The vision

An emulator that runs a game proves only that the game runs. The interesting question was never whether the machine can be imitated well enough to fool a player; it is what the people who wrote these games knew, and how much of it can still be recovered from the only copy of that knowledge left standing — the binary itself.

Evidence, not recollection

Thirty years of forum posts, magazine listings and remembered conversations say a great deal about how these games were made. Much of it is true. Some of it is confidently wrong, and there is rarely a way to tell which is which.

A colophon settles the question by going back to the binary. Every claim it makes is one the machine can be made to demonstrate.

Reproducible or it did not happen

A finding is published with the means to re-derive it: the code that produced it, the machine it ran on named by the commit it was built from, and the file it read named by its hash. Anyone holding the same file can run the same cell and get the same bytes, today or in ten years.

Written while it can still be checked

The people who wrote these games are still here. That will not always be true, and it is the whole reason for the hurry.