To be frank, you're conflating the software of the game with the data of the game.
Oh, so when you want an antivirus software, you don't want the virus definitions (that are data) to go along with it ?
What is a shell script ? Software or data ? Both, data for the script interpreter, software for the writer. Even the interpreter's binary is actually data for the CPU. Even things such as fonts are not really only data anymore these days. My understanding is that software is the kind of data that can be executed by another software or hardware and works on other data, creating another kind of data (plus waste heat, if you want to be thorough).
Do you have a copy of the server "data" ? That's an honest question, because if you have, that could explain you
not conflating those when everyone here should want a server+data bundle, nobody here wants the software alone, and will ever speak of "software" alone. Concerning the server data, I assumed long ago that it was going to be lost forever, as it is now. The whole Titan crew did, too, else why ask for all the backup effort in the last months of the game ?
I know you must know these things so let's compare: actually, the client we want a compatible server for, just manages simple things: PC and NPC movement (it does have collision maps since it can do movement prediction and disallows us falling through the floor while jumping, slightly penetrating walls due to delay, etc), PC and NPC stats (HPs, endurance, infamy...), chat (including emotes), dialogues (with NPCs, the market...), PC powers (NPC powers are listed but it doesn't actually need to manage those) and server events (a whole crapton of them: combat log (you rolled...) and effects (stat updates, status update (death)...), animation (and ragdoll), and so on).
So what you need to make the client at least
work is a server to (a) receive power, movement, dialogues and chat requests, (b) make the combat and movements tick, and (c) issue the proper event notifications to the client. That is a compliant server, that is a server simulator. Other than that, the logic (or data) is not even relevant ! But that's not what we want in our community server, do we ? What good would be a CoH community server if it never took you to Atlas Park ? This would be an engineering success, but no player would play that (for long). So data is part of the server, at least what it's expected to be and what everybody should try to do.
I don't think we'll be able to recreate everything down to the millimeter-precise spawn points or patrol routes, so in this regard, we won't be able to have CoH back
at all. But does it matter really ? So let's put this aside, yes ? At least let's assume we have
something equivalent.
Now the real question is: If we had the same dialogues, the same gameplay, the same maps and ennemies, but only mostly the same story arcs (differing only by incomplete dialogues, incorrect maps and ennemies, of which I estimate we have 75% thanks to the ParagonWiki, and 20% more in the people's minds), would it still be City of Heroes (or an emulation thereof) ? If your answer is "yes", then we can do a proper server emulator (if we had the real server files and didn't use them, it wouldn't be a proper emulator anymore), because for the user, the server is a software/hardware part that is needed to play the game he sees as City of Heroes. To help you answer the question, when the devs did rehaul the Hollows, Faultline, the tutorials or the starting zones, or even just the Romulus cinematic, were you still playing something that at least emulated City of Heroes for you ?
tl;dr: no, I don't want just a "community server" just for semantics' sake. I don't want a "server software emulator" either, because that's both impossible and useless. I want a "server emulator", something that replaces the previous City of Heroes server for my client, and with which I can use my client to create an Ice/Kin corruptor, hang out on the chat, and go Blizzard the scream out of some Cimerorians on the Towers.
