wee doors banging

The European Union is to fund the creation of an “Emulation Access Platform” that will be able to accurately render “digital objects” of various kinds, including video games. The intention is to develop new ways of storing and accessing images, sounds, documents and, yes, even video games, so that they may still be accessed long after the original platforms for which they were created have been made obsolete by the march of progress.

To date, emulators for old computer systems such as the Amstrad CPC, Commodore VIC-20 or Amiga have mainly been highly specialised software programs with one clear purpose, that of emulating the behaviour of their target systems as accurately as possible. There are a few notable exceptions that emulate a variety of systems, such as MAME and MESS.

This new software system, dubbed “KEEP” for “Keeping Emulation Environments Portable“, is designed to be the “first general purpose emulator” capable of storing and rendering digital objects (not just games) from a wide variety of computer systems. It is also designed to be easy to migrate to the unknown computer systems of the future, thus protecting itself from becoming as obsolete as the objects it is being used to preserve.

£3.6M of funding is being provided for this research, which will last 36 months until January 2012. It is an international effort with the work being carried out at Portsmouth University in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Even with the millions of pounds and no doubt impressive brainpower the team has at its disposal, I think they face a significant, if not insurmountable, challenge in developing this new system. Highly focussed emulators of even simple, comparatively “ancient” computer systems from the 1980’s have many man years of devlopment time poured into them already, and yet they are still not perfect. As  you’d expect, and with the greatest of respect for the authors of these emulators, the accuracy situation gets worse as the system being emulated becomes more modern and therefore more complex.

Attempting to build a single, monolithic system that can emulate a wide variety of other systems, both obsolete and up to date, in “a highly portable emulation framework running on any possible device”, is a herculean task that I don’t envy the research team for. I might go so far as to say I think this approach would be a mistake, not least because it would be ignoring the vast collective experience of existing emulator developers.

I very much hope the researchers can leverage pre-existing emulation community knowledge to aid their project. For example, one of the stated aims of KEEP is to “… address the problems of transferring digital objects stored on outdated computer media such as floppy discs onto current storage devices … will involve the specification of file formats and the production of transfer tools…”. On the Amiga platform at least, a lot of time and brain cycles have already been thrown at this problem by the Software Preservation Society and they now have prototype working solutions.

However, the online project description states the “…aim of the project is to facilitate universal access to our cultural heritage by developing flexible tools for accessing and storing a wide range of digital objects…”, which could be anything, even a bodged together collection of existing emulators and tools. But is that, plus a fancy report at the end, all that £3.6M of research funding buys you these days though? Nice work if you can get it.

Negativity aside, preserving our “digital heritage” is important work. I wish the team the best of luck with it and will be keeping an eye on their progress.