A special jpg: 2 monkeys, city, moonlight

How many jpg images do you suppose are living on the internet? Probably quite a few.

Among all those images, the jpg on the right is particularly special to me, because it’s a screen capture of an adventure game I wrote for the Commodore VIC-20 when I was very very young (like almost single digits).

If you can’t make it out, those are two monkeys standing under the Toronto skyline, reading a newspaper by moonlight.

At the time I wrote the game, it could only be played by reading the bits that were encoded as waveforms on an audio cassette tape. Which was awesome.

But one day my VIC-20′s cassette drive silently stopped reading tapes, and the game could be played no more.

The photograph below (another jpg) was taken of the defunct
VIC-20 hardware some time before it was tossed into a big dumpster.

Commodore VIC-20 (deceased) and Cassette

Resuscitation by Emulator

2001 Emulator (not dead yet)

Fast-forward through more than a decade to 2001, where I find VICE, a program that can emulate the VIC-20 on Windows.

With the game’s cassette reclaimed from the basement and a dusty tape player connected to my PC’s audio port, I transferred the audio that made up the game’s bits into an audio .wav file, and then converted that audio file into a format that could be loaded by the emulator.

I was so happy to be able to run my game again, and have it preserved “forever,” even though its contents are meaningful only to me (and maybe my family).

Satisfied, I zipped it up together with the emulator
and put it into my folder called “C:\pastlives” for safe keeping.

Now almost ten more years have passed. In this 64-bit world, my game still runs.

For now.

(slightly) Longer Term Thinking

This ran through my head when I was considering whether I should adopt Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format as a standard for my photo archives. The alternative is the Nikon raw (NEF) format I currently use for my negatives.

It literally kept me up last night thinking about the layers of technology I depend on to retrieve and view things in “C:\pastlives”, like my VIC-20 emulator or my digital photos.

Check out this stack of just some of the standards and technologies I used to play my game today:

Some of the technology standards and file types used to play my VIC-20 game on Windows 7. (another jpg)

(Red == the ones I perceive as more volatile)
Sure, you could substitute for some of these (the VIC-20 emulator, for example, also runs on Linux).

But how likely is it that a complete cocktail of prerequisite technologies will be around long enough for me to load and play the game in three more decades? In ten?

These standards aren’t stacking up like a solid foundation, they’re piling up like sediment!

(To abuse a pretentious analogy) It’s like the sands of time themselves.

Consider the Floppy

5 1/4 inch Floppy Disk

Remember floppy disks? Those once-ubiquitous storage devices? How many of you still have machines around that can read a 5 ¼ inch floppy?

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every technology standard drops to zero.

By my estimation, all it’ll take is for me to neglect its preservation for approximately a decade, and my game shall be played no more.

Spoiler Alert!

I’ll go out on a limb and say that despite my efforts, my VIC-20 game will never outlive even all the jpgs in the internet.

So I’m just going to tell you that one monkey rescues the other monkey from the Toronto zoo and they escape back to Africa.

There’s an action sequence where you have to climb through the sunroof of a taxi and jump off at just the right moment to escape a high-speed police chase.

Screenshots, while they last, are available upon request.