-
The 4.02m euro (£3.58m) project aims to create a universal emulator that can open and play obsolete file formats.
-
Using the emulator, researchers hope to ensure that digital materials such as games, websites and multimedia documents are not lost for good.
-
The emulator will also be regularly updated to ensure that formats that fall out of favour remain supported in the near and far future.
-
Called Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (Keep), the project aims to create software that can recognise, play and open all types of computer file from the 1970s onwards.
-
As well as basic text documents it will also let people load up and play old computer games that technology has left behind.
-
"People don't think twice about saving files digitally - from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives,"
-
But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to 'read' it disappearing altogether.
-
The conventional way of opening old files now is to open it in a different format so that you can read/see it. However doing this can corrupt the file, which will then stop you from ever seeing it.
-
A good example of this is opening a Microsoft Works Word document in Microsoft Office Word 2007. Even though it is the same brand, this older version is not compatible with the new.
