Emulation as something new

Politiken has an article about how the EU wants to develop an emulator — KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable — in order to preserve video game history. (Original article in danish; Google translation.) According to the project description it should be able to handle pretty much any data from any platform and while I’m all for preserving video game history, I think €4.02 million ($5.05 million; £3.55 million) is a bit of a hefty price to pay, considering that there’s plenty of Open Source software out there that does exactly that.

So will KEEP actually be written from scratch? Or will they simply bundle whatever Open Source software they find into one neat package? The project description doesn’t say anything about it. The first is stupid, because a lot of the Open Source emulators available are of high quality, are quite portable, have been developed for many years now and are still maintained. Some shiny new software is likely to be less stable and compatible, and the project description doesn’t give any promise of the software being maintained in the future. The latter is simply too expensive. €4.02 million for bundling some Open Source software?

Also, while preserving the games is all well and good, there’s more to preserving video game history than just preserving the software. Playing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii with the Wiimote is NOT the same as playing it with the good old, unhandy NES controller (even though the Wiimote is quite unhandy for that purpose).