All 54 Lost Clickwheel IPod Games Have Been Preserved For Posterity (arstechnica.com) 9
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late '00s. The community was working to get around Apple's onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That "master library" would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.
At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.
[...] Now that the consolidated clickwheel game collection is complete, though, owners of any iPod 5G+ or iPod Nano 3G+ should be able to sync the complete library to their personal device completely offline, without worrying about any server checks from Apple. They can do that by setting up a Virtual Machine using these GitHub instructions or by downloading this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein. The effort was made possible by GitHub user Olsro, with help from other iPod enthusiasts. To Olsro, completing the project "means this whole part from the early 2000s will remain with us forever."
He also expressed hope that "this Virtual Machine can also be useful towards any security [or] archeologist researcher who want to understand how the DRM worked."
At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.
[...] Now that the consolidated clickwheel game collection is complete, though, owners of any iPod 5G+ or iPod Nano 3G+ should be able to sync the complete library to their personal device completely offline, without worrying about any server checks from Apple. They can do that by setting up a Virtual Machine using these GitHub instructions or by downloading this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein. The effort was made possible by GitHub user Olsro, with help from other iPod enthusiasts. To Olsro, completing the project "means this whole part from the early 2000s will remain with us forever."
He also expressed hope that "this Virtual Machine can also be useful towards any security [or] archeologist researcher who want to understand how the DRM worked."
Re:In perpetuity (Score:4, Interesting)
Why don't you think we should preserve our digital history? Because it isn't important to you?
It could very well be important to a lot of people - it's Apple's first real foray into gaming by having a "game console" - and an oddity of the time before we carried app running digital slabs.
And plenty of stuff are trapped on hardware no longer available - lots of J2ME games for example. Often if you're a fan of a franchise, especially a Japanese one, lots of lore may be locked up permanently on those devices. If you're into Final Fantasy 7, for example, there was a J2ME game only available on Japanese phones that goes into the backstory more. Maybe as a non-fan, you don't care - but that content is locked to that one platform and basically impossible to run anywhere else.
This content only ran on iPods, and only a subset of them, But there's also potentially content that forever will remain locked up on it until someone creates a workable iPod emulator.
It's also a nice study into user interfaces - the iPod click wheel was inspired by an old timey radio where you could rotate the dial.
Heck, maybe you own an iPod from the era, and you always wanted to play a game but couldn't afford it because you were too young to spend more than a couple bucks. And once you grew up, you are saddened that Apple no longer sells the games anymore so even now when you could afford it, you can't get it.
Lots of stuff is preserved because we know loss. If you had a computer from the 70s most of that documentation is gone, destroyed and irrecoverable. Software as well - who needs WordStar when you have Microsoft Word or LibreOffice? Yet wouldn't it be nice to see how primitive writing on computers was, yet word processing was such a big deal? Without someone preserving it, you couldn't experience the oddity that using an early era word processor was like. If you wanted to write about the history of computing, it would be a major loss if all you had was the marketing materials to go by.
Hell, people complain about how primitive the Windows command line is - but if you tried MS-DOS, it's even worse and you really wonder how people got around without tab completion or even command history. Or how the Commodore 64's disk interface hack uses the full screen editor to help save typing.
Re: (Score:2)
Well said!
It's all pretty interesting and I might well take a look. Been in an arcade (100% sure it's made with emulators, given the look and size of the machines) and playing tempest. There are very few games made with a rotating wheel as an input device. It's one of my favourites.
Re: (Score:2)
If silicon and storage doubles in a relatively short time [wikipedia.org] then the idea that we can archive the most mundane shit from 20 years ago is quite feasible. The overhead is so low that in 20 years it will be on the same order of effort and virtual space as your own post history on Slashdot. (which is also preserved in perpetuity)
How many railroad timetable books from 50 or 100 years ago are still taking up space on shelf? I mean they serve no utility, except as toilet paper. But I think most people would be horri
Emulation? (Score:2)
Is anyone working on an emulator that would allow running these games without the original hardware? Otherwise, no one will be able to play them in a few decades, when the last iPod has given up its ghost.
Re: (Score:2)
You can write an emulator any time in the future and play old ROMs on it. Saving the data now even if you can't immediately run it is still a worthwhile endeavor.