Mar 26, 2007
When I encountered emulation
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
n 1996, I pretty much tanked the eighth grade.
Earlier that year, a student in my school named James White gave me a disk with a wonderful script that exploited the Luhn algorithm–the one credit card companies use to validate card information–to make you an account. Of course, at the time I did not know that. I just knew your pushed the button, it played music, and magically you had an account.
Yes, I was a script kiddie.
I stopped caring about school, classes and study, and instead immersed myself in computers.
I had been in the BBS scene for several years at this point, and spent thirty minutes every day leveling up in in LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon) and Usurper, my favorite DOORS games on local bulletin board systems. Some of my favorites were The Midnight Cafe, run by the Tarket family, and The Jungle. The Wizard’s Guild was my third favorite, though I spent less time on it. It was a dedicated piracy BBS, and was my first exposure to low-budget Chinese DOS games.
We downloaded schematics and built all kinds of wonderful little boxes out of a Radio Shack tone dialer. It never failed to astound me how merely playing the sound a phone makes when you drop in a quarter was enough to make Ma Bell think you dropped in a quarter. We never even called anything important or expensive–we just did it because it was funny. Remember how you could add a prefix, then dial the number of a pay phone, then wait and have it call itself? It the same kind of funny.
My computer in those days was my family’s Packard Bell Pentium 90MHz system. It was that first line with the flawed chip that couldn’t do math. We never took advantage of the recall because it was too much trouble to go without the machine for a few months. It came with an 810MB SeaGate hard disk, 8MB of SIMM memory, and an Aztec sound card Packard Bell took the time to patch every chip on with a Packard Bell sticker.
Times were good, and I received lots of mass mailing by typing great chat room lines like “3y3 m0135+ k4+z.” I weeded through the rubbish and picked out the files that looked interesting. One day in early 1996, a file arrived that said something about Sega Genesis games. I had never owned a Genesis, so playing Sonic at my friend Scott’s house was always a big thing. Needless to say I was geeked.
I spent three hours downloading it at 14.4 kilobits per second, and of course, it didn’t run.
Eventually, I bombed my classes so hard I was grounded.
Seeking a new Internet fix, we started biking every weekend to our local library, which had started offering free Internet access at three kiosks on its second floor. It promised ISDN-line speeds. Wow, ISDN. It went a blazing 10 kilobytes per second. I mostly browsed the web looking for tricks to do on Super Nintendo games laying around my house, and learned about Final Fantasy II’s Adamant Armor for the first time, and that I wasn’t alone getting explosive glitches from regular play in Final Fantasy III.
We’d go in with a box of 50 floppies and just fill them. Then go home and play with whatever we found. I got text files, game artwork and similar things. Of course, that’s not what most people were using the library Internet for. One time we walked over to the copy of The Internet Yellow Pages left behind by one girl who was using a kiosk across from us. It was open to information on trans-gender surgery.
I won’t even tell you what kind of twisted shit I saw in the Netscape cache folder the one time I accidentally navigated there while using ACDSee 3.0. I’ll just say that when I learned seven years later there were 60 registered sex offenders living within two miles of me, I was sure all of them were using that library kiosk.
On the less twisted side, browsing the cache turned up some Dragon Ball stuff, and for the first time, I learned that series and my favorite, Tekkaman Blade, actually did have more than the 10 episodes FOX aired in an endless loop.
I eventually made my own Web site. It was a cheap Squaresoft Web site hosted on Dragonfire.net, the server infamously run on Andy Church’s college connection–possibly without Carnegie Melon’s knowledge. My user name was “Kappa.” Yes, the intermission imp. The page was very cheaply done with a gray tiling background and a perpetual “Moogles at Work” sign I lifted from somewhere. It did end up in a Squaresoft webring. Whichever one The Canadian Squaresoft page was in–the one with that great MIDI of To Far Away Times.
It was while at the library I decided to search for information about those Genesis games. That chance search on a sunny July afternoon basically defined the next ten years of my life.
oh but dont forget about that chick you were talkin to on a chat room and said you killed yourself. and cops raided your room. but yeah you did have a kick ass game selection every time i visited ya. but i never really heard of the games your talkin about except ff2/3 which i beat thanks to you downloading it to a disk for my dream cast. lets talk some time peace. cuz Bren