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...
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.
Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
egypturnash•1h ago
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.
PaulHoule•1h ago
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.
xandrius•1h ago
If it runs on a runnable emulator of the target platform then we're good.
entropicdrifter•1h ago
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.
hamdingers•1h ago
> 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.