Evaluating Assisted Emulation for Legacy Executables

• Our Work
  1. HTML version
  2. PDF version
• Results' Reports
  1. Main Report
  2. Report by Time to create script
  3. Report by Operating System
  4. Report by Additional Software
  5. Report by Author and Date
  6. Report (detailed) by ISO
• Downloads
  1. AutoIt Scripts [Download] [Browse]
  2. Emulation Assistant [Download] [Browse]
  3. Database [Download] [Browse]
  4. Our library of useful AutoIt Scripts [Download] [Browse]
  5. Download this entire webpage and all resources [Download]
• More Documentation
  1. Emulation Assistant
  2. Emulation Assistant Flowchart
  3. Overview of Summer Research
  4. AutoIt Tutorial

Abstract

Access to many born-digital materials can only be accomplished economically through the use of emulation where contemporaneous software is executed on an emulated machine. For example, many thousands of CD-ROMs have been published containing proprietary software that cannot be reasonably recreated. While emulation is proven technology and is widely used to run both current and obsolete versions of Windows and Unix operating systems, it suffers a fatal flaw as a preservation strategy by requiring future users to be facile with today's operating systems and software.

With assisted emulation, a preserved object is stored along with scripts designed to control a legacy software environment and access to the object enabled through a helper application.

In this project we examined, for a large data set, both the cost of creating such scripts and the common problems that these scripts must resolve. Furthermore we developed tools to assist libraries and archives in setting up an assisted emulation environment

This website provides the data, source code, and summary paper for this project.

Team Members

• Enrique Areyan
• Geoffrey Brown (PI)
• Kevin Cornelius
• Ryan Fitzpatrick
• Ritika Sharma
• Swetha Toshniwal
• Graham Watt
• Gavin Whelan
• Kam Woods
• Tian Zhipeng

Acknowledgment

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. IIS-1016967. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

License

Copyright (c) 2012, School of Informatics, Indiana University
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