On Emulation: Don Quixote and Grandma's Cookbook

Don Quixote and grandma’s cookbook Ideology and rhetoric of emulation. The case of MAME ${ }^{1}$

Riccardo Fassone (Università di Torino)

1. The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) is a computer program developed by Nicola Salmoria and released in February 1997. MAME aims at reproducing as precisely as possible the inner functioning of various arcade machines by emulating their hardware components within the environment of a multi-purpose computer. In other words, MAME conforms to the definition of emulator provided by Conley et al. according to which

Abstract

An emulator is a piece of hardware/software that allows a user to execute game software on a platform for which the software was not originally intended. For example, video game emulators allow a personal computer to function almost identically to a video game console or an arcade game system. (2004, p. 3)

Whereas most emulators designed to reproduce extinct or disappearing video games technologies concentrate on mimicking the behaviour of a single platform (see for example Stella, a popular emulator for the Atari 2600), MAME is capable of emulating a series of different reverse engineered CPUs and sound chips found in arcade cabinets. MAME can thus ‘trick’ «the game code in believing that it is running on the original arcade cabinet» (Murphy, 2013, p. 44); games running on MAME are usually read-only memories (ROM) transformed into software, a procedure known as ‘dumping’. At a first glance MAME seems to act as a repository for lost, forgotten or broken hardware technology, an archive for obsolescent platforms that allow players and scholars to experience once again their otherwise unplayable ROMs.

MAME’s developers reinforce this stance in the ‘About’ section of their website, where they claim:

MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for preservation purposes, in order to prevent many historical games from disappearing forever once the hardware they run on stops working. (About MAME, mamedev.org)

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While elsewhere, MAME’s coordinator Aaron Giles states that «MAME is to arcade games what the Library of Congress is to books» (Giles, 2008). As most emulators, MAME seems to actively contrasts the technological teleology that drives the video game industry, by acknowledging that «much of the work of the games industry, in its broadest sense, is diametrically opposed to the project of game history, heritage and preservation» (Newman, 2012, p. 9) and providing a ‘vernacular’ solution to the lack of institutional interest in preservation. This grassroots approach to preservation has raised a number of urgent questions on the legal status of reverse-engineered platforms and ‘dumped’ ROMs, but, while the grey area of copyright laws surrounding emulation is at the heart of various studies (Farrand, 2012, Conley et al., 2004, Pinchbeck et al., 2009), the rhetorical and ideological implications of the complex set of historical and archival practices activated by projects like MAME may need further consideration.

2. MAME, antiquarianism and experience

In an article on MAME, Murphy claims that this emulator «favors technical accuracy over ease of use» (2013, p. 50); in other words, the operations of the emulated platforms should be reproduced as accurately as possible, even though this often means that emulated games «run so slowly on current hardware systems that they are virtually unplayable» (ibidem). Moreover, MAME’s clumsy interface, its general unfriendliness and the developers’ blunt statement that playing games through the emulator «is considered a nice side effect, and is not MAME’s primary focus» (About MAME, mamedev.org.), seem to reinforce the idea that the emulator’s main goal is not satisfying nostalgia for the arcade, but achieving efficient preservation of specialized hardware. Murphy relates MAME’s orthodoxy in treating the preserved material to the ideological agenda of «defining video game code as an entity that speaks truth» (Ivi, p. 51), a paradoxical archiving strategy that preserves not the objects but an abstract representation of their former existence in hardware form. Under this perspective, MAME acts as a historical tool in the foucaultian sense, a work of collective historiography whose goal is (quite literally) «to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents and lend speech to those traces» (Foucault, 1972, p. 7). While Murphy, borrowing from Coleman (2011), claims that MAME represents a continuation of the hacking practices of appropriation and reordering of technology that inform much of contemporary digital game culture, one could contend that MAME’s developers are a bizarre breed of antiquarians working in absentia of material hardware. As a matter of fact, according to Ernst:

For antiquarians, history is not just text, but the materialist emancipation of the object from an

exclusive subjection to textual analysis. Antiquarianism acknowledges the past as artefactual hardware, so to speak, upon which historical discourse operates like a software. (2005, p. 589)

MAME’s practice of antiquarianism and its mission of «documenting the hardware and how it functions» (FAQ, mamedev.org) is conducted without any hardware to speak of. Not only original CPUs, sound chips and PCBs are archived in their most abstracted form (a code documenting their functioning), but a whole section of what arguably constitutes hardware in arcade games is neglected. According to scholars such as Giordano (2011) and Newman (2012), archiving classic games by preserving their inner functioning, as MAME does, considerably shrinks the borders of what should be considered relevant hardware in arcade cabinets. Interface hardware such as specific controllers, light guns, multiple screens, often used in the arcades to enhance the player’s experience, are lost in translation when a game is reduced to its electronic functioning. Additionally, a wide range of secondary non-technological materials - painted wood cabinets, fluorescent marquees - that functioned as iconic companions to the otherwise extremely abstract video games of the arcade era (Wolf, 2003), cannot be accounted for by MAME’s antiquarianism.

Other than MAME’s incapability to account for the wealth of hardware surrounding video games of the Seventies and Eighties, both Giordano and Newman seem to agree on another, more radical, stance regarding grassroots archival practices. According to Newman:

That so much of what games have to offer is based on contingencies of play must surely lead us to question the primacy of playable games in the game preservation project and encourage us to consider the possibility of a need to a shift the balance from game preservation towards gameplay preservation. (2012, p. 158)

While for Giordano «it can be stated that a complete, philologically credible form of game storage - especially one which recreates the original conditions of the game experience - is almost impossible» (2011). Both scholars hint at the fact that preserving games as textual instances by situating «truth at the material level of code» (Murphy, 2013, p. 47) disregards the contingent nature of digital play and its reliance on ergodicity (Aarseth, 1997) and player input and, ultimately, the instability and situatedness of the player’s experience.

This discourse on the irreducible phenomenology of (digital) play counters MAME’s rhetoric of games-as-code at two distinct levels. On the one hand, since MAME does not guarantee that games can be actually played, but sees play as a side effect, it might be said that the condition of existence of gameplay, that is the ergodic dialogue between a player and a system, is not present,

thus rendering Murphy’s claim according to which «emulators are ludic technologies» (2013, p. 44) problematic. On the other hand, assuming that games can be played through MAME, the specific conditions of play (on a personal computer, lacking dedicated interfaces and iconographic material) arguably make playing Burger Time (Data East, 1982) on an emulator a significantly different experience than playing it in the communal space of an arcade room. If we assume that MAME’s means of obtaining ‘truth’ from hardware preservation is the foucaultian act of liberating «the past from historical discourse (which is always anthropomorphic), in order to make source data accessible to different configurations» (Ernst, 2005, p. 593), we might conclude that that same anthropomorphic discourse is indeed needed in order for the game archivist to end up with something to archive.

3. Consider the broadsword: on materiality

Both Giordano’s emphasis on gaming paraphernalia and relevance of contextual data and Newman’s focus on the phenomenology of play refuse emulation’s rhetoric of hardware-as-text. But while Giordano claims that no philologically plausible form of preservation is possible for digital games, due to their inherent fragmentation as multi-situated, ergodic media, Newman proposes a different strategy altogether. According to the author, since experiential accuracy is but a well-meaning utopia and gameplay rather than games should be archived, the preservation of instances of play (e.g. video clips, ethnographies, etc.), ancillary and paratextual objects, and other non-interactive material should be privileged. Whereas, in the name of accuracy, MAME trades the preservation of the object for the preservation of the abstract conditions of its existence, Newman proposes to collect and preserve instances of play rather than games, focusing on the contingent social and cultural aspects of gameplay rather than on games as cultural products. In both cases, it is the inherent instability of video games, whose very existence and relevance as media objects can be situated at different levels (Bogost and Montfort, 2007), that generates an apparently irreducible aporia.

While MAME’s reaction consists in preserving materiality, although ‘abstracted’, Newman proposes to refuse it altogether through a fascinating similitude:

The continued ability to play remains a valuable and potentially useful means of contextualising and interpreting videogames, in much the same way as handling a replica or original medieval broadsword might give a sense of combat through its heft or the aura of its authenticity. However, just as the sword itself reveals little of the detail of the lived experience of knightly life, neither can the isolated

Newman’s analogy is particularly useful, since it conjures the elusive concept of «the aura of its authenticity», that roughly seems to relate to what Giordano describes as the «Stimmung» (2011) of a game, an untraceable quality that is lost in the trivialities of material preservation. To stick with the similitude, though, it is possible to claim that, while no replica of a sword is capable of making one experience the perils and brutality of battle, the design, construction and, ultimately, the affordances of a weapon are powerful heuristic tools. In this sense, Newman’s claim for the preservation of gameplay seems as short-sighted as MAME’s materialism, since it neglects the affordances offered by specific technological platforms, whose relevance is debated in platform studies (Bogost and Montfort, 2009) and in the archaeology of digital media (Pias, 2011).

4. The past as platform: transformative nostalgia

Video games resist preservation. They can be archived as lines of code, or as traces of their use; they can be turned into museum pieces (until they eventually break) or consigned to planned obsolescence. What is certain is that their textual instability makes them unfit for the archival practices devised for books, films and other media forms. Moreover, the producers of gaming devices and developers of video games actively promote a rhetoric of technological finalism and consistently avoid implementing backward compatibility (Conley et al., 2004), thus making the extinction of old games and platforms a very likely event. As I have tried to demonstrate, the orthodoxy of amateur archivists such as MAME’s developers seems to be insufficient, but an alternative strategy may be found in video game’s very nature. According to Lev Manovich:

Just as a fractal has the same structure on different scales, a new media object has the same modular structure throughout. Media elements, be they images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors are represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities. The objects themselves can be combined into even larger objects - again, without losing their independence. (2001, p. 30)

Manovich here describes digital media as fundamentally defined by their modularity, a condition that makes phenomena such as expansion, contraction, modification and reconfiguration very common within the ecology of digital media. Contemporary video games are often integrated at different levels post-release, from small bug fixes, to large scale add-ons, games are becoming

increasingly modular and, at the same time, more and more textually unstable. While treating video games as first editions of the Don Quixote or, to return to MAME, as entries in the Library of Congress, is becoming ever less feasible, embracing gaming technologies’ inherent modularity may help reconfiguring the past of the medium. In this sense, MAME’s strategy of preservation made of technological proficiency and esoteric interfaces, could be integrated, or even countered, by strategies that aim at using the technological objects of the past as tools rather than monuments. Following Garnett Hertz and Jussi Parikka’s proposal, it might be useful to ‘resuscitate’ the gaming technologies (both hard- and software) of the past and turn them into «zombie media» (Hertz and Parikka, 2012, p. 429), putting them to use, doodling on them, modifying them as one would with grandma’s cookbook. Examples of such an attitude, that I will call transformative nostalgia, in contrast with MAME’s restorative nostalgia (Boym, 2001), can be found in projects such as Combat Rock (Paul Slocum, 2002), a version of the popular Atari 2600 game Combat (Atari Inc., 1977) modified to play a digital (and slightly dissonant) rendition of The Clash’s Rock The Casbah in the background. While apparently trivial, Slocum’s experiment is an interesting example of appropriation of video game history, which is here used as a tool for meaning making and experimentation and, at the same time, as a platform providing specific constraints and affordances. Combat Rock is a zombie, in the sense proposed by Hertz and Parikka, since it is a piece of ‘old’ media that has not been discarded nor archived, but rather tinkled and experimented with; it is a «work that takes as its object a concrete opening up of technologies» (Hertz and Parikka, 2012, p. 427) in order to exploit the inherent modularity of video game code.

Practices of transformative nostalgia or ‘media zombification’ contrast with the rhetoric of orthodox preservation of digital ludic artefact in another fundamental way. Murphy (2013) claims that MAME’s archival drive is «hacking the institutional archive» (p. 44), since it appropriates game technology and removes it from its machinic context. Nevertheless, this supposed strategy of hacking seems to reiterate the practices of blackboxing that the video game industry - and the producers of technology in general - traditionally employs; MAME’s obsession with accuracy, inaccessibility and esoteric interface de facto constitute a self-imposed black box. On the other hand, resisting the anti-historical drive of the video game industry might mean opening old black boxes, refashioning dead hardware or software, and ultimately using the past of the medium as a tool for expression,
for whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as

researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such (Wark, 2004, p. 1).

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