Digital Archiving and Emulators

Emulators let us run programs from different devices on our computers, which is an important part of preserving programs from older pieces of technology. They can help with digital preservation by allowing us to experience things that were made for a specific digital platform that is no longer being made. For example, one of the video games I played on Console Living Room was ATV Racers for the Play Station (or what we would now call the Original Play Station or the Play Station One). The Play Station 5 is the newest model that has been released from Sony, and the PS1 games are incompatible with the system. Because of this, a Play Station user’s PS1 games would be totally useless if they didn’t have the system they worked with — and even if they did have one, those systems are pretty old, and might not work like they should. Emulators allow us to experience these games even if we don’t own the correct system for them, or if the system we do own is no longer functional.

We can use emulators to share games from past decades with future generations, too. Being a member of Gen Z, I was able to experience my dad’s favorite childhood games (like Pac-Man) through re-releases I could buy for more modern gaming devices, and emulators are a way we can continue to do this without having to make a physical copy of the game. With physical copies, there is always that chance that the game will get damaged, lost or destroyed, but with digital archiving and emulators, we are able to keep them on the internet where they can live forever.

One of the drawbacks to emulators is the fact that the controls are different than the original games. I noticed this when I was playing the ATV game; I had to check below the game screen and read a diagram about what keys on my computer would function as control buttons on the original Play Station controller. I didn’t consider this when I clicked on the first game I played: Mahjong. The screen said “Press Start to play” but obviously, my computer doesn’t have a start button. I clicked my mouse and the space and enter keys, hoping something would happen, but ultimately I had to scroll down and see how the controls translated from the original device to my device.

We can use digital archiving to preserve so much more than just games. In my DS 340 class, we are currently talking about digital archiving, and one of the things that came up was books and other written materials. Our professor told us about how many members of the LBGT+ community throughout history would keep journals on their lives, and when they would die, their family would throw them out, thus erasing their personal information from the world. Of course, you can delete things that are posted online, but the internet does a lot better job of keeping things permanent. This is why there are many online archives for communities such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive and the Digital Transgender Archive. Peoples’ histories matter, and it is so amazing that we are now able to preserve things online in a way that is much safer than physical documents. There is also the matter that paper decays over time, so being able to keep records in a digital space can prevent that from being an issue for future historians who might want to look back on what life was like in 2021.