Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A lot of your concern of older games has been fixed over time by the development of emulators and wrappers. Multiplayer (and live DRM) components of modern games can't be easily RE'd in most cases. Especially with services like Xbox Live the most helpful data is actually packet captures where one can actually go through and replicate the protocol used.

I honestly would challenge you to find games from the mid 90's+ that won't work on a modern machine. Many times if there's a feature that straight up doesn't work it's due to online services being discontinued. There's been some work done to rebuild services like GameSpy or Westwood Online, but once more forms of encryption and anti-cheat or DRM were implemented in these sorts of services, the harder it's going to be to preserve their experience.

That wasn't my argument here - the older games, at the time they came out, were often a mess. Some bugs were patched out, some weren't, but the quality at the time they were relevant wasn't any greater, it was often worse.

But yeah, we're in a new phase where publishers kill games and then they are gone forever and that's a real shame. I think there needs to be some sort of legislation around abandonware so that people can host live services and MMOs after the publishers give up on them.

I agree. I think a lot of copyright/patent laws have gotten in the way of game preservation. What bothers me is many people in the industry have held onto old code/assets over the years, but have no legal way of sharing that with others. It's odd, sheet music can be documented and distributed, but with games being more complex and tangled it's almost an impossibility to have clean-room REs/decompilations. And yet distribution of source code while maintaining copyright is pretty darn easy. Release the source, protect the assets behind copyright.

In my experience, aside from DRM issues, it's the early 3D games from the late 90s and especially early oughts that run the worst : 3D acceleration is a pain to make to work correctly, and they are too resource hungry to be run well in emulation.

I my experience, Wine (+ dgVoodoo for some DX7/8 titles) runs these pretty well. There are exceptions of course but usually there is some way to make them work. Some also work fine in a Windows XP VM without any 3D acceleration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com