Seen in this light, I might even go so far to say that the Mac/PC version of Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year, which runs in a modified—and clamped down—Stella emulator is a Bowdlerized version of the Atari VCS. (Though, of course, Ian edited Stella, itself an edition of the VCS, for reasons other than the typical morally-instructive Bowdlerization.)

Thinking of emulators as editions reminds me of another analogue: the release of movies. How many “cuts” of Blade Runner are there? The studio release, the extended release, the director’s cut, the extended director’s cut, and so on. Which one is the “authentic” or “definitive” Blade Runner? Ridley Scott would probably have a different answer than Harrison Ford, who might have a different answer than the estate of Philip K. Dick, who likely has a different answer than Warner Brothers. In this case, it is not at all clear that the originary edition is the “authentic” edition. I wonder if someday we will reach a similar point in platform studies—in which VICE (for example) is seen as a more definitive version of the C64 than the original release…

I just wanted to push that a but further, since thinking of editions seemed helpful in one way to me. Namely, it helps me to see that hardware also comes in editions.

The MSX is a fascinating case of a platform that isn’t one machine made by one manufacturer, similar in some ways to the Windows MPC specification and the 3D0. It would be a great topic for a Platform Studies book!

Understanding emulation as accessing the facsimile of a work was more a metaphor than a definition, to evoke the attempt at being faithful to the source and yet still working under many constraints. Your post really makes me think that there’s a series of really interesting parallels with studying literary history and its sources.

The idea of emulators as a further edition of the machine can be even more complex than that. In the case of MSX machines, it was not a sole machine, but a computer standard complied by many different manufacturers. All ran the same operating system, but then had different hardware (from differently sized RAM / ROM to very different keyboards, for example). I don’t think it’s possible to find a canonical edition of the MSX system, since the key was its multiplicity. What’s more, there are different MSX emulators, which focus on different aspects of the platform–fMSX was the first emulator for multiple platforms, which others have made improvements and expansions on (such as better sound emulation, or loading games like you would in a console emulator). Tracing the history of these editions could be as fascinating as the study of the different editions of Hamlet, for example.