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Revision as of 09:47, 6 July 2006 by Realko (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)A server emulator is a term that got widely known in recent years in the field of online multiplayer games. For many popular online games at some point third-party reimplementations of the original server software emerge, which are known to be called "server emulators". Like the more traditional understanding of an emulator, they allow to run your the client without the use of the game creators server hardware and software.
History
With the rising popularity of commercial MMORPG internet games, came the desire from ardent players of this games to run their own servers beside the ones runned by the game creator. Since the original server software is usually not available the behavior of the servers has to be reeingeneered by analyzing the data stream with the orinal server, or by disambeling and analyzing the client which is available.
Ultima Online was one of the first large MMPORGs. Due to it's openess in implementation server emulators arose very quickly even already in Beta stage of Ultima Online development. The destination to which the client connects was e.g. changeable by simply editing a textfile. In Beta stage the client-server data stream was not encyrpted yet. The term server emulator got to be known along with the Ultima Online server reimplementation like UOX which was the pioneer. A lot of forks and reimplementations followed UOX, because it also released its source code under the GNU General Public License relativly early. RunUO is today to most widely used UO-server emulator.
Game companies usually tend to try to hinder emulator development by encrypting the data stream. However since the client needs to understand the data, in encrypten terms the "attacker" is always equipped with a decyphering machine. Therefore the original game designer can only add layers of strenuousness to decypher and understand the data stream, he cannot hinder it with cryptographic tools.
List of popular server emulators
See also
VMWare has a server edition, that is, altough very seldomly, somtimes called "server emulator" which can be mismatched with this article.