What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Twelve weeks, one throughline: recovering abandoned and obsolete games as digital archaeological artifacts. Weeks 1–7 build the methods — defining loss, emulation, file formats, save files, ethics, console preservation — against a recurring case study. Weeks 8–12 apply them to an artifact you choose yourself.
What counts as lost?
Defining the course's object of study, and the boundary between a lost game and one that's merely old
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Emulation fundamentals
How emulation actually works across the course's three platforms, and the legal grey zone around each
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Reading a dead file format
Hex dumps and basic file-format investigation — reading what a game left behind, not reverse-engineering its code
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Case study: excavating Meridian Drift
One PC game, excavated start to finish — the course's recurring reference case study, as a deck
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Save files as archaeological evidence
What a save file can tell you about a game you can't otherwise run, and how to read one without a working emulator yet
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Abandonware ethics and copyright
Digital preservation, copyright, abandonware and responsible archival access — and the ambiguity that runs through all of it
Week 6 · 12 April 2027
Console-era preservation
How cartridge dumping and BIOS emulation work, read from existing dumps and archives rather than requiring hardware of your own
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
Studio: recover an artifact of your own choosing
The open studio — you pick a qualifying lost or abandoned game and begin your own recovery attempt
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
Documentation as craft
Writing the archaeological report — treating documentation as part of the recovery, not an afterthought once it's done
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Community archives as evidence
How preservation-community archives and forum records feed a recovery, as an archival-research method rather than general games history
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
Exhibit prep
Presenting a recovered (or unrecovered) artifact to an audience that wasn't there for the excavation
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
What we couldn't recover, and why
Closing the semester on the recoveries that didn't fully succeed — and why that's still a valid outcome
Week 12 · 24 May 2027