[The Fifth Horseman]

Originally Posted by liormann

- Hand of Fate runs fine under Windows XP but with no sound. Is that acceptable? SHould we say that the game is fairly preserved and sound is not that important? If not, then sound is a significant characteristic.

You are mistaking compatibility with preservation. Backwards compatibility is - for the most part - an oxymoron. If a game runs on a modern system, but without proper sound then it cannot be claimed to be fully compatible with that system.

- Similarly, the same game has speech. The version on Abandonia doesn't include the speech files (at least in the version I have, please ignore if I'm wrong ). Is speech necessary to preserve so that we can safely say the game is preserved? If so, then speech is a significant property.

All sensory properties of a game are significant to the end user, just as are the gameplay properties.

This is something you want to keep a note of: Many games were released in two versions - one on CD and one on Floppy Disks. These usually weren't the same: the CD versions routinely took advantage of greater space offered by the medium to present the player with additional / improved contents (higher quality sound samples, digitized speech, FMV cutscenes and so on), but that doesn't mean the content was equivalent to the floppy version (compare the CD and Floppy versions of Flashback or Space Hulk - the cutscenes differ greatly in presentation, and the latter has some changes in level design).

Thus: The games should be preserved in a form replicating the original data structure - if not neccesarily the media it was stored on - as close as possible. All alternate versions (due to content differences) should be preserved if possible.

However, my question remains: what do we preserve?

The game as both entertainment medium and a media experience.

For instance, DOSBox is great for rendering DOS games but what happens if DOSBox stops working on future systems? Is in this case a virtual machine running DOS could be more apposite.

As it is right now, DOSBox is open source - if the dev team dissolves for whatever reason, anyone else with sufficient programming know-how would be able to pick up the project as they left it and continue it.
Thus, it's very unlikely for DOSBox to just "stop working" any time soon.

To do this (hopefully), we need to know what are the technical and contextual characteristics of video games that must be preserved - unfortunately we can't keep everything and compromises have to be made.

Most users don't really care about the installation or configuration processes, but the game's presentation and gameplay must remain unaltered to their perception. Since most of these games used completely individual one-off engines, and very few had their source code released to the public, emulation/virtualization is the only means through which this can be achieved on a grander scale.

The ideal way would be, convincing the publishers to make the source codes available under some sort of GPL once they cease selling a game and have no intent to re-release it. Pity that very few ever chose to do that.