I’ve had a lot of fun lately playing old-school games on a computer emulator through the Internet Archives, a digital library that has recently collected thousands of older console and computer titles for preservation.

To build on last week’s column, the Internet Archive recently added more than 2,400 new MS-DOS games to its website. Everything from “Mega Man” to “Street Fighter” to “Castle Wolfenstein” are now playable whenever you want. Even “Tecmo Super Bowl.”

There are large questions behind these efforts, however. The Internet Archive is getting past old copyrights on some of these games because archivists are preserving specific copies of the games themselves and making them available for people to experience. It’s not a perfect recreation, as Internet Archives archivist Jason Scott has publicly acknowledged in his blog. Some of the games may crash for people, some may not always play sound, gamers won’t be able to save files for longer games, etc.

Yet the effort is worthy because many of these games would otherwise disappear.

“The vast, vast, vast majority of commercial products, including hardware and software, sink without a trace, or end up in attics or collections with only glancing references made,” Scott wrote in a recent blog entry.

I’m excited for this effort for a variety of reasons. Archivists who can file these games can help gamers solve backward compatibility issues and keep alive the memories of games long since past. One day in the future, I might be able to play games like “Tai Fu: Wrath of the Tiger” and “Dragon Valor” on a tablet or laptop using a browser emulator just like the one at the Internet Archive.

It’s a worthy cause, though I’m sure there will be plenty of debate over a game’s commercial value and how companies who made these games can get compensated for these free games.

Still, I hope more archivists come out of the woodwork and publicize their efforts to keep older games alive. It’s part of our history, after all.