[Wiggins]: Now another one from games that maybe is your roll-forward idea, I really like what id Software does, which is they take their classics - Doom, Quake and so on - And after I don't know if they're 20, 30 years old, something like that, they open source of them, and that creates this interesting effect where maybe it's less that people are playing the original, although I'm sure that happens, but then it becomes fun to just port it to weird places. Like you've seen Quake that's been ported to be 100% ASCII. I also saw a Twitter thread recently where someone managed to open one of these digital pregnancy tests, realize that it had a reasonably good processor and display, and decided to get Doom running on it. […] So in a way that has turned this over to remix culture and the internet and so it gets rolled forward and become something that maybe people will experience not in its original form necessarily, but becomes woven into the cultural tapestry let’s say through these fun little projects. [McGranaghan]: I think this also speaks to the importance of that API environment they were talking about earlier being specced or at least speccable for the software to be rolled forward or actively preserved. […] Old-timey games, that's a pretty speccable environment, like needing to be able to compile C, and relatively straightforward input and output system, and even if the games weren't designed specifically with a really clean interface there you can basically back it out after the the fact, and then do the porting. Books and paintings, by the way, are examples of analog things that are very speccable: they map down to text streams and bitmaps respectfully. But stuff like modern software is much more difficulty being specced, and so it becomes harder to do that sort of rolling forward act of preservation. Wiggins and McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 16:40, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=JYEnhTUbSPCutemfh9wI-A

[Wiggins]: Games also make me think of […] emulators and it turns out that games seem to be something that people do want to preserve as a cultural history, but in a way, the best way to do that is not try to get the original hardware but to have these emulators like MAME for example, and it's really impressive: you can play almost every arcade cabinet video game from the 80s, just in your browser with this kind of JavaScript emulators that will load up the ROMs, which are basically the way they distributed binaries in those days and play them, not quite as they were intended because the hardware is different, certainly displays are different, but certainly we do preserve some of that legacy. Wiggins and McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 15:54, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=ohDy4dTAThWNh92mQP1ENA