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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
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Towards the Preservation of Local Computer Game Software

Challenges, Strategies, Reflections

Melanie Swalwell

Flinders University, Australia, melanie.swalwell{at}flinders.edu.au

/ New Zealand's digital game history includes a significant quantity of locally written software titles from the 1980s. Currently, few people are aware of this, no institutional collections exist, and institutional preservation efforts are directed elsewhere. This context prompted the assembly of a multidisciplinary team of researchers to bring legal, technical, and media-historical expertise to bear on these titles' preservation. This article briefly introduces the game preservation landscape, before outlining the case for the preservation of local game software. It reports on the challenges faced in a pilot study to preserve locally written game software for the Sega SC3000 computer. The initial plan — to secure licence agreements that would, in turn, enable technical preservation — gave way as a more complex intertwining of the legal and technical emerged. Navigating these challenges required a change of strategy: from emulation to translation. Translation — from BASIC to Java — is an elegant solution, in the circumstances. As well as recounting the project's practical realization, this article considers the fidelity of the conserved digital game to its `original'.

Key Words: digital heritage • games • preservation • Sega SC3000 • software

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 15, No. 3, 263-279 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1354856509105107
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