---
title: The Colophon Project
description: The games of the 8-bit era, opened and read from the inside, and given the note their authors never wrote.
---

For centuries, a scribe finishing a manuscript would add a colophon at the end: who copied it, where, when, and how. The games of the 8-bit era never got one. They shipped as sealed boxes of code, and most of what their authors knew about how they worked was never written down.

A lot of it is already gone.

This project opens those boxes. It runs the games and watches them from the inside, revealing how the screen was drawn, how the levels were packed, how the music was squeezed out of a tiny sound chip. Then it writes the note that was never written, and puts it in a public archive where anyone can read it.

Preserving these games means more than keeping the files alive. It means understanding them, while there's still someone around to check we got it right.

## The parts

The [emulator](https://github.com/tulinmola/colophon-emulator) is the instrument: a machine built a chip at a time in C with no dependencies, cycle-stepped, and readable from outside without disturbing what it is doing.

The [player](https://github.com/tulinmola/colophon-player) carries that machine into a page, so a reader can run it beside the account of it and hold the two against each other. It began as a way to check the emulator and turned into the workbench.

The archive is where the colophons will be kept, each one an argument with its evidence attached. There is nothing in it yet.

What a colophon has to prove before it is published is set out in [the vision](/en/vision/).