"A simulacrum is a copy without an original." - Jean Baudrillard


In information technology, the storage of information is a continuous action. Information is copied multiple times; it is passed from old memory mass supports to newer ones; new methods to retrieve it and interpret it, appropriate to newer machines, are invented...
When even one of these conditions is not satisfied, information can be lost. If this happens, but people still remember what is lost, the best that can be done is to build a simulacrum of it: an approximate copy... without the original. And when the original ceases to exist, the simulacrum will be the only thing that remains.

Simulacra can take many forms; sometimes they can even convey more information than the original. For example, emulators of 3D consoles used at arbitrarily high resolutions and in stereoscopy, or high resolution texture packs for modern ports of older games.
There are several works I have been fascinated by and for which the original is lost: either because no surviving copies exist, or because the existing copies can no longer be interpreted by a modern computer, or because the owners of the only copies will not release them to the public under any form. I have made simulacra of some of those, and released them here.

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	Original: Mercenary series Simulacrum: Mercenary fan works Description: One of my favorite game series is the Mercenary trilogy. During the years, I recreated its locations in several projects, including one that might become Mercenary 4.
	Original: REND386 virtual environments Simulacrum: VRML reproductions of the same environments Description: In the 1990s, virtual reality enthusiasts used a software called Rend386 to create simple, low-res explorable virtual environments. In order to be able to explore those environments in stereoscopy and arbitrarily high resolutions, I converted them to VRML and tried to reproduce the original interaction.
	Original: Dactyl Nightmare - Dactyl Nightmare SP Simulacrum: Virtuality Nightmare - level for Quake 3 Description: Dactyl Nightmare, a virtual reality arcade game by Virtuality, is the first deathmatch game ever, created even before the term "deathmatch" existed. It was subsequently remade as Dactyl Nightmare SP, but never ported to a home platform. I decided to fix this situation with two Quake 3 levels with the same setting as Dactyl Nightmare and Dactyl Nightmare SP.
	Original: L'Ancia Therna (CGI animation) Simulacrum: L'Ancia Therna Reloaded (CGI animation and VRML world) Description: "L'Ancia Therna" was an animation that Georg Campana presented in 1993 at Bit.Movie (a computer graphics competition in Riccione, Italy) and reached third place. A video of it was posted to Aminet, but it was incomplete and lacked audio. I decided to remake that animation as an exercise, adding the missing portions and sound effects based on a description that appeared in Amiga Magazine in January 1994. I also made a VRML world of it to be able to move around the environment.