Chugging along on FF5

Dave Pavlisak was my instant idol. He was the first college student who ever really bothered to talk to me, and he gave me some respect for being as ambitious as I was for 14-year-old.

More importantly, he built his own Super Nintendo cartridge copier. I had looked at DiskDude’s schematics and was just left scratching my head. Where I was confused, he was not. In fact, he built his without ever hearing of those plans, and at a time when the only documentation on the system was some old postings to the “famidev” newsgroup.

What can I say, the guy was smart.

He was a computer engineering major, but sadly, I’ve forgotten which school he went to at the time. Most importantly, he was patient and very much wanted to help with the project. I downloaded ICQ and made my first account on it at his request.

We would talk usually two or three nights per week. As I ran through the items, he worked on the descriptions. He had the advantage of being in college, and being enrolled in a Japanese class. How he had the balls to ask his Japanese teacher to help him translate item descriptions is beyond me, but he did. We plugged them into the game with Hex Workshop and chugged along.

I was playing through the game and working on the monster list when I had time, but given the fastest Super Nintendo emulator was still Super PASOFAMI — the infamous one that turned your whole desktop except its own Window into a brilliant 16-colors — it wasn’t easy.

Still. It was fun.

That’s something it hasn’t been since.

February rolled on. I turned 15.

Dave and I put out a few new patches, and I whored our work on the Final Fantasy Mailing List a few times. Eventually, in March or so, we attracted Keith Conger, a new guy who wanted to help. He was enthusiastic, but he didn’t have much to bring to the table. When he sent me his work, it turned out he was just making up names for all the monsters–and they weren’t even very good names.

I told him not to bother helping any more, but not before merging a few new bugs his work introduced into the main patch. Yes, he was probably the origin of the bug that made the game crash as soon as you walked into Carwen.

However, the blame rests more with me than him. In those days, we were hacking directly into the ROM and sharing our work through IPS patches. Combining our work just meant slapping two IPS patches onto the same ROM dump, and that does little to aid in quality control. This was back before we ever thought to dump and insert a whole script, and well before your average Windows could display Asian typefaces without running NJStar.

Dave and I were basically a two-man team picking along at the ROM whenever we had time up through May. We released a couple new patches. Mostly, both of us were totally out of the loop as far as emulation goes. We were doing our own thing, and every now and then, we’d check for software updates on Node 99.

We didn’t use IRC. We weren’t in EICN’s #emu channel, which was the place to be outside the password-only, invite-only #emuhaven on EFNet. For all purposes, we were translating, but we weren’t in “the scene.”

Still, we got some visitors, and one of them even made us a great little mock-up box. This is the second revision of it, because it has David Timko’s name tacked on. The original was basically the same. I wish I knew who made this now, but that information is 10 years lost. If anyone knows, please reply.

(Ignore my watermark, this was uploaded by an old version of Coppermine that watermarked everything)

Our work continued like this until the end of May, when I received an e-mail from Brad “Zophar” Levicoff — king of the wrestling Web sites. I had never heard of Zophar, or of Zophar’s Domain. Apparently, Zophar informed me, his site was the best emulation page on the Internet. It was so good, none of the more established sites like Archaic Ruins and Node 99 even bothered to link it.

My first brush with Zophar, and therefore with what would become “the scene,” was a rather telling one. I don’t have the email anymore, but it went a lot like this:

Dear Shadow,

I came to your Web site after hearing the rumors on my message board, and I am absolutely disgusted. People like you are the bane of the emulation scene. I can’t believe you would steal David Timko’s patch like that and claim it is your’s.

I demand you take down the patch right now and come to my message board and explain yourself! This is simply unacceptable! You will be hearing from me more in the future if you don’t take your patch down immediately, I can promise you that.

Have some honor and admit what you’ve done!

Zophar

“What the fuck?”

Those were the only three words to grace my head after seeing this e-mail. I had never heard of David Timko. I had never heard of Zophar’s Domain. My first guess was this guy made off with our patch and was claiming it as his, and since everyone knew him, he was assumed to be right.

Well, that turned out to not be the case either.