Space Invaders to be saved for future generations

Computer historians Dr David Anderson and Dr Janet Delve, and computer games expert Dan Pinchbeck, all at Portsmouth, are partners in a €4.02 million Europe-wide attempt to ‘rescue’ digital files from what they see as an impending black hole. Their goal: the world’s first general purpose emulator, able to recognise and ‘play’ or open all computer files types and formats from 1970s Space Invaders games to three-inch floppies. The team make the point that while other emulators exist, they are specific to certain platforms or types of media. The European project, KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable), aims to develop methods of safeguarding digital objects including text, sound and image files, multimedia documents, websites, databases and video games. Says Delve: “People don’t think twice about saving files digitally – from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives. But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ‘read’ it disappearing… There’s a very real risk that we could bequeath a blank spot in history.” “We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information. It’s a very real and worrying problem. Things that were created in the 1970s, 80s and 90s are vanishing fast and every year new technologies mean we face greater risk of losing material,” adds Dr Anderson. “Early hardware like games consoles and computers are already found in museums, but if you can’t show visitors what they did, by playing the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music,” he adds.