Seeking examples of Migration through Emulation

[Tim Mifsud]

Hi all,

I am looking for advice and examples of using emulation as a solution to assisting with migrating information assets from legacy systems to more up to date systems.

Working in the policy section of the National Archives of Australia, we are currently exploring the idea of using emulation to migrate information out of the currently inaccessible legacy systems which in some cases are still operating on decades old hardware.

Particularly we are interested in knowing about instances where emulation has been used for bulk migration e.g migrating through Windows 3.1 to Windows XP etc.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Thanks,

Tim Mifsud

National Archives of Australia

[Euan Cochrane]

Hi Tim,

Here is a small example from 2009: https://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/2009/04/amiga-disk-data-recovery-progress-and.html. I also used the approach discussed to recover some data from old Amiga disks for the person who commented later in the thread (they mailed them to me in NZ and I used a kryoflux and Amiga Forever to recover the data for them). 

While this is not a practical example for the sake of the list and hopefully of interest for all:  

With phase 2 of EaaSI we're implementing an interaction API to enable programmatically interacting with environments via inputting keyboard/mouse/controller commands and recording and analysing video/audio output. This is a re-implementation of the scalable migration via emulation approach bwFLA pioneered years ago and will be able to be used for that purpose. In practice one implementation of the API would be to record the interactions required to do the following:  manually open a single object in legacy software in an emulator, save (some of) the content into a new object/file with a different format and shutdown the machine. That recording of interactions could then be "replayed" programmatically across a limitless number of objects to create new objects from them all.  The API has much greater potential for many other applications but "just in time" migration by emulation (just in time as we'll be keeping the emulators anyway and most archived content is never accessed, so why bother migrating just in case?) is certainly one of the most attractive use-cases. 

Best,

Euan 

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[Tim Mifsud]

Wow! Thanks Euan for such a speedy and solid response. I remember you had said somewhere (AusPreserves maybe??) that this was possible, but I couldn't find where. I was asked about it at work and needed a better response than what I could give. 
Thanks again for your help.

Tim

[Cynde Moya]

I've been migrating some Macintosh Photoshop, Macromedia, and similar kinds of images from 1994 using macintosh.js

It is labor-intensive. But getting the images out of there is as easy as dragging and dropping the images to a folder in the emulator that correlates to a folder on my desktop. Once out, I can migrate, manipulate with contemporary photoshop files, share with others--at least the image files.

Is there a way to get images out of the SheepShaver / Basilisk II emulators held in EaaS?

Thanks!

Cynde