Introduction

Emulation has long been eschewed as a viable digital preservation (DP) strategy for mainstream memory institutions: it is seen as being possible in theory, but not actually practicable in real-life preservation situations. It is not surprising, then, that it took some lateral thinking to make inroads into the problem of bringing emulation to the fore as a viable DP strategy. To achieve this, the KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) project included a somewhat eclectic mix of partners: traditional DP institutions such as national libraries, a computer games museum, and an academic partner with a background in computing history as well as games development and preservation. This rather unusual group has facilitated research and development into the use of emulation specifically to preserve, amongst other things, computer games: arguably some of the most complex digital objects for which memory institutions would expect to be responsible for preserving. In this chapter we discuss some of the tools and initiatives emerging from KEEP that support the preservation of computer gaming environments: including the Trustworthy Online Technical Environment Metadata database (TOTEM), and the KEEP Emulation Framework as deployed at the Computer Games Museum (Computerspielemuseum – CSM), Berlin. Whilst these new tools make a significant contribution to the practice of emulation, and therefore DP overall, there are still unfamiliar areas into which the community needs to look. Although software preservation has been accepted as important by the DP community for some while now, as witnessed by the work of the Software Sustainability Institute and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), hardware preservation has long been deemed to be unnecessary by proponents of both emulation and migration (see Chapter 2 in Delve and Anderson, 2012). This stance has the unfortunate effect that the DP community could then miss out on much sterling work carried out at computer history museums worldwide that could bring them important benefits: indeed, were they to collaborate across these different domains, it could result in valuable sharing of knowledge (database of hardware) and a plethora of computing resources (e.g. emulators) and documentation (e.g. manuals).

KEEP games initiatives

Emulation is well understood and practised by the computer gaming community, which is recognized as being at the forefront of developing emulators; e.g. the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) community, which has developed emulators for computer games arcades.