This five-part series will explore the world of vintage game revivals. These are the largely fan-driven efforts to port classic games of the 80’s and 90’s to modern-day platforms. The process is slow, difficult, and riddled with legal hang-ups, but if you play detective and dig into some instructions, the reward for re-living a glorious title from decades ago is well worth it.

Before we start, there are some factors in vintage gaming that you just have to get used to:

• Most of the original companies behind these games aren’t very interested in seeing their classics ported. Either they’re out-of-business, bought out or merged, or they’d rather sell new titles. It takes time and perseverance to talk some of them into releasing the license rights to the game to the open source and hobbyist community, even if it’s obvious that they’d never make a dime off of that title again. Some notable exceptions to this rule (hooray for ID software!) even release their original code.
• Because many of these games came along at a time before standard programming practices existed, the efforts require a hodge-podge of hacks and reverse-engineering to make them work. Creating a game ROM (Read-Only Memory) for a modern-day emulator requires reverse-engineering the original product, usually through dis-assembling the binary or at times even physically cracking the IC-based memory from a game cartridge. Then you have to re-code it, again usually in assembly language. The media for the game (images, animations, and sounds) isn’t even in a standard format; companies were free to create whatever mad VGA/EGA/ANSI implementation they wanted to, and as long as their in-house developers knew how it worked nobody cared if it wouldn’t be portable to another platform 20 years later.
• Getting an emulator and game title on top of it usually isn’t just a matter of clicking an “install” button. Dynamic libraries, hardware drivers, processor architecture, and other support issues like sound-file formats and fonts all have to be dealt with. If you’re looking to run a classic game on a modern machine, be prepared to get your hands dirty wrestling with a messy install process. Even with the best results you can get for your efforts, there may be issues with sound not playing, or the game running too fast to be playable. Knowing a little programming yourself will be a huge asset.
• Finally, there is a huge difference between the emulator and the game itself. Emulators are actually all free and plentiful, and ported to nearly every system you can name. The game ROM, the essence of the game title, is a different story. Sometimes you must own a copy of the original game. Sometimes there’s a free download. Sometimes only a demo version is available. Sometimes you have to… no, I’m not going to mention pirate sites and bit-torrent - this isn’t that kind of site. So I didn’t mention them, OK? Remember that.

"The makers may make,
and the users may use,
but the fixers must fix,
with only minimal clues."
   -anon. from a fortune file.

Finally, some ground rules for getting into vintage gaming:

• You can help the community by donating money to development efforts. Vintage game porting is a labor of love, and if I was happy to shell out top dollar for the original game twenty years ago, it would be no problem to toss a few dollars at somebody who did twice the work to give everyone that game on today’s hardware.
• Never, ever, go into a forum or chat asking where to find game ROMs. They’re sick and tired of answering that question, and you find them by using search engines. In addition to Google, try Wikipedia, Everything2, Dogpile, and Clusty. If you can’t find it that way, it doesn’t exist. At the every least, when hunting an elusive title, specify that you already tried searching for it.
• To find old hardware and original game media, prowl charity thrift stores, yard sales, and flea markets. People throw this stuff out as if it were junk all the time. If you find something that you’re not particularly interested in, you can still grab it up and post it on a message board. One person’s junk is another’s treasure.

Now that we have that out of the way, come along for the rest of the adventure! We have a lot of clues to follow and mysterious territory to uncover. Just be sure you bring your light source. Because it is, indeed, pitch dark, and you are most definitely likely to be eaten by a grue!

You might want to carry on reading:
Vintage Gaming - Part 1
Vintage Gaming - Part 2
Vintage Gaming - Part 3
Vintage Gaming - Part 4
Vintage Gaming - Part 5

Related Posts:

• Vintage Gaming - part two: Sierra Games and DOSbox
• Vintage Gaming - part three: other Adventure Games, ScummVM, and ID Software
• Vintage Gaming - part five: the miscellaneous part…
• KDE on Road Kill, Old games and Macintosh - Sad but true story.
• Vintage Gaming - part four: MAME and ZSNES