It's a good article, but it gets a few things wrong (for example Hologram Time Traveler is NOT emulated, it's simulated via some scripting).
I think it's overlooking a few things as well. Like it mentions stuff like sonic blast man and says while it's emulated you can't get the full effect. Well that goes for at least 50% of everything in mame, excluding pinball and em stuff even. Arcade cabinet preservation and pcb preservation are NOT the same thing. If we truly want to preserve these games, we need to do BOTH. So SBM isn't the exception, rather the rule.
Also a lot of the stuff isn't really in any danger of being lost.....at least not yet. Discrete hardware emulation is in it's infancy largely due to the fact that pcs just recently got powerful enough to emulate games at such a low level. We'll get there.
In addition, anything made after 2000, well it probably isn't emulated due to it still being in use, the pcbs are still too expensive to dump, or PCs are still too slow to work on the emulation. Again, we'll get there.
Finally when people write these articles they are often unaware or overlooking other arcade emulators. The list gets pretty short when you take things supported by Daphne, Model 2, Supermodel, Demul, and ect. I'm not saying that mame doesn't need them included, but in most cases the authors of the other emulators are actively working to update mame's source.
Don't get me wrong it's a good read, but I don't think we should be panicking yet.
The things we really need to worry about are modern console games. This digital download only stuff that's popped up in recent years will be hard to track down, much less crack so that it plays without a license.
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Re: Ars article on 'unemulated games'
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