About
The Archive
Preserving the hardware history forgot
The Story
Emberware made game consoles. Not the kind you'd find at every store — smaller, more focused. Each console with clear specs: fixed resolutions, documented architectures, specific capabilities. Hardware you could understand completely rather than guess at.
How many consoles? At least three we can confirm: the Chroma, the z, the ZX. Others surface in recovered documents — codenames without matching hardware, references to projects we haven't found yet. The full picture remains incomplete.
What we know: they found people who understood what they were doing. Not many, but enough. When Emberware closed, those people didn't forget. They held onto the hardware. Traded it carefully. Kept it alive in small circles while the rest of the world moved on.
(Emberware is fictional. The preservation framing is part of the fun — a creative platform that feels like discovering forgotten hardware. The games are real. The constraints are real. The company never was.)
The Preservation Effort
Hardware ages. Capacitors leak. Screens fade. The collectors who remember what this hardware meant won't be around forever either. The Emberware Archive exists because preservation isn't passive — it's a race against entropy.
We're building emulators so these consoles can run on anything. Recovering documentation from wherever it surfaces. Creating a place where games can live — both the originals and new work from developers who've discovered this hardware and want to build something for it.
"Some things are worth remembering not because they were big, but because they were right."
Mission
What We Do
Emulation
Software that recreates the hardware accurately. Windows, macOS, Linux — if the original console dies, the games survive.
Documentation
Specs. Schematics. Context. Everything we've recovered, organized for anyone who wants to understand how this hardware thinks.
Game Library
A living archive. Original releases alongside new games from developers who found these consoles and decided to build something.
Open Source
Everything here is open source. The emulators, the tools, the platform itself. This isn't a company preserving its own history — it's a community effort, and the work belongs to everyone who contributes.
If you want to help: improve the emulators, recover documentation, build games, or join us on Discord. The archive grows because people decide it should.