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Overview

I am interested in the preservation and access to digital artifacts. Most of my work has been in conjunction with Stuart Marshall in association with Melanie Swallwell and Susan Corbett. As a case study we have focused upon computer games form the 80s and 90s. We have a particular interest in games developed in New Zealand for the Sega SC 3000 platform. To support our research we have established an archive based within Victoria University's Beaglehold Room.

Software Archive

Corbett, Susan (Commercial Law), Lilburn, Rachel (School of Information Management), Marshall, Stuart (Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics), Swalwell, Melanie (Media Studies), and Welch, Ian (Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics). NZTronix Archive held at Victoria University of Wellington's Beaglehole Room Finding prepared by Nicola Frean; Nicholas Carman.

This collection consists of the records of a project titled 'NZTronix: The Early New Zealand Software Database'. NZTronix was a project to build a publicly accessible database, initially to gather and preserve information about early New Zealand computer games, later more broadly concerned with early New Zealand software. The project was an interdisciplinary one led by academics from Victoria University of Wellington: Susan Corbett (Commercial Law), Rachel Lilburn (School of Information Management), Stuart Marshall (Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics), Melanie Swalwell (Media Studies), and Ian Welch (Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics). The project gathered research resources, set up a website and a blog, and conducted research on emulation software. However, once the initial funding had ceased and some researchers moved on to other roles, the project resources were transferred to the J C Beaglehole Room, Library.

Papers

Vipul Delwadia, Stuart Marshall, and Ian Welch. 2009. Remotely shooting asteroids on our mobile phone. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference NZ Chapter of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (CHINZ '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 45-52. DOI=10.1145/1577782.1577791 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1577782.1577791

The New Zealand software industry developed numerous games and applications during the last decades of the twentieth century. These games and applications --- our digital culture --- are now becoming inaccessible and lost due to preservation and copyright problems. Providing remote access on standard mobile phones to centrally controlled and protected archives of old games and applications may be one approach to overcoming some of the preservation and copyright problems. However, remote access over wireless poses performance problems that could negatively impact the experience of using the preserved software, especially if the software is a computer game requiring immediate responses to player actions. In this paper, we attempt to discover what time performance requirements such a remote access system would need to satisfy by experimenting with various time delays to see how players' scores and perceptions of the game deteriorate.

Vipul Delwadia, Stuart Marshall, and Ian Welch. 2009. Using remotely executing software via a mobile device. In Proceedings of the Tenth Australasian Conference on User Interfaces - Volume 93 (AUIC '09), Paul Calder and Gerald Weber (Eds.), Vol. 93. Australian Computer Society, Inc., Darlinghurst, Australia, Australia, 3-8.

There are scenarios in mobile computing that may benefit from separating presentation from computation. Traditionally this separation can be achieved via tools such as VNC. However such factors as network latency and additional communication overhead can slow down the presentation of a remotely executing mobile application below acceptable performance levels, especially for domains like gaming where responses may need to appear to be instantaneous. We present RemoteMe, an architecture and Java-based prototype for mobile-client / server communication that only requires a very thin mobile client. We hypothesise that RemoteMe will support faster response times to user input than existing software solutions such as VNC. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of our first prototype, and experimentally compares it to an open-source mobile-based VNC system.

Theses and Project Reports

Delwadia, Vipul. Masters of Computer Science. RemoteME: Experiments in Thin-Client Mobile Computing (2009). Supervised by Stuart Marshall and Ian Welch pdf.

Mobile phones are ubiquitous, however they are vastly underpowered compared to their desktop counterparts. We propose a technique to play potentially resource intensive games over a network, and provide a prototype system called RemoteME which implements this technique. We also explore the responsiveness requirement for systems of this nature, establish benchmarks for responsiveness via user studies. We evaluate our implementation by measuring its responsiveness and comparing it to this benchmark.

Shepherd, Jay. BITT489 Honours final year project report. Web Interface to a Game Emulation Server (2009). Supervised by Ian Welch and Stuart Marshall pdf.

Digital artifacts are an important part of today's culture. However many digital artifact owners don%u2019t want their content to become part of a widely accessible archive for fear of losing control over their Intellectual Property. This could lead to future generations not having access to the historical artifacts of past generations. We propose a system that balances IP protection with accessibility and could be used by a trusted archive to protect these artifacts and make them available to the public. This will be a centrally managed and portable approach that also allows the ability to implement community features such as sharing game plays amongst users.

Delwadia, Vipul. COMP 489 Honours final year project report. SGJ: Sega Genesis Java (2007). Supervised by Stuart Marshall and Ian Welch pdf.

Video games are an important part of New Zealand%u2019s cultural heritage. A common approach to preservation of legacy software is to migrate it to a modern architecture. This project explores the issues with automated conversion between architectures. SGJ is a prototype conversion tool and framework which implements solutions to some of the conversion issues.

Yue, Cao. BITT489 Honours thesis. Archiving New Zealand Digital Games From 80's an 90's (2006). Supervised by Ian Welch pdf.

Increasingly people are moving from producing physical artifacts to digital. Digital objects are being produced and updated faster than ever before; however, every time when they are replaced, the valuable knowledge behind them is lost as well. One possible solution is trying to archive digital objects and conserve them for study and research purposes. During the last ten years, many studies have been conducted on the problems of digital archiving and many countries have started experimenting with digital archiving, yet, there is still a gap in archiving software and games. Therefore, this project is devoted to find possible ways of archiving digital games and trying to build a solid foundation for future research on this subject. The potential scope is large so this project focuses upon developing a tool to archive games developed for the Sega SC3000 platform that was a popular computer in New Zealand during the 1980s.
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