“Early hardware, like games consoles and computers, are already found in museums. But if you can’t show visitors what they did, by playing the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music. For future generations it would be a cultural catastrophe,” according to Dr David Anderson from Portsmouth University, who is heading up a remarkable new project to save all the digital info and games created since the 1970s.

“A vast bank of information needs to be catalogued and stored,” adds researcher and computer games expert Dan Pinchbeck.

“Games particularly tend not to be archived because they are seen as disposable, pulp cultural artefacts, but they represent a really important part of our recent cultural history. Games are one of the biggest media formats on the planet and we must preserve them for future generations.”

Digital black hole

Computer historians Dr David Anderson and Dr Janet Delve see the project as a “rescue plan to recover and safeguard the rapidly vanishing technology and cultural information about the generation born and brought up in the digital age.” They are aiming to build “the world’s first general purpose emulator” which is described as “a piece of software which can recognise and ‘play’ or open all previous types of computer files from 1970s Space Invaders games to three-inch floppy discs.”

While there are many emulators that are specific to certain types of media or platform, the unique selling point of this massively ambitious project is that it will be able to emulate media in any format. Aiming to ‘rescue’ digital files from a black hole, the initiative is part of the Europe-wide KEEP project (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable), with the objective to “develop methods of safeguarding digital objects including text, sound and image files, multimedia documents, websites, databases and video games. ”People don’t think twice about saving files digitally — from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives,” comments Dr Janet Delve.

“But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ‘read’ it disappearing altogether. Former generations have left a rich supply of books, letters and documents which tell us who they were, how they lived and what they discovered. There’s a very real risk that we could bequeath a blank spot in history.”

Every computer file recoverable

By 2010 the amount of digital information created worldwide “will be equivalent to 18 million times the information contained in all the books ever written.” The researchers note that “Britain’s National Archive holds the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias of information in file formats no longer commercially available” and add that “research by the British Library suggests Europe loses £2.7bn each year in business value because of difficulties in preserving and accessing old digital files.”

“We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information. It’s a very real and worrying problem. Things that were created in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s are vanishing fast and every year new technologies mean we face greater risk of losing material,” says Dr David Anderson.

The Pirate Bay has established itself as the largest BitTorrent tracker, and helps to distribute millions of files a day. Yesterday, the Pirate Bay team adds yet another service to its arsenal, a free video converter that allows users to put their favorite movies and TV shows on almost every mobile device.

With the wide range of video formats out there, it can be quite a challenge to find a tool that can easily convert these to a format that is supported by your mobile device. The Pirate Bay, one of the greatest video libraries online, now has an application that does just this.

The ViO converter reduces AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV and others videos to 20% of its original size without any reduction in image quality, and claims to do it faster than any other converter. The tool is completely free and comes with pre-configured settings for the most wisely used mobile devices, including the iPod, iPhone and BlackBerry.

The converter can be downloaded for free, but strangely enough a .torrent is not available. The ViO website is currently accessible at a subdomain of The Pirate Bay, complete with a nifty marketing pitch claiming that “ViO proprietary compression delivers better video quality, higher resolution and smaller file sizes, than anything else on the market today.”

When ViO is installed there is an optional toolbar that can be installed with it. The application itself is easy to use, and does indeed a good (and fast) job at converting different video files we’ve tried. If this takes off, it might even reduce the number of pirated downloads of some of the commercial alternatives. Some readers noted that ViO violates the GPL for at least 2 projects, The Pirate Bay will put the source online to resolve this issue.

10. The Atari Jaguar
9. Shenmue
8. Lair
7. Messiah
6. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness
5. Driv3r
4. E.T.
3. Superman
2. Daikatana
1. Pac-Man

The games highlighted in bold are games that I myself have played at one point. If you would like to read their reasons behind why each of these games made the list, you can read the whole article HERE provided by the guys at IGN.

In 1958, Dr. William Higinbotham was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on a simulation of bouncing balls and missile trajectories that could predict the paths objects could take. Suddenly, it hit him: why not apply this to tennis? He created Tennis for Two, which depending on your definition could be considered the world’s first videogame, in October of that year.

Designing the circuit board and its components took Higinbotham a few days, and building the machine took about three weeks. On October 18th, 1958, hundreds lined up to play the newly christened Tennis for Two. It used a whopping five-inch oscilloscope screen, and featured play mechanics pretty similar to 1972′s Pong, though the game was viewed from the side of the net rather than an overhead vantage point.

Why didn’t he patent the technology? Well, Tennis for Two used designs extremely similar to what Higinbotham had created in his federal-owned lab, so any patent would have had to belong to the government. Owning the right to every video game eversounds pretty sweet right now, given our monstrous debt, but that’s really neither here nor there. So if this game doesn’t look too appealing to you or something you think you could play for hours at a time… just be thankful that the video games we have come to love have made such big progress as they have since their start!