Life after death: meet the people ensuring that yesterday’s systems will never be for

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont.../06/Jaguar.jpgFor James ‘Shamus’ Hammons, Doom and a limbless, white-gloved cartoon mascot were all it took to ignite a longstanding obsession with Atari’s Jaguar. Back in the early ’90s, he felt he couldn’t abandon his Atari ST for IBM PC-style computing simply to play id Software’s genre-defining FPS, but then the news came that Doom would hit his favourite company’s new 64bit console. The real clincher came later, however. “I saw a preview of Rayman,” he recalls, “which at the time was going to be a Jaguar exclusive, and it looked amazing.”Today, Hammons – the lead developer of the Virtual Jaguar emulator – is just one of a growing scene of enthusiasts dedicated to sustaining consoles the world would sooner forget, earning them some respect for the niche they tried and failed to carve out. These emulator developers, amateur historians and digital archaeologists want you to remember Jaguar’s brief run at Nintendo and Sega’s dominance, and Virtual Boy’s daring attempt at 3D gaming almost 20 years too soon. And they’re desperate to preserve something of ambitious systems such as Nuon and Pioneer’s LaserActive, which were never widely known in the first place.

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