The Joyantenna guide

What Joyantenna is

Think of Joyantenna as a TV guide for the browser gaming era that should have existed in 1994. We organise games into numbered channels — each channel is a direct link to a game with editorial context, difficulty rating, genre tag, and licence information. The guide is the product. The games themselves live on their original hosts.

We don't host ROMs. We don't run a launcher. We don't track you. We point you toward games that are genuinely worth playing, and we tell you who made them, under what licence, and why they matter.

How we curate channels

A channel earns a spot on Joyantenna if it meets all three criteria:

1. Free and legal to play — The game must be available without payment, and its licence must permit public access. This means open-source releases, public domain works, official browser ports, and games preserved under the Internet Archive's software preservation programme.
2. Playable in a browser without install — No Unity installer, no executable download, no account wall in front of the first session. If it doesn't run from a URL click, it doesn't qualify.
3. Worth a stranger's time — The game must have meaningful gameplay. Demos, tech experiments, and abandonware that barely runs don't make the cut. Every channel should be something a reasonable person would genuinely enjoy.

Our approach to licensing

Every channel page on Joyantenna includes a licence block. We list the game's licence, a link to the source repository or official project page, and proper attribution. This isn't legal cover for us — the games aren't ours to licence. It's a service for players who want to understand what they're playing and where it came from.

The majority of our channels are covered by one of:

• GNU GPL (v2/v3) — The licence family behind Freeciv, FreeDoom, OpenRA, Mindustry, and Endless Sky. Source must remain open; modifications must be shared under the same terms.
• MIT / BSD — Permissive; requires attribution. Used by HexGL and Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection.
• Creative Commons — Used by several Internet Archive-preserved titles.
• Internet Archive Software Preservation — The Archive's programme makes software available for digital preservation and research under the terms of applicable copyright exceptions.

When a game has a non-standard or mixed licence, we say so in the channel notes. When something is ambiguous, we err on the side of caution and point players directly to the official host rather than embedding.

Embeds vs. links

Where a game's host permits embedding — and where embedding is technically stable — we show it inline in an iframe so you can play without leaving the guide. Where a game actively blocks framing, we link out to the original host instead. This is intentional: we respect the hosting decisions of game authors and preservation archives.

Before adding any embed, we verify that the target host sets no X-Frame-Options or restrictive frame-ancestors CSP directive, and that the page doesn't silently redirect to another domain inside the frame. If it does either, it becomes a link channel.

Who runs this

Joyantenna is a product of Tabaconda LLC, a Florida software studio. It's a small, deliberately unhurried project — no VC money, no engagement metrics, no recommendation algorithm. New channels are added when a genuinely good game turns up that meets our standards.

If you think a game should be a channel, we'd like to hear about it. See the submit a channel page for details.

Privacy and tracking

Joyantenna is a static site. There is no user database, no login system, no analytics SDK, no advertising network. Favourites and recently-visited channels are stored in your browser's localStorage — they never leave your device.

The only third-party system with any visibility is our CDN (Cloudflare), which may retain standard HTTP access logs for a brief operational period. We do not receive these logs and do not request them. See our full Privacy Policy.