Forward Porting with Legacy Media and Code – Part 1
AlphaPixel often gets called upon to work on legacy codebases, sometimes VERY legacy. We have contact with code from the 80s and 90s on a regular basis, in a variety of dialects and languages, and stored and archived in various difficult containers and mediums.
A few years ago, we recovered source code and data from a SCSI drive from the late 80s, and then again from the 90s. This often involves reviving very old hardware, sourcing special adapters that are scarce and obscure, and using complex setups of virtual machines, emulators and real antique electronics to assemble a pipeline through which data can flow to modern environments.
After recovering data, many times it must be forward converted into more modern formats (many file formats from decades ago are no longer supported by modern software) and often evolved into new languages or modern dialects of the same language in order to compile. Even after compiling, there are often issues with data sizes and GPU features, since modern 64-bit CPUs have capabilities that may trip up code anticipating it was running in the 32, 16 or even 8 bit era.
While NDAs and confidentiality mean we often can’t talk about our paid projects, we recently had an interesting side project that used the same processes, only it was all for fun, so we can talk all about it.
