Week 2: Emulation fundamentals

How emulation actually works across the course's three platforms, and the legal grey zone around each

1 March 2027

Emulation is the course’s main recovery tool, so week 2 covers what an emulator is actually doing across the three platforms you’ll work with: DOSBox reconstructing a DOS-era PC, a console emulator reconstructing fixed hardware down to timing quirks, and a browser emulator like Ruffle reinterpreting a Flash file the browser itself no longer runs.

Each platform carries a different legal shape. Console emulation is generally legal; the BIOS and ROM you feed it often aren’t yours to distribute. PC abandonware sits in a grey zone most publishers ignore but few explicitly permit. Flash emulation is unusually clean, since Ruffle reimplements the player rather than running Adobe’s original code. None of this is a loophole to exploit — it’s the boundary you’ll need to state plainly in week 6’s field report.

Outline#

• what an emulator reconstructs, and what it can’t
• DOSBox, console emulators, and Ruffle: one demo each
• legality by platform: ROMs, abandonware, and reimplementation
• picking a platform for your own studio work later in the semester