Preserving and Emulating Australian Made Videogames of the 1990s

This paper reports on a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project, "Play It Again," which aims to document, preserve, and make playable a curated selection of 50 Australian-made videogames from the 1990s. The work is carried out by researchers at Swinburne University of Technology and RMIT University in partnership with ACMI and AARNet, and it frames games as a neglected area of screen history that requires active digital preservation. The project pursues two main tasks: creating disk images from physical media, and making those images playable through Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) and open-source emulators.

The selected titles span DOS, Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 PCs, Amiga, Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, and Sega Saturn, and were distributed on 3.5-inch floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and cartridges, each requiring specialised digitisation tools. The authors note that many of the imaging tools come from hobbyist communities, so their continued availability and support is uncertain, sometimes forcing redesigns when parts or developers are no longer available.

The paper's main findings concern the limits of current emulation infrastructure. EaaSI at the time supported DOS, Windows and Game Boy emulation but lacked Amiga and the console systems in the project, so the team turned to hobbyist emulators. This made configured environments harder to share with partners, illustrating the convenience EaaSI provides by hiding the learning curve of individual emulators. Performance also remained uneven, particularly for driving games, because not every graphics card was emulated, and some titles, such as the live-action-heavy DOS game The Dame Was Loaded (1996), proved difficult to configure. The authors report that troubleshooting with DOSBox and vintage hardware helped benchmark and optimise emulator performance.