"I'm going to make you Cry and Scream!!" - Mischief Makers. Brilliant Translation.....
EMU, BUT NOT ROD HULL's BIRD
Thinking about going back to the Good old days? Where men were men, Hedgehogs were fast, Mario was 2D and Bubsy was the most annoying cat ever, even more annoying than that one at the end of the road that bites you every time you walk past it. And infact you nearly killed that cat once, but that's your own fault, not mine. Ahem.
Emulation has been going for years, ever since someone worked out how to emulate a Speccy on a C64. Well sort of, but it's been going for a long time. Emulation was only really a small hobbie for a while. Their were some diehards that would copy and distribute games via the net or BBS'es and then there was the odd bloke who would play around with it now and again. But since the first MegaDrive emulator was released to the world, the scene has exploded. People were intrested that might of found the subject boring before. For the first time ever you could download your old games and run them on your pc. And it could be more fun than actually buying the damn console.
An example of this is the excellent SNES9X emulator. This would run SNES roms (Roms are binary dumps of carts) but it would run them so well it was actully BETTER than the real thing. In effect, it was a better snes. Nintendo was angry, and ordered the programmer to "cease and disist". The unlucky sole had to oblige. Nintendo has a history of not liking the Emu side of the net. It's closed down enough sites to give free web space to the five-thousand (More on that later). And then there's KGEN (A MegaDrive emu), which is so blindlingly fast, even on a P90, it's enough to make you shun your old machine.
Now getting the Emulator's is easy, getting the ROMS though, especially from recently from recently killed off machines, can be very, very difficult. You could say the ROM scene is the third biggest illegal activity on the net, after Warez Proper and MP3's. It's easy enough to buy a converter for your MegaDrive or Snes and port the games to your PC and then your website, but keeping them there is anouther matter. If your website admin gets a sniff of anything dodgy, he's likely to kick you. And the only free website system on the net that dosn't seem to give a toss about illegal ROMS and MP3's are Fortunecity. But then they are slow as f*ck. Keeping a site up is very difficult, so many diehards turn to IRC channels on efnet like #roms, where you can run a xdcc/ftp/fileserv server and distribute from there. Some websites have survived though, a classic example is the classicgaming (partly supported by planetquake) site, which set up it's own domain and now suppots ROM sites, Programmers of Emulators and even has a Review site gracing it's URL. Anouther is davesclassics, that deals in defunct machine ROMS only to stay safe. This is all great and may seem above board, but Nintendo has other ideas.....
This is where things get strange. Nintendo have a problem. A big problem. With anyone associated with Warez or Emu. First they (as I mentioned above) asked nicely[lie] to the Snes9X programmer to stop making such a damn good peice of software. The Snes is still selling in the US, it's seen as keeping the 16-bit scene alive, and it's kept Nintendo bigger than Sony over the pond too. They obviously saw Snes9X and panicked. Suddunly after that edvent, then went looking for other fish to fry. Down went all the recently put up N64 rom sites, & the SNES sites. And then they came across classicgaming. And weirdly, asked them to shut down their NES ROM section. Fragmaster was not happy. Actually, he was pissed off. Nothing could explain their strange decision, but it happened. A writer to classic's mailbag mentioned that in an email in reply to himself asking nintendo why they asked for the shut down of classic's NES rom section, they said it was down to "Keeping copyright material for future games". What? Nothing can explain Nintendo's actions. There were even rumours that Nintendo were developing their own emu's to be published commerically for PC's & Mac's, but they are just that. Rumours. No games making company has ever reacted in this way to emulation, Sega & Sony has never really game two-tuppence about the scene, and usally it's webadmins shutting down sites. Of course it's illegal, but shutting down sites releating to defunct machines is insanity. Nintendo should be shot.
So you want to play old games then? You have two choices. One, you spend a lot of money (well, £30) on a 16bit system and buy the games second hand, or Two, you spend a lot of time looking for ROMs on the net, only pay for the phone bill, break the law (Remember, only keep them for 24 hours and then delete them ;) )and run them on your PC.
And a word of warning, SNES9X is crap on anything less than a P100.....
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(I had to place that there......)
By PAndroid. Feedback via Email or Sign The Guestbook. Written 19/3/98.