A hands-on recovery practicum: you excavate real abandoned and obsolete PC, console and browser games using emulation, archival research and file-format investigation, then document and exhibit what you recover — or what you can prove is genuinely unrecoverable.
What you will do
Excavate a real, obsolete game. You'll spend the semester learning emulation, archival research, and basic file-format investigation on worked examples — then apply all three to one lost or abandoned game you choose yourself. You walk out with a recovery attempt, a written archaeological report, and a public exhibition of what you found. A well-documented failure counts, provided you can prove why recovery wasn't possible.
Who it is for
Students with basic programming and computing literacy who want to work with something concrete rather than survey digital preservation from a distance. No advanced reverse-engineering, exploit development, or console-modding hardware is required — emulators and public archives are enough. If you're hoping to learn ROM hacking or speedrunning tech specifically, this isn't that course.