Comment by kethinov

Your reply did exactly what I complained about: expanding the definition of emulator to cover reimplementing a network protocol.

You're not wrong that "server emulator" is a generically correct use of the term emulation, in the same sense that it is a correct use of the word for someone to say they emulate a fashion sense of a celebrity they like in their own wardrobe.

But in computer science, strictly speaking, the original definition of emulator was more strict. It was about things like emulating processor architecture A so as to execute programs written for it on processor architecture B.

And part of why expanding the definition to include "server emulators" annoys me is why has this definition expansion occurred only in gaming contexts? If a free UO server is a "server emulator" then why is Samba not also a server emulator? The lack of consistency is irritating to me, and it only happened because gamers like the term emulator, not due to any kind of rigorous computer sciencey reason.