About The Past Machine

This site is an index and nothing else. It holds no games, mirrors no archives and re-hosts no software. Every entry points at the people who did the actual preservation work, because they are the ones who should get the visit.

Why it exists

Searching for a specific old thing is unexpectedly hard. The good sources are scattered across university projects, one-person side projects and enormous archive collections with interfaces built for researchers, and the top search results are usually ad farms that re-host somebody else's emulator behind three redirects. The intent here was to write down the real ones, in plain language, and keep the list short enough to stay accurate.

How entries get on the list

• It has to load. Every link was opened and checked before it went on a page. Several well-known nostalgia destinations were dropped because they are now dead, and they were left off rather than listed with a note.
• It has to be free to open. No sign-up wall, no download required to see anything.
• It has to be the source. Where a project and a re-host both exist, the project gets the link.

On preservation and copyright

Most of what is listed here sits in the archive collections of established preservation organisations, which run under their own legal frameworks and takedown processes. A few entries are abandonware archives whose position is less settled; they are included because they are how a large amount of 1980s and 90s software has survived at all, and because judging that is not this site's job. Rights holders should approach those archives directly — nothing on this list is stored here to remove.

Related

The Past Machine is run by the same people as PastPlay, a browser library of more than 25,000 console and arcade games. That is the only entry on the site we have a stake in, and it is labelled as such wherever it appears.

Corrections

Dead link, wrong description, or a project that belongs on the list? The fastest fix is to say which page and which entry.