I want to announce that my latest article about videogame preservation has been published in Linux Magazine #289. This article was conceived while I was organizing my videogame collection. I have a respectable amount of videogames from the late 90s and early 2000s and I realized that, despite having good backups of most of the games, running them on a modern Operating System was not guaranteed. This sent me on a quest to check for the best methods to backup a retail videogame release, and then try many different ways of executing those games on modern hardware.
Now, if you are familiar with the modern gaming scene, you will know videogame preservation is an actual industry that moves money. For example, GOG, which used to stand for Great old Games, is a videogame store specialized in repackaging classics and selling them under a form that is playable on recent machines. You can buy their releases for quite a reasonable price, often under ten USD. The question, then, is why would somebody put any effort in archiving an old collection of game CDs and DVDs when you could just repurchase it all for cheap. The answer is simple: most of the time, the release you can buy is not the one you have. This is often the case with translated games - GOG might have the game for sale, but only the English version, so if you want the Spanish version, you are out of luck.
Beat Copy Protection
A challenge I faced with this article is that one of the biggest obstacles in the quest of videogame preservation are copy protected CDs. In the good old days of the 90s, it was not uncommon for videogames to be distributed as copy protected CDs which made it harder to create a clean backup. Most of those early-DRM technologies are beaten by this time, but it is hard to talk about the topic on an American Magazine because US law forbids providing instructions for breaking copy protection mechanisms. So, basically, I didn’t touch the subject in my article other than for explaining the situation to the reader.
If you have read my article already, you might be wondering how can advanced copy protection mechanisms be beaten. Since I am not bound to US law I am free to write about the subject in my personal site.
The good news is that following the instructions and examples in my article is highly likely to work for you right away. The overwhelming majority of games released before year 2000 didn’t bother setting copy protection at all, or used basic mechanisms such as activation keys. As long as you are making a legitimate archival copy out of a retail release, the need for an activation key ought to be not a problem - since I expect you will have one with your retail copy. The bad news is that CDs which used protection based on defective sectors or Data Position Measurement (DPM) can’t be reliably copied using Linux tools.
What are the solutions then? After some testing, it seems to me that the soundest solution is running Alcohol 120%, a proprietary program for Windows which is capable of creating an image from your CDs and DVDs, including the data protection components. Alcohol 120% uses a non-standard format for its images which stores information that cannot be kept on regular images, such as ISO files or BIN/CUE pairs. This allows these non-standard images to contain things such as data position measurements. Alcohol 120% also has the capability of mounting the images under a virtual drive capable of emulating the CD to perfection, including its DPM quirks, therefore making it possible to use the game image just as if it was the original CD.
The Open Source project cdemu can be used under Linux to mount Alcohol 120% images. In theory, this would allow Linux users to mount the image as a virtual drive and then run the game from the CD using Wine or a similar technology. My experience with Wine is nefarious when it comes to running software from CDs, virtual or otherwise, so feel free to try, but don’t set your expectations high.
CloneCD used to be a popular option for copying game CDs back when I was young. It is a nice alternative to Alcohol 120%, and the interface is less cluttered, but my tests show it is not as capable of breaking the most recent forms of CD copy protection.
Windows Centric Solutions
My article was written from the point of view of a Linux user, and in fact I find Linux a very good platform for running old videogames. However, what can you do if you have a copy of some old game and want to run it on a modern Windows system? My advice then would be to check what the industry is doing.
One of the problems old games face is that they are not compatible with anything resembling a modern DirectX. Chances are you are trying to play a game designed for an old Voodoo card, for example. Trying to launch such program under Windows 10 is bound to fail. The way GOG and other actors of the videogame scene are solving this issue is by including a wrapper with the game, which allows the videogame to interact properly with a modern graphics stack. dgVooDoo2 is a popular solution. GOG is also using nGlide with success.
Both dgVooDoo2 and nGlide work under Wine, so it is in fact possible to use these wrappers to play old Windows games under Linux using native-like performance, which is something you can easily try by installing a GOG release which uses an nGlide wrapper on a Linux distribution using a game launcher such as Lutris.
Commercial distributors of old videogames are also using CD emulation wrappers such as ogg-winmm in order to be able to execute the games without the need for an actual CD.
Closing Words
If you find the subject interesting, I encourage you to grab a copy of Linux Magazine. In that article, I explore ways to run old games using a number of compatibility layers, some of which are so powerful you could run an old game as-is without modifying it at all.