New blog post: Adventures in Archiving
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Jeff Parsons
Jeff Parsons
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_posts/2017-06-15-adventures-in-archiving.md
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---
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layout: post
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title: Adventures in Archiving
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date: 2017-06-15 22:00:00
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permalink: /blog/2017/06/15/
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machines:
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- type: pcx86
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id: ibm5150
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config: /devices/pcx86/machine/5150/cga/64kb/machine.xml
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autoMount:
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A:
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path: /disks/pcx86/dos/ibm/1.00/PCDOS100.json
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B:
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path: /apps/pcx86/1983/adventmath/ADVENTMATH100.json
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autoType: 8-10-81\\rb:\\ra:basica castle\\r
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---
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In October 1983, IBM released a game called "Adventures in Math", which apparently tried to make mathematics as
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exciting as walking through a dungeon full of locked doors, treasures, spiders, and more. I had never heard of this
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game, until I was recently browsing the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/)'s
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[MS-DOS Showcase](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_showcase):
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> This collection is a hand-picked set of selections from the MS-DOS Software Library of the Internet Archive.
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They've been chosen because they represent major parts of the MS-DOS story, because they are particularly impressive,
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and because they're fun. The intention is to eventually link these games to manuals and other materials as time goes on.
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> Curation was done by Jason Scott, Internet Archive's Software Librarian. He can be reached at jscott@archive.org with
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suggestion, questions and inquiries.
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For some reason, "Adventures in Math" caught my eye. You can play it on the
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[Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Adventures_in_Math_1983), or play it below, using PCjs. In
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fact, I invite you to play it in BOTH places, and let me know what you think.
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A word of warning: this is NOT a great game. I find it interesting only as an example of the challenges we face
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archiving and emulating old software.
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{% include machine.html id="ibm5150" %}
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Hosting the software on the PCjs website was more tedious than I'd expected, but that wasn't due to technical issues.
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The biggest challenge was isolating and recreating the original distribution software. You can find all the gory
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details on the page I created for "[Adventures in Math](/apps/pcx86/1983/adventmath/)".
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In short, although the software is archived inside multiple ZIP archives at the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/),
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none of them appeared to contain an un-mingled, un-modified, distribution-only copy of the original software.
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And discovering that the software was archived inside multiple ZIP archives was a purely accidental discovery, not
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something one could easily determine using the Internet Archive's own search engine.
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### Emulation Challenges
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There are also some fundamental problems with the Internet Archive's approach to emulation. They load sets of files,
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along with custom batch files, into tightly coupled machine configurations, with no indication which files were part
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of the original software distribution, and no hardware details regarding their "mystery" machine configurations.
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And the Internet Archive's overall "emulation experience" is often not very faithful. Their rendering of
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"Adventures in Math" gives the impression that the game ran *much* faster than it actually ran on a 4.77Mhz IBM PC.
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While their emulator can be configured operate at different speeds, it's unclear which of their holdings have already
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been "tuned". As a fallback, they do provide some user controls:
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> "While the program is running, press CTRL-F11 to slow the program down. Pressing CTRL-F11 repeatedly will slow it
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down further, until the speed is more reasonable. (Pressing CTRL-F12 repeatedly will attempt to speed things up.)"
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but in general, the user has no idea what speed they have currently selected, or what the target speed should be.
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For users who simply want "to play the game," that may be fine, but an historian would probably prefer to see how the
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game originally operated and how each screen was painstakingly rendered, to better understand both the original user
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experience and the challenges that early software developers faced.
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The failure to archive software exactly as it was originally distributed, generally as one or more disk image (IMG)
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files along with scanned (PDF) copies of the documentation, is the most serious problem we collectively face. I don't
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blame the Internet Archive, because in most cases, they're simply archiving what someone else archived before them,
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and those earlier "archivists" often didn't take the time to thoroughly preserve and document everything.
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On the other hand, the Internet Archive could do a better job of cataloging its holdings, recording the provenance of
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everything they have archived, maintaining a clear separation of original material from subsequent modifications
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(including any modifications created solely for ease of emulation), providing more control over machine configurations,
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and enabling the use of third-party emulators -- like PCjs -- which may be able to perform a more faithful rendering
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of certain software packages.
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In addition, I would hope that anything the Internet Archive "archives" itself (ie, from original distribution media)
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is duplicated and preserved according to a *much* higher standard than any files, documents, etc, it has simply scraped
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from the Internet.
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*[@jeffpar](http://twitter.com/jeffpar)*
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*Jun 15, 2017*
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