Week 1 Studio: 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

22 February 2027

Before the studio#

Install the platform toolchain from the setup guide linked on this page once it’s published: a DOS/PC emulator, a console emulator, and a hex editor. Bring one game you personally suspect is “lost” — you’ll test that guess against the definition today.

In the studio#

Working in pairs, you’ll sort a shared list of a dozen games into lost, merely old, and genuinely ambiguous, using week 1’s definition rather than gut feel. The ambiguous pile is the point — that’s where the definition’s edges actually get tested.

Afterwards#

Keep your sorted list. The reasoning you used on the ambiguous cases today is exactly what week 8 asks you to apply to your own chosen artifact.