Software set to resurrect old computer games and files

Researchers are developing software that could eventually be used to play outdated games and open file formats.

As part of the three-year European Union project, Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (Keep), researchers from universities in the UK and Europe will develop an emulator that they hope will recover file formats from the 1970s onwards.

Every year new digital files are created and the British National Archive estimates it currently holds enough information in formats that are no longer widely available to fill about 580,000 encyclopaedias.

Emulators - programs that mimic other systems such as game consoles - are needed to access these outdated file formats. They translate the program code of the original file so it can be used on other media.

However, many of these emulators are themselves likely to become obsolete or they can degrade the data as it is migrated to new formats.

Dr David Anderson, one of the research partners on the project, said: “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, 1980s and 1990s are vanishing fast and every year new technologies mean we face greater risk of losing material."

With new formats and technologies continually being developed, the £3.58m EU funded emulator is said to be as "future proof as these things get". It can recognise and open all previous types of computer files; from 1970s Space Invaders games to 3in floppy disks.

However Dr Anderson said UK users may have some time to wait before they can use the system.

“We have not even begun seriously to discuss how Keep could be rolled out for home users,” he said.

“The project has only just started and the intention, in the first instance, is to make the service available to the Memory Institutions within the Keep consortium the National libraries of the Netherlands, France and Germany and to the German Computer Games Museum). The timescale for this is three years.”