Mar 27, 2007
Stumbling about
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
As I browsed around its red pages, I found all sorts of other emulators–most related to some machine called the “MSX,” which I’d never heard of, and some PC emulators for Commodore 64, which I’d heard of, but to this day still have never touched.
He had assembled piles documentation, and I noted that while he provided all this for emulation, he didn’t have any ROMs.
It was the first time I saw someone on line drawing a line in the sand about what was legal.
That wasn’t an issue, because in those days, we could still get ROM binaries from a multitude of other sites. Which lead me to the next major turning point.
Damaged Cybernetics.
Led by Donald “MindRape” Moore, Damaged Cybernetics, or more casually “DC,” was an international “hacker” group. I never really cared about most of the site’s content excluding four things: Archaic Ruins, Chris “Typhoon_Z” Hickman’s Web site about emulation and home of the iNES crack that made Marat Fayzullin blow several gaskets, Rowan’s Console Horizon about console copiers and where to buy them, DiskDude’s page which explained how to actually make a cartridge dumper, and the [sometimes] weekly DC ROM packs for various systems.
I was in heaven.
The games ran slow or not at all. There were bugs all over the place. Megadrive, the only Genesis emulator, ran Sonic at a pace that made it look like the software failed to emulate Sega’s ultimate FUD, “Blast Processing.” The only emulator that came close to running games the way they worked on actual hardware–at least on my Pentium 90MHz now obsolete hunk–was interNES, or “iNES” but Marat Fayzullin.
The guy was a Russian who, even within an hour or two of browsing, I learned took a lot of flack for making only the Windows versions of his emulators shareware. I had grown up on shareware and dealing with randomly crippled software, so I didn’t see what the fuss about it was. Besides, someone would always be distributing warez copies.
Perhaps what fascinated me the most was Super Nintendo emulation.
I really can’t say why. I had a Super Nintendo. Virtually every dumped game that was worth playing, I had already beaten. From when I was about 8, my parents would every weekend let me rent one game, which was usually $3.99 after discounts at Blockbuster Video or Kroger, a local grocery chain owned by the same mega-corporation that owns Food 4 Less and Fry’s. Of course we would call it “Kroger’s,” because Michigan English adds a possessive “s” to store names. Most of my friends’ parents had a similar policy, so we would gather at someones house each weekend to run through the games till we beat them. We beat most of the library this way, even RPGs, which we played in shifts.
While Sega focused on making up flat-out lies to compete with Nintendo during the 16-bit era, Nintendo’s idea was licensing a million companies to make utter crap games for its system, then whoring the games in Nintendo Power. This made it look like Nintendo was far more popular than Sega, because of the massive shelf space the shit fest consumed. I beat most of the Super Nintendo library, and at least ninety percent of the games I prayed never to see powered on again.
So why was Super Nintendo emulation so interesting to me?
Because I could play the games that never came out here; among these were Dragon Warrior V, Dragon Warrior VI and Final Fantasy V. Of course, none of these ran particularly well, and the only emulators out there were Virtual Super Magicom (VSMC) by The_Brain and Super Pasofami, by N. Andou. Super Pasofami forced your system into an awkward 256-color mode where everything but its window looked distorted, and VSMC ran Super Nintendo games in a pleasant 8-color pea-soup-green that I keep praying byuu adds as a bsnes filter.
Oh, did I mention VSMC was shareware, and The_Brain was writing an entire OS just to be sure no one could pirate his emulator? I wonder how much better it would have been if he’d spent half the time improving emulation quality as he did developing un-copyable VSMC disks.
Besides: until I could afford a console copier, the emulators were my only hope for playing the Japanese Super Nintendo ROMs trickling out.
Throughout the summer and as I entered high school in the fall, I kept an eye on all four Web sites. I downloaded lots of strange games and has a blast playing them. I continued having an interest in the more “black-area” of things, like live viruses, key loggers and ways to make the guts of a machine cook. That quickly tapered off when I made the slight mistake of installing a key logger on the administrator’s PC and accidentally mailing out The Anarchist’s Cookbook to the entire school from her account.
Whoops!
That was fun. It got my parents called into the school; it got the police called into the school; it got me banned “for life” from ever touching another computer located on the high school’s grounds–even under direct supervision. I had fulfilled every wannabe hacker kid’s dream of being punished the same way as the guy in the movie, Hackers.
For reference, do not try the “recipes” in The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Most are garbage, and today, al Qaeda makes far better instructions available for anyone with an even passing curiosity in chaos: I’m betting theirs are far more researched and tested.
Anyway, at some point before I was banned from the library, and when I managed to snag a computer that wasn’t being used by a senior to read Blue’s News, a site which posted daily messages about how many billion triangles the next Quake installment would have, I went back to Archaic Ruins to discover a new section, “Piña Consolada.”
Related Posts
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Really cool series of posts, D. I’m glad everything seems to be going well, for a change (as you mention three posts back).
About CoES, if venatyr or talbain ever need to have it moved, I reiterate my offer to maintain it, and the EmeDora shrine. And maybe even the old T2D content if you’re interested!
I have also always been fascinated by emulation, translation and other rom-hacking news. But I’ve never dipped my toes into actual hacking. At risk of sounding naive, I dream of one day hacking EmeDora for X68k. (And also of creating an open-source Langrisser-based game engine…)
Anyway, I look forward to your next posts, and any of your final releases
Der Langrisser is coming. Eventually. I just need to finish the final reads and byuu needs to get his stuff together too. I’m crossing my fingers someone does text for a manual we can include. Only one after that will be Heroine Anthem.
Thanks for the support. I’ve never seen anyone do a series of posts like this before, so it seemed kind of interesting. And now that I’m clear of the statute of limitations for both civil and criminal charges for pretty much everything I’ve done [except translation itself], it’s probably safe to post about.
And well, if it’s not … I live in China now, and it does not have an extradition treaty with the USA.
I first encountered emulation 6 years ago. One of my classmates discovered a website you could warez console classics from, and suddenly almost all of my classmates started to use it. As others played Mortal Combat and Battle Toads I searched for strategy games for NES or Genesis, and my first (and only) find was warsong (Langrisser). It is still there http://pristavka.kulichki.net/console/sega_genesis/roms/1148_warsong/ (the description says: “It is the first time I see turn based strategy on console. You control a band of bloodthirsty thugs.”)
It took me several hours to understand how to play. I experienced headaches in progress, but somehow I felt, that the game is worth the effort. I did not know English enough to search for the sequels, and my search for sequels started 3 years ago. After learning several kanji from Langrisser 5 I asked D about translations and learning Japanese. D told me that Japanese is a fucked up language and even Chinese is simpler.
Derrick, if there’s one thing that I glaringly haven’t seen you been praised for, it’s your skill with creating websites. You’ve come along way from The2D to this CinnamonPirate. I’m not sure how it happens, but every single time you re-design this site it looks like an amazingly new style.
No doubt my attraction to your works lies mostly in their obscurity. I think you might be the cause of my “giving certain games a second chance” tolerance. I recall playing Hydlide like most else. Dying on the first screen, loathing the repetitive music, not even bothering to understand the controls. I read the reviews of the PC remake and figured I just needed the better version. I missed its release and subsequent death on the internet in general so I was out of luck in that regard. I also read your review of Super Hydlide. I really wanted to get to this game but I have a habit of finishing a series in order. So I conceded to try Hydlide again and one more chance was all it took.
Mr. Xu practically forced me to play Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan. It was surprisingly good as were your English poems therein. I can really see everyone in China liking that game since we convinced others to play it who had pretty much ceased playing video games altogether.
Langrisser is one of the few turn-based strategy games I can stand so I certainly wanted to play the PC remake in English. I remember stumbling across this listed translation along with another translation that was apparently babelfished by a langfandood (who’s site is absolutely hilarious). I never figured out how the heck to get the best endings in that game but leaving the scripts up on this website so I could read those endings was helpful indeed.
Recently, you’ve gotten me hooked on Solomon’s Key type games. I’ve played Solomon’s Key (NES and arcade), Solomon’s Club, Monster Rancher Explorer, Tang Tang, Wizzy’s Quest, Spherical, and of course, Zipang. Zipang is clearly the best of them all despite the anticlimactic endings. Abracadabra got lackluster reviews so I’ve stayed away from that. Wuchtel mit der Zauberfuchtel is borderline enduring.
demauk- At risk of sounding naive, I dream of one day hacking EmeDora for X68k.
You might want to get in touch with RadicalR (http://radicalr.pestermom.com/) since he’s the only person I know of that has bothered approaching an X68000 translation. Imperishable Night demands his attention as of now but only hacking graphics remain. I too share in the dream of hacking Emerald Dragon for its superior counterparts especially since they’re the most difficult versions. Tomaitheous, David Shadoff, and SamIAm appear to be working on the PCE-CD version. Nightcrawler on the SNES version.
I’d rather see Die Bahnwelt out the window first. Partially because that’s the X68000 translation RadicalR has been working on and partially because it blows The Chaos Engine out of the water.
mil: You’re too kind on the website thing. My last two layouts for CinnamonPirate.com have just been free templates released for WordPress. The two designs before that were my own, as was T2D. If you want to thank someone, thank the template makers. My hat is off to anyone who wants to spend the five hours it takes to make CSS nice in Firefox, and the fifty it takes to make it then compatible with Internet Explorer.
You might want to give Hydlide another look. My last upload of the patch includes a hack for Download Edition. If you download the installer from Vector.co.jp, apply the patch file, then enter any 10-digit (or was it 8-digit?) number, you can install fine. Just apply my patch after that. The only thing you’ll be missing was my cheesy music patcher, but you can swap in any new WAV file on your own.
Die Bahnwelt is a very fun game. If you are serious about doing an Emerald Dragon translation, you should get in touch with Talbain or Venatyr over at Lakuuna. They have the original 650MB ISO instead of the ISO+MP3 rip I released. Of course, you’re still stuck with Unz for an emulator … I asked the author about adding a debugger, and he gave me, “When hell freezes over,” as a response.
Thanks for the information about Hydlide. I was able to crack it with your patch file from the version provided at http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dl/win95/game/se102697.html#PAY. Oddly enough, you’re English patch after that appears not to work. Whether it’s the entire folder, the executable, or the original installer, all paths deem the file corrupt and throw a “68 fatal error.” I’ve had this error in the past and merely corrected it by patching the entire folder but nothing I patch seems to have an effect here. Perhaps I have the wrong version of the game? By the way, the musical switcher also works fine.
The remake is pretty damn good. On top of all the nice graphical improvements, you have the option of changing back to the old style graphics of what I think to be the MSX version. And then it counterbalances this by giving you the most terribly annoying music; the NES melody a professional composition in comparison. It reminds me very much of the differences between the PC-98 and PC remake of The Roots of Darkness. Enhancing graphics while losing all BGM redemption by switching to MIDI. A hell of a lot easier to choose Hydlide PC since WAV allows for so many more options to switch out than MIDI.
You know, thanks for telling me this. I got that error 68 bullshit when running it on Linux. There’s something corrupt in the patch. Since I invented the format, hacking it to make it work wasn’t much of an issue. I should have posted the hacked one but … well, forgot
I’ve found a lot of problems in the NINJA2 implementation I wrote before. When I finish the GTK patcher and libPirate, I will rerelease all the patches on my site. I’m changing the distribution license anyway.
Contact me on ICQ or MSN or something. I can send you a zip of the patched files or whatever to get you by for now.
Just to ensure that you see this comment, I have a set of strings from the July NINJA release translated into Korean for you. I would send you an e-mail, but I can’t find any address for you.
An interesting series D, I enjoy reading it very much. I only got into emulation with the N64 era, so I’m always interested to learn how it was in the very early days instead.
Keep it up
Great post Derrick, you expressed the exactly motto why SNES emulation is more interesting than Mega Drive one, plus the little taste of reality from that console wars era
!
I loved those old days, however, there was no equivalent to ZSNES for MD…
And the history about your life is curious too…
Hi Derrick, that was an interesting read, which bought back some memories.
I remember stumbling around on the web back in 1996 one day while bored at work and coming across Archaic Ruins and Daves Videogame Classics. That day changed my gaming habits forever. Later it was sites like Atmospheric Heights, sys2064, … Good thing for me that Internet usage was never monitored back then.
First emulators I got were colem, c64s, ines (with the crack), EMU and of course Dave Spicers arcade. Later Nicola released his pacman emulators which later became MAME, and at the time I didn’t think too much would come of it. Hmmm….
mil,
you said: “I also read your review of Super Hydlide. I really wanted to get to this game but I have a habit of finishing a series in order. So I conceded to try Hydlide again and one more chance was all it took.”
I too like to play games in order, and I had passed Hydlide and owned Super Hydlide and wanted to play it as it was the oldest Genesis RPG game I owned that I hadn’t played. But Super Hydlide is Hydlide 3. Hydlide 2 was made for PC-8801 and MSX. I was going to translate the MSX version of H2 so that I could play it, but I discovered that Woobm.net had officially done so, and so I bought their official translation to give it a try. I passed the game, but it was fairly hard and quite boring… but I was expecting that. What I didn’t like was that there were not enough clues as to what to do for some major things needed to advance/pass the game, which made the game essentially impossible for me. I hate having to use a walkthrough, but for this game, it’s really necessary, which takes all the fun out of it for me.