Well at the Museum of Computing here in Swindon I am on a one man crusade to preserve the old games. Not just the popular ones.

I happily champion the lesser known games. I am also in the process of converting emulator files back into audio to use on the real machines.

zerohour said:

Well at the Museum of Computing here in Swindon I am on a one man crusade to preserve the old games. Not just the popular ones.

I happily champion the lesser known games. I am also in the process of converting emulator files back into audio to use on the real machines.

Got a link I can chuck in there?

It's a huge undertaking, but preserving hardware and software - especially all hardware and software - old and new, but it needs to be done and anyone who puts effort into it deserves my respect.

And as for the newer software it would help a lot if - like Bob said - anything released on XBLIG and PSN get's a PC release, so it can be preserved too. I basically hate Flash games (for many reasons) and when I find one I like I try to rip it out of the webpage and making it run locally, for the reason that they tend to dissappear, and that's anoying if you like something. Many great ideas and games start out as Flash games, so it's a shame that they're so dependant so an ever changing platform (Flash), Ads and finally webhotel subscriptions (which tend to get closed down when people find new interrests) or they get lost in website re-designs.

We have an arcade museum here in Denmark (never been there, though - it's way out in the sticks) and they just lost funding recently, so now - if they want to keep preserving old games - they'll have to do it on their own dime, as the goverment no longer deems preservation of games of any importance. Too bad...very shortsighted.

There's an article about it here. Run it through Google Translate to get the full story:
http://ungespiludviklere.dk/3196/spilmuseet-i-danmark-star-over-for-lukning/

...perhaps this direct link will work, though: http://is.gd/iQNuEQ

Hmm yeah, I think the Flash problem is something that's going to come to the fore if/when we switch more towards HTML5 - at the rapid rate of updates my browsers receive, each with often inconsistent performance results on different things, tracing the optimal build of a browser to run gen whatever HTML5 is... well, I suspect it'll be messy anyway.

At least Flash has the advantage of being reliant, mainly, on one vendor due to it being plugin based. Of course, that's not allowing for the people who'll rush to tie their games to other online services for ad money or scoreboards or...

It's odd how at a time where we should be becoming increasingly aware of the fragility of these services (anyone remember when MS closed down their music store?), we're more and more likely to tie ourselves into them.