The History of Emulation: Preserving Gaming's Hardware Before It's Gone
Why software emulation of games and computers became its own discipline, who started the project most responsible for legitimizing it, and how a single court case settled whether any of this was legal in the first place.
Emulation exists because physical game hardware doesn’t last forever — arcade boards fail, cartridge connectors corrode, battery-backed save chips die, and the companies that made the original hardware have no commercial reason to keep manufacturing it decades later. Retrogaming, as a discipline, is the project of making sure the software — the actual games — outlives the hardware it was written for, by reproducing that hardware’s behavior in software precisely enough to run the original, unmodified game code.
MAME: the project that made emulation a preservation discipline
On December 24, 1996, Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria began writing individual emulators for classic arcade boards, starting with games in the Pac-Man family under the working name “Multi-Pac.” Rather than keeping these as separate programs, Salmoria merged them into a single, unified framework, released publicly as MAME 0.1 on February 5, 1997, supporting Pac-Man, Rally-X, New Rally-X, and Lady Bug. In April 1997, Salmoria stepped back from active development for a period to fulfill his national service commitment, handing the project’s stewardship to fellow Italian developer Mirko Buffoni.
MAME’s explicit purpose, stated from early on, was preservation: arcade boards are custom hardware, produced in limited runs, and progressively fail with age and use — MAME’s stated goal was documenting and reproducing their exact behavior in software before the originals disappeared entirely. That framing — emulation as an act of preserving a specific, finite, decaying set of physical artifacts, not merely a convenience for playing old games — became the standard justification the rest of the emulation scene organized around, for consoles and computers as much as arcade hardware.
A parallel, separate legal question
Whether emulation was even legal was a genuinely open question through the 1990s, settled by a case that had nothing to do with MAME or arcade preservation specifically. Connectix Corporation built Virtual Game Station, a software emulator for Sony’s original PlayStation, developed by reverse-engineering the PlayStation’s BIOS — a process that necessarily involved repeatedly copying Sony’s copyrighted BIOS code during analysis, without any of that code appearing in the finished, shipped emulator. Sony sued for copyright infringement; in 2000, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. that this kind of intermediate copying, done to reverse-engineer an interface for the purpose of building independent, interoperable software, was protected fair use — establishing the legal foundation the rest of the console-emulation field has built on since.
The field broadens: DOS, then everything else
Emulation’s scope quickly extended beyond arcade and console hardware. Dutch programmers Peter “Qbix” Veenstra and Sjoerd “Harekiet” van der Berg began building DOSBox after finding that Windows 2000 had dropped meaningful DOS compatibility, releasing it in 2002 specifically to keep the enormous library of MS-DOS-era games and software runnable on modern operating systems. A different kind of broadening happened starting in 2010, when developer Hans-Kristian “Themaister” Arntzen began work on SSNES, a lightweight SNES-focused frontend built on libsnes (a decoupled emulation backend by the pseudonymous developer Near) — renamed RetroArch on April 21, 2012, once the project’s ambition grew from “a good SNES frontend” into a general-purpose platform for emulating many different systems through a single, shared interface.
Why “history” and “preservation” are the same story here
Unlike an operating system or a piece of infrastructure software, retrogaming’s history isn’t really the story of one project’s technical evolution — it’s the story of a practice being invented and legally validated: reverse-engineering obsolete or dying hardware closely enough to reproduce it in software, treated from the outset as an act of preserving something finite and at risk of being lost, and settled as legitimate, reverse-engineering-based work rather than infringement, by a court that had never heard of MAME. Every deep-dive on this blog about CPU emulation, cycle accuracy, save states, or the libretro architecture is, underneath, a more detailed look at how that same founding idea — keep the software runnable, faithfully, after the hardware is gone — actually gets implemented.
Sources: MAME — Wikipedia, The MAME Team, 25th anniversary post, Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. — Wikipedia, DOSBox — Wikipedia, RetroArch — Wikipedia