GamesWiki - Introduction and help\ideas wanted....

xeonarcade

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Hi.

Me and my good friend Jos have started a Wiki about touch-based arcade games called GamesWiki (gameswiki.org). It's part of a pet project of mine that I called Touchscreen Arcade Preservation/Project (or TAP, pun-intended).

Our plan is to document as much as we can about the machines, software, hardware, tips & tricks, even some reverse engineering stuff so that we may keep these machines running way past their "normal" life.
At the moment we're still in the hardware documenting part.

My original idea is to have a one-stop-shop for everything you need, information, files as all the information is scattered amongst forums, facebook groups, telegram groups, etc... and for a niche group like this it only makes it harder to find whatever information you need.

Problems:
- I really hate MediaWiki with a passion. Not only isn't easy to get the pages as I'd like them, it looks outdated. Other than having a website custom designed (which I cannot afford, money is kinda tight), do you know of any better (and cheap) alternatives?
- Current hosting and domain aren't owned by us. As such, I have to abide to certain rules (for example, no "piracy" or "cracks").
- The name\domain (GamesWiki) is not set in stone... actually I don't really like it that much. I'd rather have another domain and have a wiki or something better to document stuff as a subdomain or something.
- I've got roughly 1.60TB of Touch-based Arcade files and it's still slowly growing. Hosting these will probably not be cheap..., any ideas? Archive.org is kinda slow and cumbersome to upload a lot of stuff.
- What would be, in your opinion, the best medium to create a kind of community around this in 2025? Forum? Discord server?
 
Last edited:
Hi.

Me and my good friend Jos have started a Wiki about touch-based arcade games called GamesWiki (gameswiki.org). It's part of a pet project of mine that I called Touchscreen Arcade Preservation/Project (or TAP, pun-intended).

Our plan is to document as much as we can about the machines, software, hardware, tips & tricks, even some reverse engineering stuff so that we may keep these machines running way past their "normal" life.
At the moment we're still in the hardware documenting part.

My original idea is to have a one-stop-shop for everything you need, information, files as all the information is scattered amongst forums, facebook groups, telegram groups, etc... and for a niche group like this it only makes it harder to find whatever information you need.

Problems:
- I really hate MediaWiki with a passion. Not only isn't easy to get the pages as I'd like them, it looks outdated. Other than having a website custom designed (which I cannot afford, money is kinda tight), do you know of any better (and cheap) alternatives?
- Current hosting and domain aren't owned by us. As such, I have to abide to certain rules (for example, no "piracy" or "cracks").
- The name\domain (GamesWiki) is not set in stone... actually I don't really like it that much. I'd rather have another domain and have a wiki or something better to document stuff as a subdomain or something.
- I've got roughly 1.60TB of Touch-based Arcade files and it's still slowly growing. Hosting these will probably not be cheap..., any ideas? Archive.org is kinda slow and cumbersome to upload a lot of stuff.
- What would be, in your opinion, the best medium to create a kind of community around this in 2025? Forum? Discord server?

- Mediawiki supports custom themes. You just gotta find them and customize them to your taste
- Not sure why that's a problem
- okay
- I don't like Archive.org either and i really wish there was an alternative but they are huge, free and most of their stuff gets mirrored all the time on other CDNs
- Discord. Having a forum for just a wiki is a little excessive
 
Thanks for replying!

I hate mediawiki first due to how shitty the UI is for editing. Themes and stuff is secondary.
The idea was not to have a forum for the wiki, but a wiki for the forum? or maybe even have the forum also as a wiki?
The problem with it not being hosted by us, is that at any point in time it can disappear, as we have no control over it, so i'd rather move it to somewhere where we have some control over it.
We currently have a discord, but it's quite empty... I guess i'll hang on to it.
 
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