Pocketheaven

From PHWiki

Pocketheaven (main site www.pocketheaven.com} is a site and a community providing hosting for sites related to handheld gaming, emulation, homebrew and piracy. It is strictly an information site and provides no illegal rom files.

Pocketheaven provides hosting for well known emulators like PocketNES and SNES Advance, rom renamers, developer sites, and rom info sites and many others.

The boards at Pocketheaven has grown into a thriving community and has taken on a life of their own.

Pocketheaven History

Although several incarnations of GBEmuHeaven had existed earlier, the modern site began development sometime in 1999. Exile'90 had been working on collecting and cataloguing all the Gameboy Mono ROMs available at the time via usenet and irc (#gbroms), this was well before the first rom renamers! The decision was taken to make a database of the games available on the web. bubbz volunteered to assist Exile in the mammoth task of converting the 1100 or so files into a detailed set of html web pages, using the available tools to extract ROM information and manually copy/pasting it into the pages. The site was known as the Gameboy Game Database or GBGDB. It existed for a short time under several domain names, including meambrasil.org, before moving to it's permanent home at http://gbgdb.emucamp.com.

The site was a success, but with the release of Cowering's goodgb and later goodgbx, which advanced at a very rapid rate, the GBGDB was quickly being superceeded. Exile had been considering a re-launch of his previous site GBEmuHeaven, meanwhile, in parallel with the GBGDB bubbz had been running a seperate site for handheld patches called No Frills. The decision was taken to relaunch GBEmuHeaven in place of the GBGDB, merging their current ROM/game lists, new release news, the patches from No Frills and an extensive and detailed list of all GB/C emulators available.

Shortly after the relaunch the site moved to it's own domain gbemuheaven.com. Lrd joined the team and assisted in news and new release updates. Towards the end of the GBC Scene Subport went offline, leaving GBEmuHeaven as the only site for people to get GBC release news. Upon the release of the GBA, Pocketheaven was already well established as a handheld release news site. The initial GBA release list was a text file manually edited by bubbz after each release. Exile was now working extensively in the background, moving the whole site across to using PHP, previously most pages consisted of manually edited html. The PHP version of the site was a major step forward, and the site continued to build an extensive following.

Adding information on new releases was the major workload for GBEmuHeaven staff. At this point, Lrd added the forums, but spent much time AWOL, Exile worked behind the scenes and bubbz did most of the new release work. OmegaXBoy joined the team and took on the majority of the new release work. Titney joined the team around 2001 and worked on a game saves section. As the site covered more handheld consoles the name began to feel outdated. It was decided to move to a new domain and launch another new version of the site as Pocketheaven. The site also covered Wonderswan releases, and was one of the few sites to do so, Exile maintained the most complete Wonderswan scene list in existance. The time consuming and thankless task of adding new releases for the GBA was taken on by rOss. Pocketheaven also began hosting many other handheld related sites.

In 2003 the pocketheaven database was hacked. Exile took the main site offline, but was happy to still provide hosting on the pocketheaven domain. In the discussions which followed Titney and rOss decided to continue the release list work, tweaking the code and moving the the releases subdomain. bubbz continued to maintain the patches section as a re-launched No Frills at http://bubbz.pocketheaven.com.

Titney worked on the releases site code, adding features such as the database search. Vinpire joined the team and has been involved in new release updates, and more recently taking on much of the coding work, adding RSS feeds and this wiki!

Pocketheaven continues to be the defacto release list site for handheld console releases and appreciates your support :)