Section 05
Emulation
Rewriting tens of thousands of games is impossible. Rewriting one player is merely very hard. Four entries on the projects that took the second option, and on the reasoning that makes it the only one that scales.
Rebuilding a player from its file format, one instruction at a time, in public.
oujouer.com collection
4 entries
Emulate the runtime, not the game.
- 05.01Ruffle
An open-source reimplementation of the runtime, written to run inside the browser that removed the original.
- 05.02Flashpoint
A preservation project that collected the games themselves at scale, together with the environment needed to launch them.
- 05.03The Emularity
The framework that let an archive run emulators in the page, so that a catalogue entry could simply be played.
- 05.04Runtime, not game
Emulating the runtime preserves everything built on it at once, which is why that is the layer everyone chose.