Evaluating Assisted Emulation for Legacy Executables

Abstract

Access to many born-digital materials can only be accomplished economically through the use of emulation where contemporaneous software is executed on an emulated ma- chine. For example, many thousands of CD-ROMs have been published containing proprietary software that cannot be reasonably recreated. While emulation is proven technology and is widely used to run both current and obsolete versions of Windows and Unix operating systems, it suffers a fatal flaw as a preservation strategy by requiring future users to be facile with today’s operating systems and software. We have previously advocated “assisted emulation” as a strategy to alleviate this shortcoming. With assisted emulation, a preserved object is stored along with scripts designed to control a legacy software environment and access to the object enabled through a “helper” application. In this pa- per we significantly extend this work by examining, for a large data set, both the cost of creating such scripts and the common problems that these scripts must resolve.

Details

Creators

Toshniwal, Swetha; Areyan, Enrique; Brown, Geoffrey; Cornelius, Kevin; Whelan, Gavin

Institutions

Date

Keywords

ischool; toronto; canada; emulation; assisted emulation; digital preservation

Publication Type

paper

License

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 AT

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