Analog console clones are a way to preserve the game's past.

Things fall apart, then they are forgotten. In video games, there was the famous Atari dump, in which the company had buried thousands of cartridges of AND. and other games in a New Mexico landfill. There are more prosaic cases where game source codes are lost for unfortunate reasons. For example, Prince of Persia Apple II was presumed gone until the developer's father found the code in a cabinet (stored on three floppy disks), after which the developer sent it to GitHub. Physical media, which is the core of the story of video games, also tends to degrade. This means that, even if properly stored, the past may be lost. As wrote journalist Heather Alexandra in Kotaku in 2016: "The first years of the game have often painted video games as children's toys. Only diligent collectors and enthusiasts had the foresight to keep their games. Even now, games are largely treated as consumables. "

Culture around games – magazines, derivatives, etc. – also disappears, which makes them less analysable in their original context. The main problem of preservation is that it does not immediately appear what deserves to be preserved. With video games, however, it gets a bit more complicated: playing them as they were meant to be played is as important as preserving their code. And it's also what people think when they think about emulation, which is a great way to preserve a code that might otherwise go away. But they never think about the material.

This is where the company founded by Christopher Taber in 2011, while studying philosophy in Montana, enters the scene. Taber and his team have begun cloning conventional consoles with full cartridge support and current needs, such as HD video output. (The first piece of material they recreated was a Neo Geo system with an arcade.) His latest console remake, the Mega Sg, inspired by Sega Genesis, is both a faithful recreation of his predecessor and a link to the past of the game. It's a ridiculously difficult business. In fact, it is very difficult to reverse engineer obsolete hardware and proprietary software.

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To clone a console, it's helpful to start with the processor, especially if you're trying to clone a console you've never worked with before. "I did not know Genesis very well and I did not know anything about the 68000 processor!" Wrote Kevin Horton, chief engineer, in an email. "It was my first foray into both areas. I probably slowed down the process because I had to learn everything as I went. "The processor in question, the Motorola 68000, is the most complex part of the Sega Genesis because its complete system based on it. This processor was designed by Motorola in 1979 and it was already used in many arcade machines when it was integrated with the Genesis. Horton has found a way to accurately mimic the performance of the 68000, up to the cycle and sub-cycle of its processor. He consulted the semiconductor circuitry of the CPU to design his emulated hardware card, which is a physical circuit board that exactly duplicates that of the original Sega Genesis.

All Analogue products work with Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) emulation, which involves designing a chip that meets the needs of the original hardware. "Custom hardware has been created to directly connect a 68000 processor to the FPGA to enable real-time direct comparison to ensure the highest level of accuracy," Horton continued. In other words, Horton connected an original 68k processor to its emulated chip to test its relative accuracy, and then left it on for a week in a row. (Any deviation would result in the test failing.) The chip works in the same way as the original circuitry, which means you get the same features and performance as the hardware that the FPGA reproduces. "When we recreate these chips on an FPGA, it's like you're taking the original transistor-level schematics and implementing them directly," says Taber. "This translates to 100% accuracy."

In other words: if you decide to disassemble any mass-produced electronic product, such as a Sega Genesis, any chip you saw on the green circuit board is known as an application IC. Specifically (ASIC), this is a cost-effective way to produce millions of chips, which will be used for mass-produced products, "says Taber.

Horton said he spent nine months developing hardware and software for the Mega Sg, including two and a half years for the CPU. (It took three months to get Sonic to work.) Another month was needed for the audio to work, and it took a month for the functionality of the Sega master system to work properly. The rest of his time was spent debugging and implementing features. (Analog followed a similar, comprehensive process to get his Super Nintendo console, the Super NT, right.) The most satisfying part of the recreation of the Sega Genesis, Horton said, was to make it work. Especially Overdrive 2, a demo released in 2017 that pushes the original Genesis material to its limit. As Horton says, it's "notoriously difficult to be correct for emulators (and only one emulator currently seems able to do it)."

The main technical advantage of hardware emulation is this precision. This means very low latency, which means that it's easier to play games that require quick reaction times, like many runners, combat games and platforms designed for Genesis, released to the late 80s. Since Analogue has recreated hardware-level consoles, the Mega Sg and other analog products are more accurate than any other software emulator. Sega has its own range of Genesis remake consoles, delivered with many preloaded games. But they recreate the Genesis experience at the software level, which means that they are not as good as what Analogue has to offer. This is the only company to rebuild hardware to give players the same experience they had on a Sega Genesis made in the 1980s. The goal is to let modern gamers play old games as they were supposed to be played .

However, this precision comes at a cost: the Mega Sg costs $ 189.99, but you can find Sega's Genesis Flashback product for $ 59.98 on Amazon. "Our customers are really passionate," says Taber. "But this market, and the type of people that interests it, is much larger than most people expect." This may be true, but it should also be emphasized that Analogue people are passionate themselves. The logic of spending nearly US $ 200 for virtually obsolete equipment makes sense only for those who have the time and money to appreciate it.

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In emulation, what is beyond legality and piracy, it is the preservation. Software has a half-life that can be measured by the weaknesses of the population: the code is lost, corporate takeovers by small businesses, brains and flying bodies fail. But what must be done?

In 2015, Jason Scott, an Internet Preservation Specialist, delivered a speech at this year's Game Developers Conference, urging employees to steal. "Theft in the workplace is the future of the history of gambling," he said, which means that if people do not take active steps to preserve their goals, the policies of the must be condemned, this work may be lost forever. Scott's interest in his statement is his call to individual action. It is not the game and hardware manufacturers who act on their own; it's only a group of Taber enthusiasts. Some organizations are dedicated to preserving the history of video games, such as Frank Cifaldi's nonprofit organization, the Video Game History Foundation, created two years ago.

"The majority of games created during history are no longer easily accessible to study and play," reads on their website. "And even when we can play games, this playable code is only part of the story." The Foundation's main work is its digital reference library, which she describes as "an online repository of artifacts related to the history of video games and video game culture." It's about having a searchable database of material that is accessible to researchers and historians, which is not code.

Although the source code is not as perishable as, for example, a book, its backup presents unique challenges. Emulation is a way to save obsolete hardware and software from the bone. "We often see people talking about preservation, they talk about games: finding or finding lost games, or offering permanent ways to access pieces of this story," says Taber. It is just as important to imitate the consoles as to imitate the games themselves, because the experience of the console deserves to be preserved in the same way as the games.

For each of its consoles, Analogue managed to convince developers to launch previously unknown games exclusively for its products. "You know, the games developed in the 90's are almost finished or canceled." These games include the run'n gun Super Turrican had to be reduced by one third because of memory constraints, of which Analog got the full version, or Ultracore, a shooter canceled (and renamed for copyright reasons) from DICE bundled with the Mega Sg.

Although saving two games is not a movement, this suggests a way forward: preserving games should be a priority for all those who are interested in games as a cultural form. "Our goal is essentially to raise the medium in order to put the story of the video game on a pedestal and say," It's worth being preserved, that deserves to be looked at. " Up close, it's worth talking about, "said Taber," Spending nearly a year creating a perfect replica of an outdated console is not something everyone does.

"There is no one else who does what we do," says Taber. Horton, for one, agrees: "It is important to preserve the history of the games so that these games can be played by future generations as they were intended to be played."