Talk:List of emulators

I thought about using a categorization by OS that the emulator runs under, but there are just so many - MAME, for example, runs on many different OSes. There'd be quite a bit of duplication. I figured it'd be better to categorize by the system being emulated - anyone else have ideas? Check out Zophar's Domain (http://www.zophar.net) for a pretty comprehensive list of emulators, by the way. -- Wapcaplet 17:47 22 May 2003 (UTC)

---

Removed:

• • UNIX/Linux emulators
    • Cygwin emulates bash and a number of other GNU utilities
    • LINE (http://line.sourceforge.net/) (based on Cygwin) runs Linux applications on Windows
  • Microsoft Windows emulators
    • WINE [1] (http://winehq.org/) emulates Windows for Linux
      • CrossOver Office[?] [2] (http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/) extends WINE to run popular Windows-based office programs
      • WineX[?] [3] (http://www.transgaming.com/) extends WINE to play Windows-based videogames.

None of these are emulators. Cygwin is a POSIX API subsystem for Windows; cygwin programs such as the cygwin version of bash are natively compiled Windows programs. LINE and WINE ("WINE is Not an Emulator"!) are similar, respectively supplying a POSIX API on Windows and a Win32 API on Unix, combined with a binary loader for the other OS's executable format and capturing and translation of system calls. There is no emulation of hardware. --Brion 17:55 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Very true. Though, even though WINE Is Not an Emulator, for practical purposes many consider it as such. Perhaps another section could be added for programs that aren't emulators, but are commonly mistaken for emulators? Cygwin definitely isn't, though... -- Wapcaplet 17:58 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Yes, that's probably a good idea. --Brion 18:00 22 May 2003 (UTC)

What about WinBeth?

~~Lenny

Eh? (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=winbeth&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&selm=6h6ppn%24q6q%241%40newshost.comnet.co.nz&rnum=2) --Brion

For practical purposes, they are emulators. LINE and WINE run precompiled and unchanged programs, so even if they aren't technically emulators, they still act like them.

---

I keep going to make edits to this page, but hardly know where to begin. (Pretty funny, considering I created it in the first place :) Part of the problem is that there are so many emulators out there. Zophar's Domain (http://www.zophar.net/nes) lists almost 70 NES emulators for Windows alone, 26 of which are mostly if not fully functional. Listing them all (along with all the ones for other platforms and other systems) would be an enormous list, and not at all helpful to a reader of the article, but trying to select a few based on some set of perceived merits would be difficult.

Considered formatting all of it as a table, possibly with columns for each of the major platforms that the emulator has been ported to (Win/DOS/Linux/BeOS/Mac/Other), but that would be just about as long. Also considered listing them in comma-separated form, but then it'd end up looking like one of the "List of ___ topics" pages (such as List of legal topics), which are often hard to look at. Again, this would not be very useful to the reader, unless many of them have their own articles (which they most likely will not have).

Perhaps it should be split into multiple articles? Perhaps the article shouldn't be here at all? Perhaps it would make more sense to turn it into a set of articles on the historical development of emulators, how some of them borrowed from others, etc., but that's a pretty big undertaking.

I'd love to hear other ideas. I'm interested in writing about emulation but I'd hate for this to become a pet project of mine that I someday get bored with and leave a mess for someone else to clean up, a la Atlas Shrugged. Suggestions are welcome! -- Wapcaplet 21:41 23 May 2003 (UTC)