Abstract. Memories of playing games with computers have an important role in terms of documenting people's personal relationships with computing history. This paper presents and discusses the Popular Memory Archive (PMA), an online portal of the "Play It Again" game history and preservation project, which addresses 1980s games, produced in Australia and New Zealand. As well as providing a way to disseminate some of the team's research, the PMA taps into what is, effectively, a collective public archive by providing a technique for collecting information, resources and memories from the public about 1980s computer games. The PMA is designed to work with online retro gamer communities and fans, and this paper reflects on the PMA as a method for collecting and displaying the memories of those who lived and played their way through this period.

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The Popular Memory Archive is an online collaborative research portal for collecting and exhibiting the production and reception histories of Australian and New Zealand micro-computer games of the 1980s. Proposed as a resource for both historians of technology and media, and the public, the site provides the means to collect and share the memories of those who lived and played their way through this period. This article surveys activity on the site and offers some preliminary evaluation of the significance of the online contributions. From this we consider the discursive, inclusive and questioning practices of the portal as a means of exhibiting historic games.

Relatively cheap, low-end 8-bit machines were embraced by hobbyists interested in computing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But what were these early computers good for? Opinion was split as to whether these early computers were useful, and what for. As early adopters, hobbyists were in the vanguard of inventing new uses for computers. To date, their pursuits have tended to be overlooked or dismissed as insignificant. This article focuses on consumption in the early microcomputing period and considers the Australian history of computing in terms of several interrelated questions about utility. Based on extensive archival research, it discusses doubts about the usefulness of these computers, the actual uses to which these micros were put, the invention of new uses by hobbyists and factors behind the change in perceptions of computers' usefulness in the latter part of the decade.

New Zealand's digital game history includes a significant quantity of locally written software titles from the 1980s. Currently, few people are aware of this, no institutional collections exist, and institutional preservation efforts are directed elsewhere. This context prompted the assembly of a multidisciplinary team of researchers to bring legal, technical, and media-historical expertise to bear on these titles' preservation. This article briefly introduces the game preservation landscape, before outlining the case for the preservation of local game software. It reports on the challenges faced in a pilot study to preserve locally written game software for the Sega SC3000 computer. The initial plan -to secure licence agreements that would, in turn, enable technical preservation -gave way as a more complex intertwining of the legal and technical emerged. Navigating these challenges required a change of strategy: from emulation to translation. Translation -from BASIC to Java -is an elegant solution, in the circumstances. As well as recounting the project's practical realization, this article considers the fidelity of the conserved digital game to its 'original'.