RetroGaming

Fuck this, fuck these guys, and fuck them to hell.

I said this many years ago and I will say it again on here to be brief: Emulation and amateur game preservation by moving them from their original media (such as floppy disks, tapes, CDs, and other physical media) onto newer stuff and be able to move it around better is an act of historical defiance.

You see, throughout history, especially in the past 150 years or so, almost all early iterations of recorded media are just gone. Whether it is cylinder recordings from the late 19th century that preserved human voices, to the first music records, to the first silent film, and even the early talkies. 90% of all silent movies from all over the world are lost. What we have available is only a small sample of what existed. Even 75% of all early sound film from the first half of the 1930s are gone. For non-Western countries the number can be higher. The first ever South Asian language sound film is lost, and practically all films made in Indonesia from 1945 and back are also gone. Have you ever noticed how in terms of music, almost all the Christmas jingles are from the late 40s to 50s? There were a lot made before then, and it isn't just because the newer stuff is more relatable... a lot of the older stuff just doesn't exist anymore.

For TV, the majority of the first broadcasts were never recorded. Even as late as the 1960s some TV stars from Canada will never have their work shown because they were broadcast live and never recorded.

The list goes on and on... except for video games.

For video games that rule was broken. We have early computer adventure games from the 1970s that we can still play, ditto for console games and arcade games. The original Pong and Computer Space are still playable by anyone. The Atari 2600's original game library is almost 100% preserved, with even the destruction of E.T. the video game en masse anyone can play it (I have it on emulation, because every single Atari game ever made so small that they take no space).

All legal attacks on emulation have failed ever since the 90s. Look up the history of MAME to see how hard amateurs have fought to allow us to revisit the classics and allow people for generations to come to see what things were like before they were born.