Making legacy videogames and interactive artworks playable with EaaSI via ACMI’s website
For the first time at ACMI, we’re making Australian videogames and interactive artworks from the 1990’s playable in a web browser via our website. This has been made possible through collaboration with our Play it Again II (PIA II) and Archiving Australian Media Arts (AAMA) Australian Research Council (ARC) grant work and project partners.
This means that when you visit ACMI*, you can experience and play some of your favourite Australian historical videogames (via emulation) in ACMI’s Story of the Moving Image Games Lab, or with EaaSI via our website on your laptop or mobile devices.
Background
ACMI has a long history of exhibiting videogames and interactive art works, as well as curating and preserving them to capture the widest range of videogame artistry and history of play possible. Creators in Melbourne were pioneers of experimentation utilising (and bending) the home computing technologies of the 1980’s and 1990’s. New graphics and PC processing capabilities as well as web-based platforms shifted display opportunities for makers and their collaborative practices. As local videogame studios evolved, and the industry flourished, growing from hobbyists into a fully fledged pre-Global Financial Crisis commercial sector. Simultaneously, organisations like Experimenta in Melbourne fostered unique exhibition opportunities for artists creating interactive or software-based works.
Many of these works are exemplars of artistic and technical experimentation but remain vulnerable without dedicated preservation efforts. Delamination, bit-rot, segment corruption, hardware and software obsolescence are only a handful of challenges that plague the optical disks, floppy discs and the videogame cartridges of this era.
Play it Again II and Archiving Australian Media Arts ARC’s
The PIA II and AAMA Australian Research Council funded Linkage projects have allowed ACMI even more scope to invest in the conservation of this highly culturally significant content. Through the AAMA project, ACMI has also been working with Experimenta to ensure that their 35-year-old collection can be conserved, catalogued and made accessible, while the PIA II project has aided the acquisition, documentation and preservation of a range of 1980s and 1990s Australian videogames into ACMI’s Collection.
Imaging and Emulation
To preserve the unique content within these significant collections, Dr. Cynde Moya (and her team at Swinburne) have been imaging floppy disks, optical disks and videogame cartridges to extract the content from their original carriers. These disk images are then accessed and quality checked using EaaSI, the browser-based software management tool that allows access to, and storage of, legacy computing environments. In EaaSI, Cynde has created a range of legacy software environments (from Commodore 64s to early Intel x86 PCs running various early versions of Windows). These are used to test and run imaged content which are then able to be shared with ACMI and partnering organisations via an Australian emulation node courtesy of AARNET and OpenSLX. This emulation mode is going to be increasingly vital national infrastructure over the next decade as more contemporary cultural artefacts have a software element to them.
Embedding EaaSI’s playable media into ACMI’s website
With ACMI’s new(ish) media delivery infrastructure (XOS) and website making material from our collection more visible in our online catalogue’s ‘work’ pages we were keen to also embed the EaaSI platform for access to these imaged works when visitors are in on our network or wi-fi footprint*.
How we did it
First let’s look at what website visitors see when they navigate to an ACMI work from the collection that has a videogame emulation such as Gumboots Australia for PC. There are a few steps to get the EaaSI game emulator to load in the page. Currently they look like this:
- Add the original operating system image to EaaSI (in this case, Windows 98)
- Add the game image to EaaSI to run on the operating system
- Add the game configuration to setup the audio/memory, and auto-run the game
- Add the game’s environment-id to our Vernon collections database
- The Work is then automatically imported into XOS (our Museum content management system)
- The Work is then automatically added to the ACMI website database and search index
- For rights reasons, the website checks if the visitor is onsite at ACMI, and loads the game emulator
Currently we only store the game environment-id in Vernon, which is the identifier that points to the configured game running in the operating system in EaaSI. The EaaSI JavaScript embed code requires these other variables to run the game emulator:
- eaas-service — the URL of your EaaSI server
- eaas-script — the URL of the JavaScript to load the game emulator
In our case AARNET are our eaas-server hosting partners, and we load the eaas-script from the official EaaS client GitLab repository.
Our website determines whether a visitor is on-site at ACMI by checking if the IP address range of the visitor is within the IP address range of the ACMI WiFi network. If they match, then the Django backend passes a message to the Vuejs backend to allow the frontend to render the EaaSI JavaScript component. This component then asks EaaSI to load the game emulator that relates to the environment-id for that Works page.
One of the nice easter-eggs that comes with using EaaSI for game emulation is that you can also run the base operating system via an environment-id. So if you’re on-site at ACMI you can navigate to the Commodore 64 Works page and create some magic like it’s 1982!
Future plans
We’re currently working on releasing our Vuejs EaaSI component for public use via npm. If you’d like to contribute, head over to the ACMILabs GitHub repository and see the issues we’ve got to solve before launch (we’re Python/Django developers, so your Node/Vuejs mentorship would be appreciated).
Our current approach worked well enough for the 25 different operating system emulators we installed for the launch of the Born Digital Heritage Conference, but looking to the future where we’re wanting to image thousands of videogames and interactive artworks from our collection we’d like to be able to:
- Request a game environment-id via an EaaSI API POST including the game image
- Request a game configuration via an EaaSI API POST so we don’t have to create configurations for every game image
This would allow us to save only two things in our Vernon collections database:
- A URL to the game image
- An optional reference to a custom game configuration if needed
Which means that if we need to update the game image or configuration, we only have to do that in one place in Vernon, and on next page load on the Website that change will be reflected.
We’d love to work together with the EaaSI community and other organisations preserving videogames and interactive artworks to make this happen.
This article was co-authored with ACMI’s brilliant Creative Technologist Simon Loffler who has lead the work done to embed EaaSI in ACMI’s website.
Thank you to our ARC grant partners Swinburne, RMIT, EaaSI, AARNET, UNESCO Persist and Open SLX and to Melanie Swalwell, Cynde Moya, Helen Stuckey, Seb Chan, Tony Savesky, Caroline Choong, Mar Cruz as well as ACMI’s AV, Curatorial, DevOps and Collection teams.
*Why can’t you play these outside of the footprint of ACMI’s network on our website? There is no technical reason why not. The current state of the Australian Copyright legislation only allows us to provide this kind of research access to collection works on our physical premises.
