Stumbling about

It was around this time I stumbled onto Node 99, a Web site designed by Sean Whalen that was dedicated to what I would come to learn was the “emulation scene.” To be honest, I had really never heard of anything being called a “scene” up till this point, except for maybe New York’s theater “scene.”

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.”

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Published:
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Author:
Derrick Sobodash
Category:
Memory