The R-Type Game You Have (Probably) Never Played

[Friendly]

R-Type Sparkle in the Void of Space (Flash of The Void) mini game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB6g--WgKAE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb9LPuAcfSU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jv80ZjE3wk

And with the death of Irem, it's completely vanished now.
Welcome to the digital future.

[Edmond Dantes]

And with the death of Irem, it's completely vanished now.
Welcome to the digital future.

Thus highlighting why the death of physical media may as well be the death of art as we know it.

[Ganelon]

Is there any way to reconstruct the game from offline content or was key data for the game stored server-side only? I've played this game on my PS3 (not fun at all IMO) and still have the Irem PS Home space if someone thinks he can piece together the game with my offline data.

On a similar note of more personal interest, I also have all the offline files for Street Fighter Online Mouse Generation, which got canned years back on PC. If anyone thinks he can do anything with those assets, please let me know. I'd love to try the game out again but it no longer runs without Daletto's connecting piece.

[CStarFlare]

Thus highlighting why the death of physical media may as well be the death of art as we know it.

Lost works have been a reality for centuries. Let's be reasonable.

It's also completely possible (even likely) that the game still exists in some form, it's just not available to us. Unattainability is also a well known to people who grew up with physical media (wtb dodonpachi campaign version plz)

[Ed Oscuro]

I think it's right that this is very detrimental to art, but I wouldn't say that wholesale destruction of works as a matter of course is really a centuries-old phenomenon that was accepted as par for the course. Monks reusing vellum or ancient treatises crumbling away are either accidental or not totally catastrophic (reusing vellum leaves traces of the original work in many cases, such as the recently-discovered Archimedes Palimpsest). Stupid policies that ignite the ire of all friends of the arts, like the wholesale destruction of "worthless" silent films, or the destruction of art for tax purposes, seem to be more recent phenomenons.

What is most aggravating about this latest trend is that putting games in the cloud has obvious benefits that speak louder to game creators than seemingly abstract ideals like "preservation of gaming history," unfortunately, so it's not clear how to see the way out of this problem.

[Edmond Dantes]

Yeah, what Oscuro said. Those older works were lost due mostly to things that were beyond mankind's power at the time. Such is not the case today. Megaman 3 is always gonna exist, but Megaman 9 is only as future-proof as people's ability to back it up--and let's be honest, that likely means it'll be just a memory in a couple decades.

If there's a way out, its likely through downloading and putting it on a thumb drive or something, creating your own personal physical copy. But then you have games that have DRM... those have to be cracked, and then the crack might introduce bugs (as I've heard happens with some Steam games). In short, there's no point getting attached to things that don't have physical releases. Except Ib. Ib is awesome.

[BryanM]

Megaman 3 is always gonna exist, but Megaman 9 is only as future-proof as people's ability to back it up--and let's be honest, that likely means it'll be just a memory in a couple decades.

As long as the internet continues to exist, MM9 will still be readily available.

When the internet ceases existing, we will probably have bigger problems than game preservation.

[Edmond Dantes]

Why "as long as the internet exists?" MM9 was only released for XB360, PS3 and the original Wii, right? So as soon as those consoles are phased out, the game is gone (unless their replacements are backwards-compatible). Or Capcom could simply decide to pull it.

Or are you suggesting that someone's cracked it and ported it to PC?

[GSK]

Why "as long as the internet exists?" MM9 was only released for XB360, PS3 and the original Wii, right? So as soon as those consoles are phased out, the game is gone (unless their replacements are backwards-compatible). Or Capcom could simply decide to pull it.

Or are you suggesting that someone's cracked it and ported it to PC?

You can emulate the Wii version without any issues, as far as I know.

[BryanM]

Or are you suggesting that someone's cracked it and ported it to PC?

Seriously, the internet archives everything. Even if it had some super-duper genius encryption lock-down on the data, we'd still have that data widely available.

[system11]

There are already original Xbox Live Arcade games which are lost to time.

In the future, consoles which have patches left on them for games coming out today will end up fetching a premium... Just as an example AC4 Black Flag has shipped 900P because Ubisoft fail at life, and they're going to have to patch it 'soon'. In 15 years time if someone wants to play that game properly, they're going to need to buy a console with the patch still on it.

[Pretas]

In the future, consoles which have patches left on them for games coming out today will end up fetching a premium... Just as an example AC4 Black Flag has shipped 900P because Ubisoft fail at life, and they're going to have to patch it 'soon'. In 15 years time if someone wants to play that game properly, they're going to need to buy a console with the patch still on it.

Or more likely, the system will be cracked wide open and there will be a way to install downloaded patches and DLC via burned disc or USB.

[Squire Grooktook]

The future scares me.

[Ganelon]

In the future, consoles which have patches left on them for games coming out today will end up fetching a premium... Just as an example AC4 Black Flag has shipped 900P because Ubisoft fail at life, and they're going to have to patch it 'soon'. In 15 years time if someone wants to play that game properly, they're going to need to buy a console with the patch still on it.

Or more likely, the system will be cracked wide open and there will be a way to install downloaded patches and DLC via burned disc or USB.

I'm still waiting for all the original Xbox patches. The DLC is out there but nobody seemed to have cared about the patches. Some obscure games have patches that I've never even found mentioned online. To do your part for posterity, be sure to update all your games and get as much DLC as you can before PS3 and 360 inevitably lose online support.

[Ghegs]

Counter-point:

Megaman 3 is always gonna exist

No, it is not. Some ways down the road, every single original physical copy of Megaman 3 will be gone. They will be lost due to negligence, accidents, the chips just giving up and dying...it will take a long time, probably hundreds of years, but it will happen. But the game will survive even after that, thanks to the rom image which can easily be transferred to new systems and copied endlessly without any loss.

Case in point: SideLine. You can play the game today only because it exists in digital form. There are still physical copies of it in existence, but they're very few and far between and the game's not even 20 years old. The digital release, however, has been downloaded 909 times so far and it continues to be downloaded as time passes. Even after I'm dead and my site goes down, the game will still be out there on the Internet. As long as one of those downloaded copies survives, the game can resurrected again easily. The remaining physical copies will have been tossed out by the descendants of people who originally had them, or they have been destroyed in a house fire or got swooped away by a tsunami or any other possible misfortune. Or the original CDs will just die, optical media has the estimated life time of around 200 years, I believe.

Digital games without DRM and/or reliance on one specific piece of hardware have the potential to be around forever. Physical games do not.

[drauch]

Let's just put it this way: anything worth playing will probably always be available in some form. In 50 years if you still want the WAD files for Megaman 9 and 10, just let me know.

[evil_ash_xero]

Let's just put it this way: anything worth playing will probably always be available in some form. In 50 years if you still want the WAD files for Megaman 9 and 10, just let me know.

Yeah, I was gonna say that. I think almost every single Wii VC game has been ripped and are up somewhere or other.

[Ed Oscuro]

Digital games without DRM and/or reliance on one specific piece of hardware have the potential to be around forever. Physical games do not.

We still don't have an original Xbox emulator, so you've got the origin of the challenge wrong.

The argument you're making, that "physical games" are tied to their media, is also based on a false comparison. You're penalizing games with a removable physical medium for presenting more options to the user. As we all know, the ROM images can be extracted from any physical media. The major challenge is making sense of that (emulation).

If you want to make a better comparison, it'd be between the formats that the media takes. If one is going to argue that physical media degrades, then one must also argue that the (more important) physical systems used to play the games also degrade. Some games store their data on a physical medium (NES cartridge), some are stored in internal memory (Wii VC titles), and some are internet serviced only (NESiCA x LIVE, many flash games online) unless the files are grabbed or the owner chooses to release them to the public. The only difference between a NES cartridge and Wii VC title is in the details of when and how the image's physical residence in the machine was decided. But there was a time, in both cases, where the game files resided on a development PC before being transferred to another medium.

The crumbling manuscript I posted earlier is a good example of the general problem. The full text is partly lost, but what remains is still comprehensible. If people chose to make copies of its parts, then more of it would likely still be available. And this is actually what happened with a number of classics from ancient times - Greek writings especially. Of course there's no guarantee that anybody will care in the future to keep copies of NES ROMs, but it seems probable that they might.

The argument that "everything worthwhile has been ripped" is silly on its face. There are plenty of important games that are server hosted only which nobody has a copy of. Probably thousands of games like this are no longer available because hosting has been pulled.

[drauch]

But what can you do about server games? Won't that almost always be a problem, especially with huge hosted MMORPGs and such?

Everything worthwhile has certainly not been emulated, but I would speculate that most games--excluding the aforementioned MMO titles--will be in some form; or, at least physical games. There are dedicated communities in regard to whatever home computer or console out there. I mean, look at all the dumps of obscure PC-98, x68000, DOS, etc. titles out there.

XBOX Live and WiiWare titles: are there any objectively good ones out there that dedicated communities will let fade into obscurity? I'm all about preservation, but I can't say I'd be too worried if a few dozen indie live titles fell off the deep end. At this point do we need an Xbox emulator, even?

I think if anything I'm more concerned with certain arcade ROMs never being dumped. Do we even have a legit dump of Primal Rage yet due to the protection?

[PurpBullets]

But what can you do about server games? Won't that almost always be a problem, especially with huge hosted MMORPGs and such?

Everything worthwhile has certainly not been emulated, but I would speculate that most games--excluding the aforementioned MMO titles--will be in some form; or, at least physical games. There are dedicated communities in regard to whatever home computer or console out there. I mean, look at all the dumps of obscure PC-98, x68000, DOS, etc. titles out there.

XBOX Live and WiiWare titles: are there any objectively good ones out there that dedicated communities will let fade into obscurity? I'm all about preservation, but I can't say I'd be too worried if a few dozen indie live titles fell off the deep end. At this point do we need an Xbox emulator, even?

I think if anything I'm more concerned with certain arcade ROMs never being dumped. Do we even have a legit dump of Primal Rage yet due to the protection?

Surprisingly, nearly all the undumped games for retro computers were through a sort of internet server. Takeru machines allowed anybody to sell their game. It could be from a legit source, or the author could be a teenager at home. Shinobu Yagawa actually released his first STG through Takeru for MSX. Unfortunately an enormous amount of takeru games are undumped still. You would think since at the Takeru services peak, there was 1 like on every corner, it wouldnt be hard to save those files. At least Brother must have saved everything? If someone did, they did not release them. I have thought about what the reasoning might have been? Negligence? A scheme to make more money in the long run once everything is rarer and rarer. My friend in japan told me that everything was lost due to data corruption in the Takeru machines. Who knows though? I do know that finding these undumped games is not easy. Not to mention how some authors just dont like gaijin.

I would say that saving everything is a serious concern. Because its the same realization no matter what title it may be.
Its not available/accessible....
I cant tell you how many awesome weird undumped STGs their are for retro computers that are just not there publicly.
Finding them is next to impossible, unless you know the right people. It is not fun to be enticed by an amazing game to find out its on a mythical level of existence.

This hasnt been long either... 20 years, and a huge percentage was lost.

[Ganelon]

But what can you do about server games? Won't that almost always be a problem, especially with huge hosted MMORPGs and such?

It depends. As I suggested in my first post, some online games store enough data offline that it's possible to get most or all (rarely) of the data and tweak some references to achieve an approximate or identical copy of the original game respectively. Ultima Online is probably the most well-known example of reverse engineering the server connection where even past versions of the MMO still exist in part. Even if EA goes under, player shards can keep the game going indefinitely (amazing it's been over 15 years already). But this kind of stuff requires dedicated hackers.

[Ghegs]

@ Ed

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to convey there, but it doesn't seem to contradict my statement. In case it created some confusion, my "Megaman 3 will not be around forever" was only referring to the physical copies of the game, which is what I believe Edmond Dantes was talking about. The rom image will, of course, be around far longer than any of the game's physical copies, which was kind of my point.

[drauch]

But what can you do about server games? Won't that almost always be a problem, especially with huge hosted MMORPGs and such?

Everything worthwhile has certainly not been emulated, but I would speculate that most games--excluding the aforementioned MMO titles--will be in some form; or, at least physical games. There are dedicated communities in regard to whatever home computer or console out there. I mean, look at all the dumps of obscure PC-98, x68000, DOS, etc. titles out there.

XBOX Live and WiiWare titles: are there any objectively good ones out there that dedicated communities will let fade into obscurity? I'm all about preservation, but I can't say I'd be too worried if a few dozen indie live titles fell off the deep end. At this point do we need an Xbox emulator, even?

I think if anything I'm more concerned with certain arcade ROMs never being dumped. Do we even have a legit dump of Primal Rage yet due to the protection?

Surprisingly, nearly all the undumped games for retro computers were through a sort of internet server. Takeru machines allowed anybody to sell their game. It could be from a legit source, or the author could be a teenager at home. Shinobu Yagawa actually released his first STG through Takeru for MSX. Unfortunately an enormous amount of takeru games are undumped still. You would think since at the Takeru services peak, there was 1 like on every corner, it wouldnt be hard to save those files. At least Brother must have saved everything? If someone did, they did not release them. I have thought about what the reasoning might have been? Negligence? A scheme to make more money in the long run once everything is rarer and rarer. My friend in japan told me that everything was lost due to data corruption in the Takeru machines. Who knows though? I do know that finding these undumped games is not easy. Not to mention how some authors just dont like gaijin.

I would say that saving everything is a serious concern. Because its the same realization no matter what title it may be.
Its not available/accessible....
I cant tell you how many awesome weird undumped STGs their are for retro computers that are just not there publicly.
Finding them is next to impossible, unless you know the right people. It is not fun to be enticed by an amazing game to find out its on a mythical level of existence.

This hasnt been long either... 20 years, and a huge percentage was lost.

Damn, some good points there. As I kinda assumed, I wasn't aware. Odd, too, that so many gamers and collectors out there just flat out don't give a shit about PC games. I typically hate the Youtube video game community, bu from what little I've watched of "big" collectors, most of them only care about console games. Thousands of game, yet only a handful of popular titles on PC--presumably due to configuration and compatibility, I suppose, which seems fairly silly if you're going to amass so much time into collecting bizarre Pong consoles and other obscurities.

This is all rather depressing.

[Ed Oscuro]

@ Ed

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to convey there, but it doesn't seem to contradict my statement. In case it created some confusion, my "Megaman 3 will not be around forever" was only referring to the physical copies of the game, which is what I believe Edmond Dantes was talking about. The rom image will, of course, be around far longer than any of the game's physical copies, which was kind of my point.

Aside from the sweeping generalization about the future (I certainly can imagine plausible futures where all the data has been nuked, but the box art and plastic shells survive alongside ancient paintings and statues), you keep saying "physical copies" as if "physical format" (whatever you mean by this - it's vague because flash memory is a "physical format" just as much as a NES cartridge) only applies to games, instead of systems. This is wrong - you must consider the "physical format" contributing to our ability to play the game - like having the right kind of controller ("you mean you have to use your hands?") and having the right kind of system to play it on (even systems that are widely supported in some respects can vanish overnight - so much emulation is reliant on the X86 architecture it's not funny, at the same time that the X86 CPU within the Xbox is not completely well understood even for virtualization on another X86 CPU).

All these physical things can break and stop working, given enough time, agreed. The problem is whether our backups really fix this problem: We can back up PS2 and Xbox discs all we like but that's no guarantee that anybody will be able to use them at all like somebody using a real system would. Good examples are the close-but-inaccurate output of PCSX2 rendered with a modern GPU instead of the software renderer, and the near complete lack of Xbox emulation. If you had an Xbox game disc data copy, and enough time and ability, you could probably work backwards to come up with a somewhat accurate description of how it played on the original system. But even with carefully recorded details of actual Xbox games playing, you can't just assume that looking at the output is going to give an accurate picture of what's happening inside the box. So we have two choices here (and hopefully we will take both): Either make careful and complete measurements (as much as possible) of the system now, for use later on, or keep duplicating parts so that we don't have that future where you run out of parts and thus don't know the context of how the systems actually worked.

Before you dismiss this as just an emulation tangent, I would invite you to take a moment to reflect on how little progress is made in these areas.

So that is one of my concerns - the "ROM images solve everything" school of preservation thought. And unfortunately, a lot gets swept under the rug when we assume that the relatively easy part (making copies of ROMs) is all that we need to really worry about.

Perhaps these things (and server-based issues, like leaderboards and so on) aren't catastrophic losses for preserving games, but it's not ridiculous to admit that we are losing ground here. On the other hand, if we make accurate records of the physical formats and devices used to play games, we can keep "replacing the ax handle" and actually have something that is far more accurate than just using teh ROMz. I know you have to agree with this, because you must have some arcade hardware you'd like to preserve. Replacing capacitors, mask ROMs, or even the fiberglass board for a PCB as needed still can leave you with a lot more accurate representation of the original object (when replacements or copies are backed up by careful measurements and reproduction of originals) than just trying to do something (what?) starting with the ROMs and broad specifications alone.

About the original point, it seemed to me that your main reason for stating that "physical copies won't be around forever" was to push us towards dismissing holding original formats as critical for preservation. Even within the meaning of the law, it seems to me there is nothing that says that I cannot make a direct backup copy of an original format (such as a NES cartridge) for future use. So whyu not do this? Money, of course, but that doesn't mean the approach isn't important to try.

We also shouldn't be optimistic about the ability of hobbyist part makers and emulator programmers to capture every important system out there. In fact, I think the population of hobbyist preservationists is already swamped just taking care of a few things. In this sense it's too bad that worldwide tech laws and practices promote fragmentation and dissuade more widespread adoption of standards.

[BryanM]

Thousands of game, yet only a handful of popular titles on PC--presumably due to configuration and compatibility

Chris, the "I'ma play and review every horror game there is" guy, kind of lays out why.

Besides "that's just what they're into", consoles give them a much smaller, and more easily attainable task. Any console generation, there's only 3 to 5 big ones released. With computers, there's more platforms out there than there are pokemon. And collecting "all of the games" for them is a virtual impossibility - I can write a shitty new one in like a week. And then be a douche and not release it*. And then you won't have all teh games for the PC, will ya?

* (Though the world is probably better off without Men Mit Dem Morters, a piece of shit I cobbled together in spare class time in Air Force tech school (not exactly a period of time I was my most stable of mind) using stock VB6 controls and stock windows sound files.)

The future scares me.

Shh shhhhhh... David Levy says we'll have robot wives to take care of us. And Kurzweil thinks nanobots are like industrial robots (and not like, tiny forks as the laws of physics demand) that we can use to transform ourselves into a kitty if we still can't handle it.

It'll all be okay, as long as the lab meat is cheap and plentiful.

The lab meat is made out of people btw.

[Obiwanshinobi]

There have always been games I couldn't play, so it's not like much has changed for me.

[Ghegs]

Ed, I think you're reading something from my post that I didn't actually say or intend to say. Of course the hardware required to run the game will also stop working, that was kind of included in the "Digital games without DRM and/or reliance on one specific piece of hardware have the potential to be around forever" -line. So, to make my point as clear as possible:

*Working copies of Megaman 3, the original physical cartridge, will be extinct one day in the far future, as will the original hardware capable of running the cartridge. The physical cartridge can not be played without the specific hardware, the NES in this case.

*Working copies of Megaman 3, the rom image, will probably never go extinct, because the rom file doesn't have any DRM on it, meaning it can be copied and spread without technical problems, most likely to systems that don't even exist yet as well. The file can also be played on any hardware capable of emulating the NES, which means PCs, MACs, cellphones, calculators...pretty much anything. So as long as the file can be copied to new hardware, and there is an emulator that can run the file, the game can still be played. In ~500 years, when the holodeck is a reality, I'm pretty sure you can emulate the NES with it. If not the NES directly, then it can emulate a computer that can emulate a PC running Windows 7 that can emulate the NES. Emulationception.

And that is why games in digital format will outlast games in physical format. Because the digital version can be transferred to new systems and played there. You can still play Megaman 3 five hundred years into the future, but it will not be done using an original cartridge in an NES. Which is why comments like "death of physical media may as well be the death of art as we know it" are misguided, because the lack of DRM is the important point that matters here, not the fact that something isn't available on a physical media.

we can back up Xbox discs all we like but that's no guarantee that anybody will be able to use them at all like somebody using a real Xbox would

If and when there is an XBox emulator, you will be able to play those backed-up discs. Your real XBox, however, absolutely will break down sooner or later. Which do you think is more likely, that your XBox is still working in 50 years or that a working emulator has been coded by that time?

[Ed Oscuro]

Ed, I think you're reading something from my post that I didn't actually say or intend to say.

I realize that, but I think it's important to flush out the distinctions because this "physical format" stuff isn't very useful and people likely assume things that are harmful to preservation when they talk this way.

we can back up Xbox discs all we like but that's no guarantee that anybody will be able to use them at all like somebody using a real Xbox would

If and when there is an XBox emulator, you will be able to play those backed-up discs.

We're stuck at "if." The utopian view of the digitally remastered future? Chucked right on the fuckin' roof like a pizza.

If "digital formats are great!" means "we don't have to think about how the actual hardware works," then we're sunk. You don't get to a working emulator that way.
If "how does actual hardware work?" translates into "we think we know everything a person in the future will need to know about how the actual hardware works," we're probably sunk once again. We don't know what problems the future holds. If the X86 market evaporates overnight, probably many emulation projects will be set back 10 years at least. Some won't be bothered much but others will be utterly destroyed.

If "physical formats die" means just "collectors have absurd expectations," I agree; I should have remembered to mention that earlier. However, there is no physical law stopping hobbyists from making a back-up copy of a game's physical format (just legal/expense/technical issues), so we can make use of all of our preservation techniques - both preserving the data (which we have modern techniques for) and information about the physical formats. Emulation is second best.

The thing that complicates all this is that it's expensive to duplicate physical formats (or systems). I also don't have a problem with the idea of trying to "liberate" the running of a program from its physical implementation, as that certainly does increase the potential for saving the system, and also allows it to be reused in new and interesting ways. However, this should be thought of as just another tool for preservation - it doesn't displace the importance of preserving physical formats.

Speaking of which, if we're honest, how hard is it really to preserve many physical formats? You might first have to replace ROMs, and that might be challenging and expensive in the future when the appropriate silicon processes for making direct replacements are obsolete and trashed. At the same time, getting measurements of all the parameters needed to specify the performance of each component that makes a system what it is seems to be an even harder task. You can't just throw a tape measure across the Xbox, download a page of technical specs from Anandtech, and say "that's all we'll need to know."

To your other question - whether we'll have original Xboxes or emulators in 50 years - I'm not too concerned about the idea that there won't be at least a few Xboxes kept in working order; some might even be running all original parts. Attrition is a major problem, but not fatal. About the prospect of there being an emulator - what is "good enough?" We're far away from having a general solution, let alone something that renders games just the way an original Xbox would. My hope is that we can have both things. Incidentally, as the years pass by, the technical ability to process the secrets of the Xbox seems to become more obscure and expensive, both in terms of knowing what decisions went into it, and having devices that will actually interface with it. That said, decapping-type projects and maybe automatic logic probe type stuff should be promising, so I wouldn't discount that entirely.

If there is one major point I would like to make here, it's that it is much easier to preserve knowledge when you use different techniques. Of course, in the case of physical systems, we can borrow the words of the modernists and borrow a title from Wallace Stevens: "Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself." The closer you get to that original implementation, the more accurate you are. Outside of this, I don't think people have a good conception of how details are hard to understand and capture, and that they can be lost by changing terminology and technology. But you can think of this in terms of generations: Somebody emulating a board for MAME may have direct access to the board to answer questions they may have. A certain number of assumptions are made and probably some errors or differences are introduced. Somebody emulating with MAME and not the original hardware as their guide is another generation out, and the copies degrade from generation to generation if you don't have painstaking physical references. No matter how you split it, there needs to be some kind of preservation to keep things level with the originals.

Originals aren't exempt from the problems of preservation - but neither are hardware emulators. However, originals are by their very nature more reliable sources of information.

Ideally, we will come to the golden age where emulators use precise and flexible frameworks for specifying timing and the interaction between components. In reality, there's reasons to believe that we can't assume that future systems will easily overcome the computational complexity needed to do this, or even that emulators will set up robust timing systems. Look at where MAME devs are spinning their wheels right now.