A few readers wrote in response to me sharing Panic’s blog to say that they witnessed online publications doing the same.

Here’s a 1993 essay by William Langewiesche from The Atlantic Online (sic!) that’s still on the web – which, by the way, you should read because it’s really great writing – juxtaposed with a screenshot of a 2026 Atlantic essay on the same machine:

Likewise, here is a BBC News article from 1997, and another one just from today:

I do see those as something different, though. The old articles here are basically preserved as they were, which you can tell by the tiny images, pixel fonts, narrow widths, and so on. They’re likely the output of contemporaneous CMS frozen in time, functionally equivalent to a “Save As…” command.

This is better than those articles disappearing altogether, and better still than them being carelessly converted in bulk to a more modern CMS, resulting in formatting mistakes, broken images, and missing context. But what I appreciated about Panic’s approach is that it felt unified with the rest of the blog. In a way, it was less like preservation “as is” and more like “remastering” – ask any Star Wars fan about the difference – with slight updates to fonts, more thorough integration, and thinking about readability on smartphones that didn’t exist in the 1990s.

Of course, compounding the difficulty of online preservation, “as is” in the computer realm doesn’t really exist; even The Atlantic Online’s 33-year-old HTML is served using modern fonts via crisp and tiny pixels 1993 would die for – but even if it’s increasingly more and more possible, you also probably wouldn’t want to emulate an old, flickering CRT and Internet Explorer 3 to read it. On the web, just like elsewhere in computing, you truly can’t go home again.

Thanks to Phil Gyford for a few examples.

Since we’re talking about pixel art, in this 30-minute video, Stuart Brown known as Ahoy embarks on recreating an illustration called Four-Byte Burger:

The original picture was created by artist Jack Haeger on an influential computer Commodore Amiga in 1985, on prototype software that “was in such an early stage of development that it lacked a save feature, entirely.” Proper to-disk screenshotting didn’t come to computers until the 1990s, so the only reproduction of the picture was a photograph taken off of the display and reproduced in print in a manual for the graphics software; the original image pixels evaporated when the computer was eventually turned off.

Brown recreates the image using more modern means (Photoshop), but eventually goes back to an Amiga to try to display it as close to the original as possible. It’s a soothing watch, and there are some fun moments in the video, like rotating the CRT to “portrait mode” – in a world populated by smartphones, in some sense the image aspect ratio seems oddly prescient.

(Also, if you ever find yourself having to rotate a CRT, you can just degauss it instead of waiting all night. Degaussing a monitor is one of the forgotten weird tactile pleasures bordering on dark magic, and if you’re ever near an old CRT, ask someone to show you.)

A funny and occasionally spicy 15-minute video by Nerrel from October 2024 about some of the nuances and legal fights surrounding Nintendo’s fight with community-made emulators:

The video paints Nintendo in the harsh light, highlighting their double standards and willingness to throw their corporate legal weight around just to squash the challenges before they go to court, despite court precedents ruling against them.

The video also talks about software preservation – this is the part that feels very important to me – and I also learned things about piracy, DCMA, and modern video game encryption.

Just to highlight the versatile value of emulation, in another corner of the emulation universe, I found this fascinating project: a web page called Yes we scan, made by George MacKerron, that promises scanning directly from the browser – for example if you have an old scanner unsupported by your modern OS.

And… it actually works! It combines WebUSB with an interesting technique:

Your web browser emulates a whole PC running Linux with open-source scanning software (SANE). It connects that to your scanner via WebUSB.

If you are interested, the details page has more… well, details. MacKerron also wrote Printervertion that allows you to print directly from web, too, even if your operating system abandoned your vintage printer. The way I understand this, both efforts basically invite an alternative operating system that might be more supportive to take a stab at scanning or printing, and do it in a friendly and sleek way through emulation. It’s kind of incredible this is even possible.

Multibowl is one of my favourite emulation projects because it’s a rare example of using emulators creatively, rather than for nostalgia or research.

It’s a 2016 game by Bennett Foddy and AP Thompson that reimagines older existing games as smaller pieces of a new, Super Mario Party-like experience. Two players randomly join one of 300 games – sometimes in medias res – with a small explicit goal that can be accomplished in about ~30 seconds, after which a point is awarded, another game is loaded, and so on.

All of this is done through actual emulation and fast switching of games’s original code:

Regarding the game choices, at the outset, I wanted to curate a list of moments of gameplay that would be meaningful if played for just a short period of time. Sometimes it’s obvious – you can take a moment from a fighting game where both players are low on health, or play a sports game from the start until the first point is scored. So that’s where I started. Over time, I figured out that you could make exciting moments in games that are not otherwise interesting for a competitive duel. For example, in Dodonpachi (a bullet hell game) we take away the player’s guns and challenge them to stay alive in a huge hail of bullets.

For games that were designed as cooperative experiences, I eventually gravitated toward the structure ‘score more points but do not die’, which forces the players to calibrate how much risk they take relative to the other player.

This excerpt is from a 2017 interview of Foddy by Seb Chan from ACMI. There are many interesting moments in that interview, such as the issue of curation:

Multibowl is not a very precise historical curation like you might make for a museum exhibition, where you can only show a couple of dozen things at most. It’s a huge driftnet of games. There is no quality or historical significance standard, and no attempt to balance out the games in terms of nationality or gender. The only curatorial instinct that it follows is to find the most diverse set of game ideas. With each piece distilled down to a randomly-selected 30-second slice, there’s room for an infinite number of them.

In fact, contrary to a museum curation, the point of Multibowl is to have too many games for a single player to see. It’s best when it feels too big to grasp. I think, now that there are 300 games in there, it’s starting to feel that way.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to actually play Multibowl outside of special events, given copyright issues. In addition to general emulation copyright murkiness, Foddy adds, “I don’t think the actual bits of actual games have ever been used as the fabric of a larger game before.”

However, a really fun introduction to Multibowl is another art project from a now-defunct comedy duo Auralnauts, who actually played Multibowl pretending to be Kylo Ren and Bane, to hilarious results:

From Nina Kalinina’s excellent revival of a forgotten 1983 GUI, a discovery of a hilarious accessibility bug:

VisiOn loves to beep at the user. It beeps every time a menu option is chosen or an on-screen button is clicked.

If you are tired of the noise, you’d appreciate that Application Manager has an option to replace the sound with a “visual beep”. It is implemented as a flashing area of 32x16 pixels around the mouse cursor. Every time the flashing is about to happen, an image “below” the cursor is preserved in RAM to be restored after the “visual beep” is over. However, the memory allocated for this bitmap is never freed. It takes between 200 and 1000 clicks to fill the RAM with useless copies of the mouse cursor, and then the system crashes.

If you have never heard of VisiOn, The Digital Antiquarian has a fun walkthrough that also happens to be the first chapter of an excellent series about the history of graphical user interfaces.