I just got a newsletter from X-Gaming that contained a startling announcement: The US Copyright Office has legalized abandonware. Or has it? I went to the US Copyright Office website and recognized at once that this claim is a bit exaggerated. Actually, what's happened is that the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA has been relaxed a bit regarding certain types of works. That's the part of the DMCA that makes it illegal to reverse-engineer or to do anything that attempts to bypass the copy protection schemes introduced by software companies. Here's the part about "abandonware":

Acorn BBC Micro: Do you care that this machine isn't backwards compatible with your PC?Brian Crecente of Kotaku seems upset about some comments from Peter Moore, VP of Microsoft Gaming. Moore claims that Microsoft "underpromised and over-delivered with backwards compatability, and that people just don't care enough about BC to make it worth the investment. Let me add my two cents: Moore is right: Backwards compatability IS backwards. BC is simply an ineffective and inefficient means of hedging the bets with a new platform. Everyone is better off with a clean break and a fresh start.

Blade of Blackpool: Nice tavern. You won't find it in Redmond.Every now and then I read an article that makes me stop and wonder about the Big Picture. What will history students a hundred years from now read, if anything, about my lifetime? Will they "read" at all? An article that did that for me today was The Dead Formats Society by someone named Momus. How is the brief half-life of most digital formats affecting our culture and its future? This is probably a question that all of us here at Armchair Arcade have asked at one time or another, since we're constantly faced with the problem of getting old games for "obsolete" systems to run on our modern hardware.