đŸȘŽ JachĂ©re

Gate

Jan 23, 20255 min read

Autoethnography: Re-enacting Gate

  • Researchers should acknowledge and document their emotions instead of striving for artificial objectivity.

  • Reflexivity is crucial: researchers must be aware of how their background, identity, and emotions influence the research.

  • Researchers can describe their emotions, interactions, and the impact of the research environment on their own perspectives.

  • On emulation and playing on the iMac

  • two versions of Gate, one for the Apple IIgs and one for Mac

Regarding playing the game, Gate had a special kind of challenge prepared for us. The original Gate from 1991 for the Apple IIgs was ported a few laters to Macintosh. Where Jörg Kienzle and Yann le Tensorer worked on both, the first version was mainly programmed by Henrik Gudat, whereas the graphics in the port where made by Valérie le Tensorer. Which raised the question which version we focus on, or if we want to analyse both, and if yes, what would merrit such an effort.

  • Question of emulation and game-experience discussed many times, but very obvious here

Despite being Apple computers the Apple IIgs and the Macintosh are fundamental different machines with different operating systems and different processor architectures. That was also the initial inspiration for Jörg Kienzle to port Gate to the new platform. But, since this is our first case study for the Apple platforms, it also meant that we needed to get two different systems running. Which is always connected with some frustration to be honest.

  • state of emulators for old Apple and Mac devices somewhat messier and not straight forward to setup
    • kegs for the Apple IIgs version
    • [photo] iMac and [screenshot] infinitemac for the Mac version

We’ve found the state of emulation for older Apple devices especially troublesome. There are quite a lot of different emulation projects out there, but many of them in dissaray and rotting state. [list/outline some of the projects, see https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/p4nshe/comment/h91cbzc/] The best candidate for our needs was kegs, but its setup is its own kind of hell. Getting the Macintosh version running was definitly easier, thanks to the Infinite Mac project as well as a still running, but somewhat erratic iMac G3. The latter allowed us to proceed as easy as dropping of the game files on a USB-stick, unpacking the archive, and running the game. USB as a bridge between new and old computing raises an interesting aspect, but that is for another time.

But not all of us could afford the luxury of having a spare iMac and that is when Infinite Mac comes in. The project attempts to make classic Mac and NeXT emulation accesible. It’s as easy as open the website, choosing the version of the classic Mac operating system and click run. A simple drag and drop of the game files, and the experience is close to playing on the original iMac. At least for those with a fast enough computer. Emulating a whole operating system, even an old one, and a game on top within a browser takes a toll on the host machine. I tried many different setups and attempted to get other Mac emulators running, to no avail. My 8 year old IBM Thinkpad isn’t fast enough to run a 34 years old game.

  • frustrating experience to finds working setups, painting gate as somewhat odd
    • finding a working emulator, and showing/listing how complicated the setup for kegs is

More luck was to be found in kegs, an emulator specifically for the Apple IIgs. The open source project is going on since the mid 1990s and is probably the most advanced emulator for that system. But setting it up is certainly no joy. To boot, one needs to obtain proprietary files, the original firmware of the Apple IIgs and disk images containing the operating system. Both firmware files and disk images must be legally sourced from original hardware or authorized distributors due to copyright restrictions. Many different version of these files exists, and it was not an easy process to find the correct ones. I leave it at that.

  • obvious intereference of setup with play experience
    • [photo] kegs needing a keyboard with numpad to be playable, some hardware emulation settings making the game to quick
    • iMac crashing every now and than
    • infinitemac slowing down my own machine and being unplayable
    • arno on the other hand being happy about being able to slow down speed

Once up and running, we were able to play the original Gate version. The last hurdle was our inability to reconfigure the input keys to play Gate. It was meant to be played on a Numpad to indicate directions. Which is tough to reproduce on a laptop. Luckily we had a spare keyboard that could help out in this case.

  • in between two versions and many different settings, which is the intendet Gate? next to the difference in Erwartungshaltung (Birken) how does this setup also influence our experience and how can we deal with that