What we've shipped, what's next, and what we've ruled out. This page is the project's running ledger — when a candidate comes up, the answer is here.

The scope rule: 8-bit feel

Every shipped system has the feel of an 8-bit machine — sprite-based, chiptune, low-res. The test is the aesthetic, not the calendar year or strict CPU bit-width. (Updated 14/06/2026 from the earlier "8-bit era, ~1975-1990" framing.)

In: the classic 8-bit machines — Apple I/II, Atari 2600 / 400 / 800XL / 7800, BBC Micro / Master / Electron, Commodore PET / VIC-20 / MAX / 64 / 16 / Plus/4 / 128, MSX1 / MSX2, NES, Sega Master System, ColecoVision, Intellivision, ZX81 / Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Tandy CoCo / TRS-80 / Model 100, TI-99/4A — plus the 8-bit-feel handhelds: Game Boy / Game Boy Color, Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx.

Out: systems that defined the 16-bit GUI/console leap (Atari ST, Amiga, Macintosh, Archimedes, Sega Genesis, SNES, PC-Engine), and anything 32-bit+ (Saturn, N64, PlayStation, Neo Geo). The rule is about feel, not the calendar year — Genesis (1988) doesn't have the 8-bit feel and is out, while a late GBC game (2002) does and is in.

Intellivision (CP1610, 16-bit ALU) is the technical edge case the feel framing handles cleanly: Mattel marketed it as "the first 16-bit console", but it's universally grouped with 8-bit-era consoles (1979 launch, Atari 2600 contemporary). In.

✅ Shipped (18 emulator engines, 33 sub-systems)

Shared infrastructure: - _shared/ — controls.css, frame.css, NumLock JS, VICE softkeys, gamedocs link JS - _shared-ejs/ — one EmulatorJS framework + 4 VICE cores + gearcoleco + FCEUmm + Stella + gambatte + handy + genesis_plus_gx + prosystem cores (14 bundles share; ~25 MB saved vs per-bundle copies)

See Emulators for the per-platform integration stories.

⏳ Still to go

Out of scope under the 8-bit-feel rule

Listed for clarity — these are the 16-bit/32-bit transition and beyond.

• NEC PC-Engine / TurboGrafx-16 — 16-bit-era console
• Nintendo SNES — 16-bit-era console
• Sega Saturn / Nintendo 64 / PlayStation / Neo Geo AES — 32-bit and beyond

❌ Rejected (don't re-investigate without new information)

Quality / hosting / library size

• Research Machines RM 380Z (1977) — surveyed 14/07/2026. RM's first machine and one of the first built for UK schools, predating the BBC Micro: a £7,000 card-cage CP/M box (~£56,000 in today's money) — S100-style IEEE bus, 2 MHz Z80 (not a Z80A), 64 K max, COS ROM monitor booting CP/M and RML Extended BASIC. No games library exists — the CBM-II rule, only harder. The fullest inventory anywhere (vt100.net) lists six games — Adventure, Startrek, Games Package, Wordsquare, Hike, Fives and Threes — all text, none held. MAME ships no software list for rm380z or rm480z, so nothing has ever been dumped. The dedicated archive at rml380z.org was abandoned in July 2012 with every section left an empty stub (its Games page is one line plus a system-disk image), and the domain is now dead. A collector with a school 380Z and its complete original software haul confirms he has no games for it. Emulation is MAME-only with no browser build, but the library settles it before that matters. Reopens only if a genuinely dumped games library surfaces.
• GCE / Milton Bradley Vectrex (1982) — shipped, then removed 04/07/2026 (replaced by the Sega Master System). The only browser core, jsvecx, has AY-3-8912 sound emulation that overruns tones and can't voice Spike's speech; confirmed against upstream jsvecx and the libretro vecx core, so it's the emulation lineage rather than a bundle bug, with no practical browser alternative. Fails the site's accuracy bar. Door reopens only if a browser Vectrex emulator with correct AY sound appears.
• Sinclair ZX80 (1980) — re-investigated 07/06/2026. ROMs OK. JtyOne ZX80 mode is broken (display-sync state machine never fires the keyboard scan). zame-dev's js-zx8x works correctly but ships without an SPDX licence header. Door stays open if either gets fixed.
• Acorn Atom — removed 26/05/2026. Investigated as jsbeeb's Atom mode + tape files; didn't meet the quality bar, JS patch reverted.

Undated below: never shipped, so no commit dates them — all were recorded when this page was written (05/06/2026). - Sinclair QL (1984) — no turn-key bundle; sQLux build is ~4h project - Cambridge Z88 (1988) — OZvm is Java/C++ desktop only - Sinclair NewBrain (1982) — MAME driver broken (VFD doesn't get data) - Sinclair MK14 (1977) — MAME-only, very obscure (256-byte RAM kit) - Microvision (1979) — split-CPU emulators don't pair with available ROMs - Commodore CBM-II / B-series (1982-84) — VICE cores exist but the library is ~5 commercial games + business productivity. Not enough content for a 10-entry bundle.

Out of scope (16-bit, removed)

• Sega Genesis (genesis/) — removed 05/06/2026; Motorola 68000 16-bit
• Macintosh Plus (macplus/) — removed 25/05/2026
• Acorn Archimedes (archimedes-live/) — removed 25/05/2026
• Atari ST (estyjs/) — removed 25/05/2026
• Commodore Amiga 500 (amiga/) — removed 25/05/2026
• Atari 5200 — removed 11/05/2026 from the menu tree (an external-links platform, stripped in the self-hosting push)

Maintenance threads (shipped systems, open follow-ups)

• Menu reformat sweep — ✅ done 05/06/2026. Every game menu is a 4-column # Title (Year) CODE layout, year-sorted ascending, alphabetical within year. Every echo row across fs.js verifies at exactly 45 chars.
• Per-game gamedocs pages — ✅ done 09/06/2026. 327 pages across all 33 sub-systems (Vectrex's 11 out, Master System's 10 in, 04/07/2026; the ZX81's Chess replaced by 1K Chess in its two openings, +1, 06/07/2026; the Tandy Model 100's 10 in, +1 sub-system, 07/07/2026). The 20 docs/games/jsbeeb/*.html (BBC Micro + Master) were briefly runtime orphans (jsbeeb launches keyless ?disc1= URLs and its Vite dist/index.html hardcodes the corner link to ../controls.html) — wired 11/06/2026 via a genx-gamedoc-link.js that maps the disc filename → gamedoc key and rewrites the link href on load. Keyless BASIC / blank-Master launches still fall through to controls.html. (The shared jsbeeb/ bundle was later split into bbcmicro/ + bbcmaster/, 25/06/2026, each with its own copy of that script and gamedoc dir.) All gamedoc controls re-verified against the original manuals / disassemblies (23/06/2026) and corrected platform-by-platform where keys had been guessed — every standalone-emulator bundle had errors, the EmulatorJS bundles were already accurate; see the CHANGELOG for the per-platform detail.
• Controls-link URL wiring — genx-controls-link.js reads the game key from the live URL params (?game= / ?tape= / ?rom=) when the deferred script runs. amstradcpc and jtyone rewrite their URL on load (stripping ?game=), but the rewrite sits behind an awaited fetch('games.json'), so the deferred link script reads the key before the rewrite lands — no extra plumbing needed. (There is no window._genxGameKey stash; earlier drafts of this page described one that was never implemented.) jsbeeb is the exception that doesn't fit this URL-param model — it has no game key in its URL at all, so it ships its own genx-gamedoc-link.js that maps the disc filename to the gamedoc key instead (see the gamedocs thread above).
• C128 indie dates — 4 of 7 homebrews (Phazer, Rockfall 128, Wumpus 2.0, World at War) have no internal version stamp anywhere; fall back to zimmers.net file mtimes (one definitive, one fuzzy).
• MAX Multimax-extracted carts — 7 games extracted from the MultiMax EasyFlash compilation. Remaining unknown banks (Sea Wolf, Le Mans, Avenger, etc.) lack identifiable strings; would need empirical VICE testing or menu-table decode to extract.
• PET: 3 games skipped — the PET runs Skibo's pet2001 now (it moved off VICE). Microchess 2.0 hits an illegal opcode on that core; 3D Star Trek and Cosmiads load at non-standard addresses the loader doesn't auto-start. Recoverable with manual cleanup.
• CRT 4:3 bezels — every platform is now bezeled (completed 16/06/2026). The first seven wired by 13/06/2026: PC.png (DOS prompt, 09/06), Acorn.png (Electron, 10/06), Pet.png (PET, 10/06), Amstrad.png (CPC, 10/06), 80s.png (Atari 400/800, 11/06), 70s.png (Atari 2600 / Stella, 12/06 — the first bezel on an EmulatorJS bundle), and Commodore.png (the 1084S, across the whole VICE family — c64/c128/c16/plus4/vic20/max, one monitor + one hole, 13/06). The core recipe is a layered stack inside .bezel-wrap — black backdrop behind, canvas in the middle, the transparent-hole PNG on top — but the canvas-fill method varies by engine: the PC bezel uses non-uniform transform: scale on the canvas; the atari800 bezel tells the emulator itself to fill via -stretch full -fit-screen both -image-aspect none (its integer scaling made a CSS scale quantised and viewport-fragile); the EJS bundles put the EJS player (#game) in the hole and stretch the canvas to fill — Stella uses #game canvas { height: 100% !important; transform: translateX(-18px) scale(0.85) } and the VICE family (all six, C128 included) uses #game canvas { height: 100% !important; transform: scale(1.01) }. The rest were wired through 16/06/2026: Apple.png (Apple ][/I), the keyed nes.png (NES), 70s.png reused for ColecoVision / Intellivision / Odyssey², 80s.png for the Atari 7800, and Sinclair.png for the MSX, CoCo and TI-99/4A — so every platform now sits in a bezel. (The two later arrivals were bezeled on landing: the Sega Master System, 04/07/2026, reuses the CRT treatment; the Tandy Model 100, 07/07/2026, sits in a device-over-photo bezel rather than a CRT one.) Source-verification note: the maintainer has adopted a no-graphic-provenance-tracking policy for bezels/wallpapers/textures, so wired bezels no longer carry per-image credit comments (the earlier PC/Acorn/Pet "open an issue" comments predate that policy; Amstrad.png keeps a real CC-BY-SA credit because it is genuinely source-cleared).
• Sitewide 70s wallpaper — ✅ landed 09/06/2026. systems/_shared/textures/70s-bg.png (seamless arrow-arch pattern) tiled at 220 px via the shared body rule. Suppressed on per-platform controls.html pages via a body.controls-page opt-out.