The ultimate emulation site -- what would your wish list be?

[Harrison]

Purely for emulation what would your ultimate wishlist be for a website?

I'm trying to collect together lots of ideas to evolve these forums and kickstart them again.. focusing mainly on emulation and gaming for all retro and modern systems.

One thing I often find hard is obtaining all the information needed when I'm looking to emulate a new system. f.ex. I've been looking into emulating the Sharp X68000 and the information about the system and the various emulators has been quite scattered around the internet, and not much at all regarding the emulators themselves, so one idea I have is to collect together information about each platform, downloads for emulators available, and guides on how they work and which are the best.

Thoughts and more ideas on emulation?

[Demon Cleaner]

The most, the better I think, but also the most work, which will never really come to an end, as still many emulators are released on a quite regular basis. And that's the main problem, to set that up, would be VERY time consuming, and basically looking most of the time incomplete.

I'm quite often at the AEP Emulation forum, and they cover already quite a lot of stuff, so look there once for yourself JUST on the News page of the forum, then you will have an idea of how many releases there are all the time http://www.aep-emu.de/PNphpBB2-file-viewforum-f-8.html

Not really sure yet what would be mandatory, and what could be skipped, I guess we have to discuss about that a bit more exclusive. I would concentrate on the main stuff, and stuff like your Sharp X68000 I would put in an subcategory, and create if necessary.

But then the question is, what IS mandatory, and what isn't?

Will have some more thoughts about it tomorrow, I'm going home now, leaving work.

[Harrison]

Yes there are a lot of constant emulation releases, but the majority of these are new versions of existing emulators. With that in mind we wouldn't need to concentrate on providing the very latest of every emulator, as we could easily provide a link back to the main developer sites/download pages for each so people can check for newer releases themselves.

The thing that frustrates me is finding all the information about how to emulate a system, what is needed, locating the files and downloading them, setting everything up, where to locate roms etc.. and what the top games and software is for each system (over time we could do a user voted top 10 games for each system).

I also want to try and get more people on board to help generate the content, rather than us struggling along as we tried with classicamiga.com. I'm currently exploring possible alternatives, such as using the articles system within these forums to create system specific sections so all designated members could add and edit content, and any member can post forum posts that can be promoted into articles if we like them.

Alternatively we have options for other software solutions, such as a more retail like software such as Magento, which could work well as a structured database CMS but with the commerce part disabled, but the sale item idea making it easy to enter information.. much easier than classicamiga.com was to add content (although as I coded that myself it was the best at the time).

[Demon Cleaner]

You would have to become sort of an emulator expert, to be able to reply to any questions, although we don't know yet how many people would actually visit the site or even sign up.

I really love the idea, because I wanted at some point to get again more involved into emulation, instead of only collecting every single ROM on the planet, which I probably already own. Problem is indeed with all the information you would have to gather, and all the stuff surrounding the emulator.

I would first ask how many of our existing members would be interested in joining us for supporting such a big project. I would also then definitely split the project in many little sections, and ask everybody who's willing to help, in which section he would take part. I for myself would like to be part of everything games/roms related, obviously, and perhaps also helping out on getting the emulators to run.

[Harrison]

Rather than trying to tackle every area of emulation and every available system from the start I think we would be better off taking things slowly. Beginning by focusing on the main western retro systems, then expand into handhelds and lessor know systems as we go on.

It's a given that we know a fair bit about Amiga emulation so that could be the starting system to develop the ideas around (how it should look and be presented, and the type of information and content we want to include). I expect, as I have, that others also have a fair bit of knowledge and experience emulating other common systems and consoles, such as Atari ST, C64, Spectrum, BBC, and for consoles SNES, Megadrive, NES, N64 etc...

One thing I don't want it to become is just a database of what is available. I want it to be for visitors to explore each system and learn what is possible to emulate, how they can get the emulators working, and what games to try on them first.

[zapiy]

I like this as an idea and I would happily promote this through our site is some form to perhaps direct that specific traffic.

Emulation and getting all these programs to work is a right pain in the backside. Having a site that caters for all systems and really just simplifies the who emulator process can only be a good thing.

[Harrison]

Links to other sites and forums supporting each emulator could definitely work as a section within each emulator page. A small bit of code that tests the site links are still working would be something useful to include, as something else I hate is using a site with links to additional information, and then finding out all the sites no longer exist and the links are broken.

[Demon Cleaner]

Currently sorting my ROMs collections...