J T wrote:Don't emulators and cracked copies have big limitations for the future though? I thougt that they were not a viable option for the long term and that source code would be more important.
Source code is always the gold standard. But you'd be surprised at what trouble you can have trying to compile 20 year old code. Try compiling the Doom source code as released by iD without modification for instance. Even if you have the source code, you may not be able to compile it or run it without an emulator, especially if the code was written for a platform that's out of favor (6502, 68k, PowerPC, etc).
Emulators when done correctly (see bsnes, nestopia) serve as both documentation for the hardware, and a way to run the binaries into the future. Both of these are essential to any sort of preservation effort. Open source, portable code bases will ensure that these emulators are available essentially forever.
It would be nice to have an archiving and preservation entity that works with, but is separate from, the game companies. I don't trust the companies to be left to the task of preserving their own games because once the game appears to longer be able to generate profit, the company no longer has much reason to keep the source code. At the same time, companies often need to keep their source code to themselves to make a profit and avoid theft or piracy.
This is exactly what they're trying to do with the IGDA. They throw around some ideas like offering awards or other publicity to IGDA members that contribute their archives to libraries and museums. Whether anything gets any momentum is a different story, the first "digital game canon" panel was like 3 years ago, so who knows.
