ROM Check OK

A recent Facebook note from iPal Vern indicates that another museum is adding a permanent collection with the goal to preserve the history of electronic gaming. As a lover of the early days of electronic gaming, I continue to applaud these efforts partly because of my appreciation and partly because I am lazy. Allow me to explain.

Because I like old video games, I have a part-time love affair with emulators to keep my collection of games running without the catch of too many legacy hardware problems. Atari 2600, Colecovision, Commodore 64, DOS, and arcade cabinets are all on my PC's hard drive in software form. But again, I am lazy. You see, it takes genuine effort to keep up with the development behind some of these platforms.

For instance, I recently got a MAME itch again that required some significant scratching. So I downloaded the latest GUI MAME client and pulled the old CD-ROMs out of the closet. And there's the catch. The key word in that sentence is OLD. I acquired that ROM set in 2002, a full seven years ago. As the MAME client develops, it requires certain ROMs to update their file sets as well. My ROM set is very out of date. So even ROMs that I have don't work and that requires to reach out to the intarwebs for update downloads. It takes a lot of time for me to find these updates because while some sites have the ROMs available, a lot of them don't keep their sets updated either. And because these things are still copyright protected, that drives the honest preservationists further underground.

So once I figure out that it's going to take way too much work to even keep this tiny little collection of ROMs functional, I give up. Once more, I am lazy. The reason I started feeding off of the the emulation scene in the first place is that I have a strong desire to preserve these games. Their original hardware has a shelf life. It will stop working. But software can fill the gap. Unfortunately, it just takes a lot of effort to keep things working and compatible, so even my modest efforts will be wiped out.

Of course, all of this is simply to state that I applaud the efforts of the true preservationists, the people that are doing their best to see that roots of this new medium are preserved and do not die a slow and silent death trapped in the webs of intellectual property law. To those people: I might not be smart enough to do what you do, but I support your efforts whole-heartedly.