The MAME emulation project is an under-appreciated volunteer initiative that has had a major impact on video game preservation. Started in 1997, the goal of MAME (which stands for the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) was to find a way to run old coin-operated arcade games on modern PC hardware. Since that time, the project has expanded support for over 14,000 electronic devices. Not just arcade games, but music synthesizers, children’s spelling toys and even slot machines are included in MAME. Contributors to the project have described its purpose as a reference library for the inner workings of electronic history. The project is surprisingly agnostic about the content it preserves: good games as well as bad are meticulously preserved and their idiosyncrasies carefully noted.
This diligent note taking by MAME developers allowed us to conduct a novel study on the history and cost of game preservation. We analysed the entire compatibility list of 3,783 arcade video games dating from 1979-2023, looking for issues that made preservation difficult. One of the main difficulties encountered by MAME volunteers were copyright TPMs. These are digital locks applied to old circuit boards and chips that prevent access or copying of the underlying game code. In the arcade era of 1979-2010, many manufacturers applied these measures to prevent bootlegs of their games and control what arcade operators could do with the equipment. Now, decades later, researchers and preservationists need to contend with these legacy TPMs.
Our study contributes to current policy debates about the costs and benefits of contemporary TPMs. Those measures applied to digital goods today will become the legacy TPMs of tomorrow, inhibiting preservation, research and other uses permitted by copyright exceptions. Thanks to the tremendous work of MAME volunteers, the TPMs applied to legacy video games were overcome (although it took an additional 628 years of aggregate effort to do so). The same cannot be said for other digital records that don’t benefit from enthusiastic global hacker communities. How will TPMs be dealt with in more mundane electronic records and government archives as those formats pass into obsolescence?
This study was funded with generous support by Knowledge Rights 21, as part of a wider research on the impact of TPMs. The full report can be accessed using the link below.
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