a user must specify which platforms and emulators the game runs on.
I agree that these old games aren't promoted enough from a historical stand point.
Coupling system requirements, technical, manuals etc, with the game file itself is a good concept. This is a feature I plan to implement on the Macintosh Garden soon - people will be able to upload multiple versions of the one game and specify architecture, system requirements and manuals for each file. This is an easy thing to do in Drupal, the software I'm using, and I'm more than happy to show other people how to do it using Drupal. And I don't think fields like year, description, screenshots should be platform specific. Year could be based on the first release date of the game regardless of its platform.
I do think though, that at the end of the day, we just need to get a website up there in the first place, no matter how simple. What's the status of this whole project?
Maedi
I agree that these old games aren't promoted enough from a historical stand point.
Coupling system requirements, technical, manuals etc, with the game file itself is a good concept. This is a feature I plan to implement on the Macintosh Garden soon - people will be able to upload multiple versions of the one game and specify architecture, system requirements and manuals for each file. This is an easy thing to do in Drupal, the software I'm using, and I'm more than happy to show other people how to do it using Drupal. And I don't think fields like year, description, screenshots should be platform specific. Year could be based on the first release date of the game regardless of its platform.
I do think though, that at the end of the day, we just need to get a website up there in the first place, no matter how simple. What's the status of this whole project?
Maedi
Broklynite
Apr 12, 2009, 8:35:31 AM4/12/09
to Home of the Underdogs Revival Project
Also multiple versions of games might be of interest. I recently
struggled to futz my way into playing an old mac game from 1989 on my
Vista 64 and it was a struggle. One problem was that for one reason or
another the last release which is downloadable from the developer
himself won't really work (version 2.2.4) while a version I found
elsewhere (v2.2.3) was perfectly fine.
That said (and maybe this should go in a seperate topic) it might be
nice to see a place where we have walkthroughs for how to get these
games to play on today's PCs and Macs. I know figuring out how to get
this game to work was hell because it was a lot of trial and error and
frequent googling, but once I knew how it wasn't so bad.
On Apr 12, 4:25 am, Maedi Prichard <clue...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "emulate://<platform>/<software_uri>?<options>'" - I think this is a great
> concept, obviously it would need a lot of work to get this idea of the
> ground. To make it easier, you could consider emulating this function on the
> website. For example, when editing a game, a user must specify which
> platforms and emulators the game runs on.
>
> I agree that these old games aren't promoted enough from a historical stand
> point.
>
> Coupling system requirements, technical, manuals etc, with the game file
> itself is a good concept. This is a feature I plan to implement on the
> Macintosh Garden soon - people will be able to upload multiple versions of
> the one game and specify architecture, system requirements and manuals for
> each file. This is an easy thing to do in Drupal, the software I'm using,
> and I'm more than happy to show other people how to do it using Drupal. And
> I don't think fields like year, description, screenshots should be platform
> specific. Year could be based on the first release date of the game
> regardless of its platform.
>
> I do think though, that at the end of the day, we just need to get a website
> up there in the first place, no matter how simple. What's the status of this
> whole project?
>
> Maedi
>
struggled to futz my way into playing an old mac game from 1989 on my
Vista 64 and it was a struggle. One problem was that for one reason or
another the last release which is downloadable from the developer
himself won't really work (version 2.2.4) while a version I found
elsewhere (v2.2.3) was perfectly fine.
That said (and maybe this should go in a seperate topic) it might be
nice to see a place where we have walkthroughs for how to get these
games to play on today's PCs and Macs. I know figuring out how to get
this game to work was hell because it was a lot of trial and error and
frequent googling, but once I knew how it wasn't so bad.
On Apr 12, 4:25 am, Maedi Prichard <clue...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "emulate://<platform>/<software_uri>?<options>'" - I think this is a great
> concept, obviously it would need a lot of work to get this idea of the
> ground. To make it easier, you could consider emulating this function on the
> website. For example, when editing a game, a user must specify which
> platforms and emulators the game runs on.
>
> I agree that these old games aren't promoted enough from a historical stand
> point.
>
> Coupling system requirements, technical, manuals etc, with the game file
> itself is a good concept. This is a feature I plan to implement on the
> Macintosh Garden soon - people will be able to upload multiple versions of
> the one game and specify architecture, system requirements and manuals for
> each file. This is an easy thing to do in Drupal, the software I'm using,
> and I'm more than happy to show other people how to do it using Drupal. And
> I don't think fields like year, description, screenshots should be platform
> specific. Year could be based on the first release date of the game
> regardless of its platform.
>
> I do think though, that at the end of the day, we just need to get a website
> up there in the first place, no matter how simple. What's the status of this
> whole project?
>
> Maedi
>
Maedi Prichard
Apr 12, 2009, 8:44:38 AM4/12/09
to hotu-r...@googlegroups.com
On the Macintosh Garden, we've started a guides section to help walk people through setting up old games:
http://macintoshgarden.org/guides
http://macintoshgarden.org/guides
Walter
Apr 12, 2009, 10:59:58 AM4/12/09
to hotu-r...@googlegroups.com
> That said (and maybe this should go in a seperate topic) it might be
> nice to see a place where we have walkthroughs for how to get these
> games to play on today's PCs and Macs. I know figuring out how to get
> this game to work was hell because it was a lot of trial and error and
> frequent googling, but once I knew how it wasn't so bad.
> nice to see a place where we have walkthroughs for how to get these
> games to play on today's PCs and Macs. I know figuring out how to get
> this game to work was hell because it was a lot of trial and error and
> frequent googling, but once I knew how it wasn't so bad.
If we have download versioning then it's definitely possible to
associate extra resources (walkthroughts, cheats, etc.) with
a particualr version of a game. In the traditional database design,
it wasn't possible.
- Walter
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