FIRST CONCEIVED TO MAKE MAINFRAME COMPUTERS BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE, EMULATORS LATER PROVIDED A WAY TO RUN OLD GAMES ON NEW SYSTEMS. DEVELOPERS METALLIC, CARSTEN WAECHTER AND HIKARI NO YUME DISCUSS EMULATION AND PRESERVING VIDEOGAME HISTORY

WORDS BY RORY MILNE

In 1962, IBM had a major problem. Its cutting-edge System/360 mainframe computer series wasn’t compatible with software designed for its older 7070 models. After attempts by others failed, engineers Larry Moss and Stuart Tucker found success with a hybrid software/hardware project they called The 7070 Emulator.

Decades later, similar approaches resulted in accessories that made the C64 behave like an Apple IIe and allowed the ST and Amiga to run PC software. Then in the early Nineties, Sega developer Yuji Naka created an in-house NES emulator for the Mega Drive, and Argonaut Software developed a Game Boy emulator for the Amiga for internal use.

The first console emulator aimed at a public audience appeared in 1994, in the form of the MegaDrive Emulator for the PC, with others following, including a Pac-Man emulator that evolved into MAME. By the late-Nineties, websites hosting emulators and games to play on them were commonplace, but in 1998, many shut down after legal threats from an organisation representing the games industry.

The following year, Sega published a Mega Drive compilation for PCs that used a modified version of a publicly available emulator, and Capcom released emulated versions of its original Mega Man coin-ops for the PlayStation. As the 21st century unfolded, emulators for numerous platforms appeared online, and with that the opportunity arose to preserve their games libraries.

“THE AUTHOR OF NUANCE PASSED AWAY, BUT THE SOURCE CODE WAS ONLINE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE TO PICK UP. NOBODY HAD, SO I THOUGHT HOW HARD COULD IT BE?”

CARSTEN WAECHTER

Arguably, the most ambitious project is MAME, which emulates hundreds of vintage coin-ops, computers and consoles. Then there are bespoke emulators like DEmul, which supports newer systems like Sega’s Dreamcast and certain polygon-based coin-ops. A crucial contributor to both projects goes by the pseudonym MetalliC, and he remembers the process of getting into emulation development being quite organic. “The DEmul team noticed that I might be someone who could be useful, so they invited me to join them,” MetalliC explains. “My motivation for working on DEmul wasn’t that I was a fan of console gaming at all, but the guys said that I could do whatever I wanted on the project, so I was OK with that. As for MAME, I had been submitting many Russian gambling machine-related things to MAME, and later Sega-related stuff too, so it was a practical and reasonable decision to include me in what they were doing.”