You know the drill. You pick up a new handheld, or finally get around to setting up a front-end, or want to know if a particular emulator has improved recently — and you spend an hour piecing together an answer from a three-year-old Reddit thread, a YouTube video that buries the point, and a Discord server where the question was already asked but never really answered.

EmuDB exists to short-circuit that. It's a single place to look up emulation software — emulators, frontends, operating systems, utilities, scrapers, shaders — filter by the system you're targeting or the hardware you're running it on, and go straight to the official source. No guides, no ROMs, no noise.

The part that makes it actually useful over time is the rating system. There are two scores: one for overall software quality, one for performance on specific hardware. So if you're running a Steam Deck or a particular Android device, you can see how something performs on that exact setup — not just whether it's generally well-regarded. The more people rate and review, the more accurate and useful that picture becomes.

Contributions happen on the site itself.

If software is missing from the directory, submit it. If you've used something and have an opinion, rate it — especially if you can attach a hardware-specific performance score. If a tag would make something easier to find, add it.

Submitted listings go through a moderation queue before they go live, so quality stays high without requiring accounts to be vetted upfront. Anyone with at least one approved submission can review pending tags.

EmuDB is open source under the MIT licence. The full codebase is on GitHub. Pull requests, bug reports, and feature suggestions are welcome — especially from anyone familiar with Next.js, Prisma, or Supabase.

At the time of writing, the project is maintained by one person. Any help is genuinely appreciated.