I'm looking for a student for an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Calgary. *This is a fully funded position.*
The project: building tools to help understand how "retro" video games were made under amazingly constrained circumstances. While it's a CS position, this is interdisciplinary work done in collaboration with archaeologists and others.
Needs: strong coding skills, good writing abilities. Ideally: low-level, reverse engineering, or compiler experience.
@herrprofdr A lot of people have done insights on The Cutting Room Floor (https://tcrf.net/), a wiki about video game assets that have been discovered as cut, unused or otherwise included alongside the playable portions of games.
Good places to look as well, are the various decompilation projects for several vintage games - oftentimes, they have had to reconstruct or emulate the development tools originally used to produce the ROM, assets and executables within.
Finally, there have been various commentaries posted on the basis of leaked or found original-source disks or workstation backups, especially for games prior to 2000.
John Aycock
sirocyl