EmuWiki.com launched Jan 1 2009 and is already vying for the location of choice on everything related to software emulators. The admin for the wiki contacted me and provided some very interesting points about the site. The intent of the site is to:
- Provide the user with quality information and quality emulators.
- Preserve, collect and classify the artifacts of the emulation scene.
- Produce interactive software that will allow browsing and analyzing the historical events that lead to the creation and existence of the emulation scene.
In the mail I received I learned the following about their focus on history:
So instead of just allowing leeching Emuz & Romz like most site, what I’m looking for is a true historical perspective on emulation. The Emulation Timeline is the part of the site where this perspective is most apparent; every event in emulation history is placed on a timeline… So I can ask : what were the news released about emulation on January 3rd 1999 ? What emulators running on Dreamcast were released between 2003 and 2004 ? What YouTube videos about NES were released in 2007 ? Of course the timeline is far from complete. As data is added to the encyclopedia through history pages of certain emulators like this one : http://www.emuwiki.com/index.php?title=History_of_Final_Burn, the data is automatically added to the timeline. So in 1 or 2 years, at my current pace and if I find some people to help me build the project, we should have a complete timeline of all emulation-related events from the 90′s, or even before, up to now.
The great thing about this particular wiki isn’t just that it’s your typical user-generated content site. It’s also hosting thousands of emulators, videos, documents, archived news items and more:
And at the same time of being a good tool for historical preservation, EmuWiki is just a huge emulation website for the everyday user. I’ve been working on it pretty much by myself for a year, and it only opened officially on January 1st, 2009, but the encyclopedia already contains 4280 archived emulators, 839 documents, 500 videos, 1869 current emulators, and 1321 Emulation Camp news archived (we’re trying to archive and classify all news of emulation websites that are not online anymore and emucamp just disappeared so we started with this one). Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg.
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This sounds like a pretty cool project. I am all about the history behind internet culture, with Emulation being very interesting due to the sheer amount of users that have poured countless hours into homebrew projects that have created some amazing classic gaming experiences and brought back many fond memories of the golden age of game.