Internet Archive launched a project to save old games on portable consoles

In children of the former USSR, the portable "console" was very popular, where the wolf caught the eggs in the basket, preventing them from breaking. No less popular were gaming devices of similar design in children and adults from other countries. Unfortunately, now many of them are a museum rarity, so it will not work to be nostalgic while playing.

But the problem is resolved by the Internet Archive. The team of this organization, in addition to the old games for MS-DOS and console games for Atari and ColecoVision, decided to add virtual copies of consoles with an LCD screen. For example, these are Mortal Kombat from Tiger Electronics, Burger Time from Bandaib and some others. In total, it is planned to add about 200 such consoles to the database. Some of them (at the time of writing this article - 74) are already there, so you can not wait, but start the game .

The job of digitizing such toys is very different from the work of digitizing ordinary gaming consoles. The fact is that the interaction of objects on the screen is organized by the appearance and disappearance of individual figures. When individual elements are combined into a cycle, it all seems to become a game. The screen can be multi-layered, as with color static elements, and with black and white dynamic.
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As an example, you can take a screenshot of the already scanned and digitized LCD display with all the figures on it.



Well, below is one of the moments of gameplay, when the figure on the screen goes about his business.



This is a very difficult and time-consuming work. The fact that someone took up the project, shows how enthusiasts can love their work. By the way, in many cases devices of the type described have to be disassembled in order to find out what elements are on the screen and how it all works. To collect back is not always obtained. But to disassemble one device means to save it for future generations as a digital game, so such a sacrifice does not seem to be in vain.

For the first time, the organization posted an archive of old games back in 2013. We are talking about 30-40 years old titles, which could be played directly in the browser. These are games for consoles Atari 2600 (1977), Atari 7800 (1986), ColecoVision (1982), Philips Videopac G7000 (1978) and Astrocade (1983). The most interesting thing is that the Internet Archive has achieved that you can play quite legally. Now the collection has more than 3,400 games, constantly continuing to grow.



In 2015, 2500 DOS games were posted . You can also play in the browser, and now the number of titles has also increased, already to 4,000 - the staff of the Internet Archive love and know their work, not intending to stop there.

In 2016, thousands of old programs appeared in the archive, which worked under Windows 3.1. And they all run fine in the browser! To do this, of course, I had to create a Windows 3.1 emulator.

Well, last year the Internet Archive released a whole archive of software for the first Macintosh, including programs released from 1984 to 1989. And, of course, it took again to develop an emulator for the browser.

There is not only software for work, but also games, a lot of games. In particular, Dark Castle , Space Invaders , Lode Runner , and Microsoft Flight Simulator are available . Many are familiar not only to users of Apple products but also to gamers who prefer gaming consoles or games under Windows.

Internet Archive fully justifies its name, and the employees of the organization do not copy everything, but only that which represents a certain value for humanity. Some “digital artifacts”, as we see, employees not only store, but first restore, and then place on their servers, providing access to this data to everyone. The organization exists on donations only, both from individuals and companies. Probably, the Internet Archive is one of the most geek organizations where true enthusiasts work, capable of surprising with their projects. In general, the organization really justifies its name, preserving the results of intellectual work for future generations.