Download a copy of the website here.

The emuwiki.com, emuwiki.org and emuwiki.net domains are for sale at 6000$, however they would be GIVEN to anyone who actually wants to restore the encyclopedia and maintain it as it was before. Contact me for details.

= EmuWiki.com - closing torrent =

Unfortunately, I have to announce that due to upcoming changes in canadian laws, I am closing the public version of the EmuWiki.com archive. The new copyright laws that have been announced recently and that are more and more likely to pass do not make emulation illegal per se in Canada. Nor do they make the distribution of emulators illegal. It simply creates a situation where right owners can make your life extremely hard. 100% of the content on EmuWiki.com was legal and is legal after this legislation based on information I could gather, however since the principle behind the encyclopedia is that everybody can contribute, it makes it extremely hard to verify all the files that are uploaded, all the contributions that are made and some of my own contributions. What if someone uploads an emulator with a subfolder containing a rom ? For how much can I be sued if that happens ? What if I myself upload an emulator port with a bios subfolder ? Can I display a copy of that old website published in 1997 and from which I cannot contact any administrator ? That's the kind of questions I do not want to sleep with. And I do not want to be an experimental rat for a new law - especially considering that nobody really knows what it's going to lead to - including those who wrote the very law. This law is coming in Canada like it came in other countries - it's even worst because it's not clear - and although the whole Internet community is supposedly conscious of it, all they do is submit their proposals through the "democratic" participation system so the governement can just ignore them. If the opposition would be critical about it, it might encourage me, but when I write to them, all I get is "Thanks for your letter, we'll consider some points but we'll still vote that law so we can be compatible with the International laws". Pretty sad for a souverainiste party claiming independence from Canada to not even be able to claim independence from other countries outside of our own. I will thus probably continue to archive emulators, but I will be forced to do it privately. I'd like to know that some people care, I'm sure there are, but unfortunately there's not enough activism to make it such that history of virtual communities in a public contribution model becomes feasible, possible, and pleasant. The public is not aware, academics are busy at other things and politicians are not interested. They work on themselves, their images and their carreers; they chose the way the were contributing to this world. My contribution is this incomplete encyclopedia, for now, and it's the best we have in terms of emulation history. It's really up to a couple of amateur to maintain these archives such that this knowledge does not get lost and that the collection eventually starts to grow again.

EmuWiki is the biggest emulator archive ever created up to now. It contains more than 8000 emulators, the What's New of 9632 releases, 128 website photos and descriptions, 905 documents (+ all those you can find in the zip files of the emulators), a list of 540 YouTube videos, and a beginning of description for the history of some particular emulators like MESS, Final Burn, Daphne and Basilisk II and many others. A total of 35935 pages written, most of them being stubs or containers for files. The files and events collected in the encyclopedia span from 1982 to 2010. Moreover, the structure of the website is pretty unique. It classifies emulators by date, categories, and various tags, such that the MediaWiki system becomes a database that you can query for questions such as "what are all the emulators published in year X running on machine Y and emulating machine Z". You can also create graphs of this data thanks to the ploticus plugin. The original content on EmuWiki.com is licensed under the Creative Commons license and can be used by anyone. The files themselves belong to their creators - they are not covered by our license.

The good news is, anybody can be EmuWikiAdmin. If you have more time than me and live in a country that is still considering that history of virtual communities is a legal activity, go ahead. Buy the EmuWiki2.com domain and download that torrent. If you have previous knowledge of MediaWiki and PHP, it will help. If you don't, you'll have to learn. It is a pretty sad thing, because there was a lot of projects going on, including an archival of newsgroups from the 90's referring to emulators, and a PDF version of the encyclopedia. I had also started a blog where I would have liked to talk about what I discovered while building the archive. I will likely not update that blog anymore, altough it will remain opened as soon as the server merge is done. Anybody can just start where I stopped. Contact me at admin@emuwiki.com if you want help with hosting a copy of the website - you'll need time - don't think it's just a couple of html files you just put in a web folder.

= How could I re-create EmuWiki.com =

You will need knowledge of php and some experience with the MediaWiki code. The firt step would be to install MediaWiki, then install the extensions listed. Note that some tables were removed from the database because they contained private information such as user passwords and emails. In the event that you would re-create the encyclopedia, you will never be able to recover the user data. However the edits are still associated with the authors, so you would see who edited what in the history of the pages, but the users would have to create a new account to continue participating.

At the time of publication of this torrent, EmuWiki.com is running on Cent OS 5 with PHP 5.1.6 and MySQL 5.0.77.

The MediaWiki version is 1.15.1. The following extensions are installed :

* Contribution Scores (v1.11) ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Contribution_Scores )
* News Channel (v2.1) ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:News_Channel )
* Semantic Forms (v1.8.6) ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms )
* Cite (r60750) ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite/Cite.php )
* DynamicPageList (v1.8.9) ( http://semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php?title=Main_Page )
* Embed Document (v1.0) ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Embed_Document ) - with some modifications for extra security.
* EmbedVideo (v0.1.2) ( http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=EmbedVideo )
* Semantic MediaWiki (v1.4.3) ( http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ )
* Wayback Machine (v0.5) ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wayback )
* main.css was the style that we used.
* EmuWikiHooks.php and WikiToWordpress.php were supplementary sets of hooks for MediaWiki that do some things when changes are applied to the encyclopedia such as submitting news to twitter and Zophar's Domain. They also made it such that any addition to EmulatorTable pages were also added to history pages (Emulator Archive). The code is dirty but it works. It is not provided in the torrent because it contains security features but email me and I can send you a copy and explain to you how to use these.

= Thanks =

Thanks to all those who contributed to the encyclopedia and to everybody both in the emulation scene and the computer history world.

EmuWikiAdmin - May 27th 2010