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, 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 (20 emulator engines, 35 sub-systems)

Shared infrastructure: - _shared/ — controls.css, frame.css, NumLock JS, VICE softkeys, gamedocs link JS - _shared-ejs/ — one EmulatorJS framework + 3 VICE cores + gearcoleco + FCEUmm + Stella + gambatte + handy + genesis_plus_gx + prosystem + mame2003_plus 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. Removed 04/07/2026 because Spike was silent, and restored 04/09/2026 once we found out why: the machine plays speech through a four-level DAC on VIA port A that jsvecx never emulated. It is not a sound-chip limitation, and the note that used to sit here blaming AY-3-8912 emulation was wrong. See Emulator-jsvecx-Vectrex.
• 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 128 (1985) — shipped, then dropped 03/09/2026. In native mode it was never really a games machine: of its ten slots, only Star Fleet I was a commercial C128 title, two were C64 games, and six were BASIC type-ins. The 80-column library is mostly Infocom multi-disk sets the launcher cannot mount. - 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. 438 pages across all 35 sub-systems (the arcade section's 100 added 06/09/2026) (Master System's 10 in 04/07/2026, and the Vectrex's 11 back alongside it 04/09/2026 once its speech worked; 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; MS-DOS 4.00 joined the IBM PC shelf 24/09/2026 with a page of its own, but is the operating system rather than a game and is not counted here). 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. jtyone rewrites its 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.) Four bundles cannot rely on that timing at all — apple2 and cpc rewrite the URL synchronously, and the two BBC bundles never carry a game key — so each publishes window.GENX_GAME_KEY before the deferred script runs, and the script prefers it over the URL. That replaced three inline copies of the link-building code (04/09/2026).
• 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: IBM-5153.png (DOS prompt, 09/06), Microvitec-CUB.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-Monitor-III.png (Apple ][/I), the keyed TV-Sony-Cabinet.png (NES), 70s.png reused for ColecoVision / Intellivision / Odyssey², 80s.png for the Atari 7800, and TV-Vintage.png for the MSX, CoCo and TI-99/4A — so every platform now sits in a bezel. Filenames reconciled 31/08/2026 — the bezels are now named after the hardware each photograph actually shows, so the names in this paragraph are the current ones rather than the ones used at the time: PC.png became IBM-5153.png, Acorn.png became Microvitec-CUB.png, Apple.png became Apple-Monitor-III.png, NES.png became TV-Sony-Cabinet.png, Sinclair.png became TV-Vintage.png (it is a generic television shared by six bundles from five makers, not a Sinclair product), Pet.png became PET.png, the handhelds gained capitals, and the two Tandy files became TRS-80-Model-III.png and TRS-80-Model-100.png. (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.