Studios
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each studio, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
Studios are the hands-on half of the practicum — where the emulators actually get installed, the hex dumps actually get read, and your own artifact actually gets worked on. Each pairs with the lecture from the same week.
Sorting cases into lost, alive, and edge cases
Applying the course's definition of "lost" to a set of real games, before you have to apply it to your own choice in week 8
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Getting three emulators running
Hands-on setup and first boot for a PC, console, and browser/Flash target
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Cracking an archive format by hand
A guided hex-dump exercise on an undocumented archive format, worked alongside a tutor rather than solo
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Rebuilding the Meridian Drift timeline
Reconstructing the case study's publisher-collapse timeline from primary sources, in parallel with the lecture's deck
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Reading a save file cold
Extracting concrete claims about a game from a save file, with no working build to check them against
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Field Report clinic
Working studio time on your Field Report, with a tutor available for scope and sourcing questions before it's due
Week 6 · 12 April 2027
Judging a console dump's provenance
Given three archived dumps of the same cartridge, work out which to trust and why
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
Choosing your artifact
Committing to the game or artifact you'll spend the rest of the semester recovering, with a tutor sanity-checking the choice
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
Report clinic
Structuring your recovery report so far, and checking it would make sense to someone who wasn't there
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Sourcing your artifact's provenance
Tracking down and evaluating whatever community record exists for your own chosen artifact
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
Exhibit dry run
A full run-through of your recovery exhibit in front of a small audience, a week before it counts
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
Recovery Exhibit
The semester's closing session — recovery exhibits, presented to the class and open guests
Week 12 · 24 May 2027