A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.

I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.

Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.

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[–] HumanPenguin@feddit.uk 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Not so sure about that. When you consider time spans.

Currently we can emulate the majority of early games consoles. So theoretically with time and Moors law any hardware will be emulate able in a few decades. With enough information.

The advantage of open source software. Is it can be used with the original binaries to reverse engineer the instruction set even if the original manufacturer wishes to hide it. So with will and effort even the most complex hardware will be able to be emulated on future much faster hardware.

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Moore’s law is not a given. It has been slowing down recently.

Current games are made for current day’s design of graphics cards. They are very dependent on pixel shaders for example.

Let’s be hypothetical. Imagine that future graphics cards go all in on ray tracing. Pixel shaders have become a thing of the past and no new hardware support it natively anymore.

Preservers have two options: either try their best to simulate pixel shaders effects through ray tracing, or emulate it through software.

Simulating through ray tracing won’t be accurate. Many pixel shader effects can’t be properly translated to ray tracing. Emulating through software can be hard. I don’t think many games even from 20 years ago can be fully run on modern CPUs.

[–] HumanPenguin@feddit.uk 2 points 6 months ago

The direct numerics of moors law may not be definite.

But the principal it defines is. In the future computers will have much more power then they do now.

The reason modern GPUs use things like shaders etc is to allow them to archive massive manipulation of data in more efficient ways specific for the task desired.

Honestly this is why I mention time scale as the main thing that will make this possible. How modern gpus or other specialised processers do the task is less important then what the game code is asking the gpu to achieve.

The idea that at a unknown future date. The CPU GPUs or what ever future tech we have. will never be able to run fast enough to read current cpu or gpu instruction sets. And generate the effect defined using future techniques is not viable as an argument. The only questions are how long and is anyone going to have the motivation to reverse engineer the large but finite instruction sets used by secretive hardware corps today.