I guess it was fun keeping track of all the new advancements. Nowadays it's mostly edge cases getting ironed out when back then entire games would suddenly start working and you'd be thrilled. Also it was crazy that random websites could just casually host roms. But at the same time you had to dig deep to find certain things and deal with all the bullshit like fricked up dumps that had trainers or group intros tacked on.
During the copier era the pirates would often slap an intro on a rom to show that they had dumped/cracked/etc the game.
This was called a cracktro, sometimes they'd add toggeable cheats to it, and would be called a trainer.
There used to be SNES releases with intros and trainers as well. It's just that these roms kinda went extinct and got phased out by goodset dumps because they date back to BBS days while GBA releases were spread wide because the scene started leaking more shit since the early 2000
5 months ago
Anonymous
https://archive.org/details/SNESSceneArchive
5 months ago
Anonymous
what happened was a group of lamers called "nointro" started removing crack intros and trainers from games and tried to take credit for their existence online. this mostly started accelerating during the gameboy advance days. unfortunately for the lamers in nointro (several of their members having lengthy child sex convictions going back to the 1980s btw) they failed pretty fricking hard.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>unfortunately for the lamers in nointro (several of their members having lengthy child sex convictions going back to the 1980s btw) they failed pretty fricking hard.
Do tell anon
It was after the 2nd "eternal september" event, when the masses moved onto the internet as high speed internet made video and online gaming more viable. The piracy groups got flooded with new kiddies, and many started their own groups by just copy+pasting the releases of other people. So as a frick-you to these wanna-be groups, they started putting intros into their releases. good luck claiming that rip as your group's when the intro clearly says MUGS or Mode7 or whoever.
Then the wanna-be's started hacking the releases to press the start button just after launch to skip the intro, so the scene groups started making the intro's unskippable for 30-60 seconds. That's when people started to complain, and no-intro was born.
TL;DR version: Attempted method of filtering out wanna-be kiddies flooding the scene, was mostly successful.
>That's when people started to complain, and no-intro was born.
Wow, I always assumed it came out of a response to goodroms and its obsession with cataloguing every single dump and hack ever made.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Interestingly enough, no-intro's initial mission was to strip the intro's out of effected releases. It wasn't long before they realized that doing their own proper dumps was far superior, and easier, than trying to hack together what they think the right dump was before an intro was hacked in.
I remember when that snow background was specifically a special feature that happened if you loaded ZSNES on Christmas Day. I was very surprised when I did exactly that and saw it. This is going back even further though, before I think even transparencies were supported. I remember brute forcing my way through the Mist Cave in FFII (yes, II, because IV hadn't been translated yet) because at the time I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be like that.
For me, it was the ship graveyard in FF5. I finally got through it when I got fed up and started pressing random buttons and accidentally discovered how to toggle layers off and on.
>talk about DeJap's projects
Hey, I worked with that group. lmao. We didn't do a great job but so much of that stuff was completely new to us. We were basically high school/college students and they had enough "hackers" who were competent enough but they badly needed an actual fluent translator and editor. I was trying to help with their translation when I had only one year of Japanese classes under my belt and I tried to work on Rudra no Hihou with them. I remember our website had this dude with the user name "Anus Village" that was a huge druggie always sharing his various drug use stories on mushrooms and acid with everyone. Good times. I feel bad that I did such a shit job for them but nobody spoke Japanese back then.
What was the deal with dejap's "hard drive crash" right before they were about to finally release the star ocean translation and then delaying it for another 2 years and never dubbing the voices like they originally promised? Was it all a ruse or were they really that incompetent that they didn't backup anything?
RPGOne also suffered a suspicious amount of HDD crashes. Though I suspect that was a cover for ChrisRPG's very real health problems that eventually took his life. I don't necessarily begrudge someone for making up an HDD crash if he didn't want to divulge that he was literally dying.
Couldn't answer that for you. I wasn't a core member. I worked remotely with them and hung out on their forums. Although now that you mention it, it seems entirely possible that none of them directly communicated in any kind of chat. They e-mailed me text dumps for Rudra no Hihou and Bahamut Lagoon. I translated what I could. Namely all the names, items, weapons, and basic text like opening treasure chests. I remember Rudra no Hihou's text dump weirdly had a shit ton of redundant text about putting objects into your bag for each event where that happened. A lot of dialogue was too complex for me at the time. I mailed back my work and they implemented it but I wasn't actually closely involved in their projects or inner development on these translations.
We were young and inexperienced people trying to do that stuff and they very much had a bit of a lazy, carefree attitude about it. They were fun to talk to, but definitely took a slow pace. I would not be surprised at all if they just hadn't backed anything up.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>it seems entirely possible that none of them directly communicated in any kind of chat
There was definitely a dejap irc channel back then.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Maybe, yeah. I didn't use irc back then so that's probably why I wouldn't be aware of it.
I think of DeJap the same way I do Working Designs. They were products of their time, doing the kind of work that nobody else was going to, which made them valuable. But they were products of their time, as well, for better or worse.
It was about being part of a community. And the excitement of being able to play console games for free on your computer for the first time. It felt a revolution in gaming.
Yup, it must have been 1997 or 1998. Playing Link's Awakening and Metroid II on a Game Boy emulator was like you found a cheat code to real life. Which I guess is pretty much exactly what theft is but still...
>watching mindrape copy nesticle source code off sardu's samba share barebacked over the early internet >developing the earliest cart dumpers >anthrox/elitendo/paradox >bullying the proto-troons on irc
yeah i'm thinkin i'm based
i dunno we all met either through BBS or on irc or usenet groups. i guess we felt superior and annoyed by people that also can't figure things out on their own. you see the same shit with torrent trackers as we saw with ftp courrier sites though with U/D ratios etc.
there were no mod chips in this era. the copiers that were developed based on the cart dumpers were all in the ~$400USD range. we had to bring in thousands of units from Front Far East, Bung, China Coach Limited etc. literally tens of thousands of dollars were detained in customs for months at a time.
no one wants to spoonfeed some 13yo on dial-up using their parent's computer.
No, I get the elitism. But some groups used to pretend it's all for internal scene use while advertising stores where you could buy these devices in the nfos.
The reason I brought up modchips is because companies like divineo were ran by a scener (Max Louarn) who was with Paradox way back since the Amiga days. Monetizing warez was always a thing even though some groups kept appearances as if it was all clean.
Yup, it also coincided with the worst of the malware era. Popups that would run away from your mouse as you tried to close them, random infections that completely fricked up your machine after spending 10 minutes online. It also took a long time to get shit even if you were on 56k.
It's a fricking miracle I never ran into this especially as a stupid kid during that era. I don't even remember how I heard about it. Does it even work properly anymore?
As someone who lived through the "warez" era of piracy, not really, no. A lot more viruses, it was harder to actually get things working and it was way harder to tell whether it was a (You) problem, a hardware problem, or a software problem. People back then also only had the most major of releases available for piracy and didn't catalog entire libraries of games, especially since they were mostly PC/DOS games and console emulation was in its infancy. The websites were also just a giant fricking mess since people hadn't really ironed out web design yet and all of them had their own style, usually replete with low res gifs of skeletons smoking cigarettes or something.
Piracy nowadays is easy. Just google it and it's yours if you want. Entire libraries neatly catalogued. Zoomer pirates have it good.
100% absolutely. Used to be involved in the scene, worked on a couple of ROM sites. It was so unbelievable to be able to play Super Mario World on a crappy Pentium 2 computer.
I had nothing to do with pic related, but it was one of my favorite websites once I lost access to internet at home for like two years. I'd download roms on floppy disks from the local library, but unfortunately by that point they did not have any of the Nintendo or Capcom roms, so it was mostly hentai bootlegs and obscure Japanese titles (like Wagan Land, Ultraman Battle Pinball, etc.)
Yes, warez viruses were a huge issue. You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games, but then they'd redirect you to another one, make you watch ads for a minute (JavaScript timer keeping you on the page), in an endless loop, only to download the same exact file regardless of the ROM (which would be a virus). So if you found a good website that actually cared about the games and not interested in screwing over visitors, you'd stick with them.
I loved Zophar's Domain, too. Downloaded most of the ROM hack editors from there.
>You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games, but then they'd redirect you to another one
That's because most rom sites never hosted shit themselves, they would always leech links from other sites that did.
seriously, it was the first place that just had all the roms with no BS
anyone else remember that update to Zsnes when they rewrote a bunch of the core in ASM and all of a sudden you could play games in 16bit color with only a tiny bit of frameskip on a pentium 120?
>You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games
Oh frick me now I remember having to do this shit
I don't miss it at all
>You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games, but then they'd redirect you to another one, make you watch ads for a minute (JavaScript timer keeping you on the page), in an endless loop, only to download the same exact file regardless of the ROM (which would be a virus).
It was the old "FTP topsite" system with the word ROM slapped over it. Before he got onto usenet and started getting the pieces directly from the source, my uncle used to go around to all those topsites and go through all the BS to get the parts. He had a collection of burnt CD's in his closet of all the games he downloaded for PC and PS1 in the late 90's and early 2000's. Every time we went to visit we would always go home with a stack of burnt games, some requested but also a healthy selection of random titles.
I probably never would have played Starshatter or Shattered Union if not for that. Played and beat the hell out of both. Flawed games, but they have their charm. SU is a janky TBS hex-grid game, but it's kinda entertaining how well they mapped out the US into the game system. Starshatter is a space combat sim where you really need to train on how to properly take off and land in order to avoid crashing and wasting your limited pool of ships. You can fly fighters or direct your fleet, a lot of the game is determined by user action. Has one real earworm of a music track. First 2:50 of this is the original track I remember, the rest is an extension on the track from the remake.
>it was harder to actually get things working and it was way harder to tell whether it was a (You) problem, a hardware problem, or a software problem.
Related, people were often way less helpful. As much as people can be casual dicks on /vr/ if you ask a question about getting MAME working or something similar you're very likely to get an answer. Back then you still might get an answer but 1) communities were smaller in general, and 2) the insular nature of them and the 1337 culture at the time meant they'd frick with you or at least try to for no reason other than boredom.
And this is exactly why zoomers are so tech illiterate. Back then you would have to actually learn how to do things yourself and not have everything instantly spoonfed to you.
I think it's a combination of things. Today a lot of shit "just works" so you don't have to troubleshoot it. Back in the day you didn't have a choice but to fiddle with drivers and shit. But at the same time if something does break today it's usually unfixable so people don't even bother trying since it's futile. Apple doesn't want you fixing your own iphone. Meanwhile back in 1998 if you fricked up your family PC by downloading a virus while looking for SNES roms you suddenly became John Carmack because you didn't want mom and dad to find out.
>the insular nature of them and the 1337 culture at the time meant they'd frick with you or at least try to for no reason other than boredom.
yeah i remember going into mirc chats and just understanding ahead of time that everyone was going to be hostile to you and call you homosexual and racial slurs. the late 90s/early 2000s internet was wild, it was basically an autistic gentlemans club. take me back
I still have hundreds of megabytes of irc logs from those days. Reading them feels like being on a completely different planet from what the internet has become today.
Normies were not on the Internet back then. Home computer ownership didn't cross 50% in America until 2000. If you walked into a video game chat room in 1998 you were surrounded by a very specific niche and a very specific age group.
The difference is those games were actually brand new and at the cutting edge of 3d graphics at the time. I still remember the day UltraHLE came out and how huge that was. It'd be like the equivalent of having a PS5 emulator that runs games at full speed today. But actually a lot better because modern games aren't even worth emulating.
maybe it's a perspective thing. I wasn't there for original N64 or SNES emulators but I experienced the same thing with GBA and DS games later on.
I feel a similar feeling from booting up Switch games like Mario RPG or Mario Wonder on my Steam Deck only a few months after launch.
some of the first games I saw was Ocarina of Time on an emulator and Morrowind on PC, it was fricking wild.
I thought games used to just come out on everything that could play it back then, lmao.
Chrono Trigger for me. The future part of it was set beneath layers of grey fog. I thought it was supposed to be like that, then altavista provided the answer. I was so happy when I got it to show properly.
it moved here
https://ironmouse.za.org/dragon/index3.html
but it seems that most if not all of the pictures are just gone.
for some reason the non H site seems fine though, if not a bit disjointed
https://ironmouse.za.org/dragon/
No I do not miss the days where I had to keep clicking on links to vote for a site to make it on top of some list no one fricking uses to download one rom.
Being on dialup, you had no idea which emulator was the best and you just used whatever you got your hands on. For a long time I used SMYGB and Rew (didn't even know it could do NES), then finally got my hands on VBA which played all GBC games that mattered flawlessly.
A bit later, two events of note I recall were the release of nullDC that liberated everyone from having to use Chankast and of course Dolphin announcing multicore support, 20fps on Wind Waker was bananas back then, then the open source and Wii support. Closed source development was like waiting for christmas, the devs would always tease you with screens.
Also incredible that emuparadise is still alive after all these years although I preferred snesorama which is now dead. Do they still have a warez links section on the forums?
I just looked it up and one of the guys from dejap actually works in game localization now and writes books about game translations. >https://twitter.com/ClydeMandelin
No, I don't. Emuparadise was cool but it seems easier than ever to find roms and romsets. I miss the feel of older forums in general, that's why I like Ganker. The fun of finding new rom sites that have games you've never heard of was fun. Now that's so far gone, the last remnants being CD romances top notch translations updates. Other than that, everything has been sifted through or sets have been completed. I find going through abandobware sites even an old task at this point, I still do it, but I know longer feel the same as when I was first delved into these unknown places. I've learned enough to filter most things out on a first pass of anything. Then go back and take a better look after the good cuts have been flayed.
I'm gonna agree with what others have said and say no. Emulation really didn't get good until no-intro and redump decided to get serious about documentation. Goodtools sets were fine for what they were, but their organization and documentation was ass and many places didn't even stock the full sets. TOSEC tried, but they couldn't even agree on proper formats, leading to multiple sets for each platform. It wasn't until emulation finally moved away from the warez scene that they finally started having romsets function as an archive instead of just a collection of dumps.
Redump is currently doing something similar with Windows PC games, providing clean rips of discs instead of the usual warez package releases with cracks included. It's going to require a sister project to archive all the cracks for each game so they can actually be used, but it's a step in the right direction. After all, it can be difficult finding a cracked scene release of a AAA game from 10 years ago, imagine trying to hunt down a cracked copy of a less popular game from 2003. Also needed is another project for all the updates that were released for these games, but in many cases it may be too late to find anything that isn't the retail copy or the final update.
I'm glad people are more focused on preservation now and not just piracy. If videogame dumps were still treated like warez, it would be virtually impossible to find most games not on a top 30 list after about five years. I just hope some group pops up doing the same thing for romhacks and mods. So many have been lost to dead links.
I remember when GoodGBx used to include some rom with animal porn. >Redump is currently doing something similar with Windows PC games, providing clean rips of discs instead of the usual warez package releases with cracks included.
Redump sucks for protected games as they do nothing to dump securom and starforce properly, these discs are useless without cracks or mini images. Warez clone releases are playable at least even though they use those propritetary formats and require daemon tools but they are as close as to playable untouched discs we have now. >After all, it can be difficult finding a cracked scene release of a AAA game from 10 years ago, imagine trying to hunt down a cracked copy of a less popular game from 2003.
Torrrminatorr has you covered.
>I remember when GoodGBx used to include some rom with animal porn.
What the frick? I need to know more, that sounds hilarious and very in character for old school internet shenanigans
>Redump sucks for protected games as they do nothing to dump securom and starforce properly, these discs are useless without cracks or mini images.
And the Total DOS Collection games may need cracks, serials, and other ways around the DRM, but the images provided are legit. While useless for people just looking to play in DOSbox, it serves a purpose for those looking to play on real hardware, or very accurate emulators like 86box. This is important for PC games since there are mods, hacks, and tools that are only compatible with the legit .exe file and not a cracked version. I do agree that Redump needs to do a better job of making full dumps of protected discs, having uncracked discs is better for long-term emulation.
Of course, like I said before, a sister project archiving all the cracks will be needed. As it is, our best source for old cracks is gamecopyworld. If they ever go down, we'll have to scavenge cracks off of scene releases.
>After all, it can be difficult finding a cracked scene release of a AAA game from 10 years ago, imagine trying to hunt down a cracked copy of a less popular game from 2003.
Pretty much me a few weeks ago. Was trying to hunt down an obscure and not at all popular game from 09, and I know that no-CD cracks can cause false positions and whatnot... but when every version made my virus scanner go nuts and virus total was reporting over 30 engines detecting something with many having a specific name, that's a bit of a different beast.
I remember when there wasn't any Genesis emulator able to run Virtua Racing, and was said that whoever makes it work will have half of the work done for a Sega 32X emulator.
Never knew if that was true.
>Never knew if that was true.
it wasn't, the 32x and the virtua racing chip wasn't even remotely alike.
whether the amount of work to implement it matches half of an outright 32x emu is a different question.
I have vague memories of being a young zoomer sonicgay in 2005 downloading stuff off of sonicstuff (the site with all the Donnie Darko ads) and using Kega Fusion to run the roms. That was a surprisingly organized area of emulation, and I do remember browsing through a shit load of rom hacking sites cause of how sonicgays were heavily into that kind of stuff.
With that said, I didn't know shit about how to get roms outside of those sources. It was great when emuparadise cropped up because that site wasn't fricking garbage and actually had what you were looking for most of the time.
I'm not sure if this was the answer you were looking for, tbh I think I might be too young to add any real input here, but that's how I remember it. I remember the communities were more soulful though but again, probably too young for any of that
In my experience, the best places to get ROMs if you were looking for something specific was usually IRC. If you knew the right channels and the correct xdcc magic words you could find almost anything.
Kega line of emulators were good. Fusion is and was a very good emulator and made by a former Sega employee. Still runs well today but on modern OS freezes for 5-10sec for me I first load it up, then no issues afterwards.
well it wasn't surprising considering his, um, gender disorder
He trooned out? Sad.
>You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games
Oh frick me now I remember having to do this shit
I don't miss it at all
If you knew about the good sites you didn't have to do any of that, just never download any .exe claiming to be a rom, always zip, 7z, tar.gz etc archives. Unfortunately the good sites would only last 1-3 years before they were forced offline, like emuparadise being one I remember. Some are still up like Vimm, must be hosted somewhere tendie and the other copyright seethers on old games they don't even make money off anymore can't get them.
>If you knew about the good sites you didn't have to do any of that
I learned my lesson eventually, but like many children I was rather irresponsible and stupid. Had a few mishaps along the way. It doesn't help that I discovered emulators earlier than I probably should have, when I was still in elementary.
>Still runs well today but on modern OS freezes for 5-10sec for me I first load it up, then no issues afterwards.
It's an excellent emulator and after like 20 years or so I'm still very used to it, but I do notice it takes up a ton of performance in Task Manager now. I dunno how much it did that before since I was very young and didn't know enough about that at the time. It's my go-to after all this time though.
Blastem seems pretty neat too but I'm not quite as adept with it.
No, not really. Well, I think there used to be less homosexual whiteknights who banned mentions of it. I guess because sites weren't federated by Reddit/Discord. Maybe less fear of using it too. For some reason my Nintendrone little brother really doesn't want to use emulators.
I guess ZNES UI was comfy, sure. There's a libretro frontend called ZMZ made to look like it. Idk if it works well, seems to be old.
o I will say I miss when there wasn't a new fork every week. Like I think for a time Mesen was best for NES and bsnes for SNES, then the bsnes dev forked it into higan, then killed himself and it got forked again into "ares." The Mesen dev stopped working on it and it got forked into Mesen-X, then the original dev came back and made Mesen 2... Same with Minecraft launchers. It's hard to keep up with this shit.
>then killed himself
"""""""""killed himself"""""""""" aka some guy on the internet claimed he is dead and there is zero actual concrete proof he committed suicide
What I miss is that in the early days of emulation, there were seemingly dozens of websites where people would just download weird ROMs and do little humorous writeups on them. I would stay up all night reading these kind of sites in high school instead of making friends or chasing girls lol.
Does anyone remember a site similar to that Zeroes Overclocked site that had the Ninja from Ninja Gaiden as the author and as a recurring joke? The gimmick was repeated use of screenshots where he says "..." and I think screenshots from Gologo 13. I wish I could remember the name, but it was one of those satirical NES review sites pre-AVGN. I'm not sure if it was hosted on tripod.com or geocities.
Thanks anon, but it wasn't Seanbaby. Although the entire site was very similar to the one you linked. I wish I knew what it was because I remember thinking it was one of the most hilarious websites ever. It had a Norm MacDonald quality to it in that some of the articles were ironically bad.
No idea, but I have vague memories of tons of sites like that. Occasionally I'll stumble upon an old one and it's like finding a dodo bird in the wild.
Being on the cutting edge while also being a kid was something so unusual that I don't think I processed just how unique a situation it was for us. Being a millennial in the 90s and having your life changed because of a technological leap was par for the course but it not the kind of thing that just happens. It was probably like being a kid born in the early 1900s and suddenly cars and motion pictures are everywhere.
It's wild, isn't it? The vast majority of human history was primarily agricultural and at best it would take a month to sail from one continent to another. Then the 20th century rolled around and we went from the first airplane to landing on the fricking moon in 66 years.
Millennials were pretty uniquely situated though even taking the whole 20th century into context. Computers existed when we were born but a lot of shit was still analog back then. We were using #2 pencils and shit to do our homework. We didn't grow up with cell phones and most of us didn't have the Internet until America Online really took off and even then it was somewhat of a novelty because you couldn't casually stay online forever because it tied up your landline and the phone bill would be insane. When I was in second, third, fourth grade my life wasn't THAT different from how it was for my parents outside of the existence of video games and cable TV. But then suddenly there was this massive transition. In fact, I remember having a conversation with my friends back in high school about how antiquated our high school was, both in technology but also in attitude since our teachers were relatively old at the time and had been teaching since the 70s. Simple shit but also representative, such as having a physical card catalog in the school library when the public library had already gone fully digital.
I'm in the biggest mister cheerleader in the world. That said, yup... I hate how soulless everything is now. Just like israeli architecture. Everything is bland.
Speaking of old videogame humor sites like Seanbaby, does anybody remember one which was run by somebody named Spesshulboye, or some other variation of "special boy?" It was one of those comedy editorial sites focused on nostalgia for 80s/early 90s things (like cartoons, NES games, snack food, etc.) which were all the rage 20 years ago.
>shit dial up connection >want to play megaman x4 >download the iso split in 53 parts >1 FRICKING week to download everything >part 53 is available to premium users only
Game iso split into 250 files renamed as .txt and uploaded to file hosting services that only allowed text. They even built a software to put all the .txt files back to iso. Those were the days man, people got around shit.
i remember one of my first times online i found a megaman fansite that had a lot of info about the games, and showed me how to emulate. then i went into a section called fan-fiction and read a story about sigma fondling zero and i left the site
There was an old Megaman porn site (aptly titled megamanxxx.com), that had content split across sections per game and character, using graphics from the games as layout and having Dr. Light make raunchy comments on each page of every gallery. It was hilarious.
>Using Yahoo or Metacrawler to try to find the ROM of that game you can't locate anywhere >The same 15 or so Angelfire or Geocities rom sites that you know don't have it keep popping up >Trying to find a copy of Megaman X2 that isn't the incomplete half-dump but every site just carries that broken file >Trying to find a copy of Breath of Fire 2 that doesn't have that trainer which not only doesn't work but breaks the game's save feature, but no rom site has a clean version >Pretty much no such thing as romSETS or reliable places/databases to actually get them >Shareware emulators >Many less popular systems only had said shareware emulators as an option >Many games either unplayable or very very broken due to unemulated features >Have to reboot into DOS mode for some emulators, but use Windows for others >Having to run dexor.exe with .xor sets on games like Star Ocean or Far East of Eden Zero and place the resulting files in the proper directory to bypass the SDD-1 chip because it was still not emulated >Laughably inaccurate emulators that even back then you could tell was off >Having to use frameskip just to get a playable framerate >Having to use SciTech Display Doctor to get transparencies to work in ZSNES (Hell, I still have my physical registration card) >CPS2 not being cracked for ages >Who knows what else I forgot
It was am amazing time and felt like a crazy Wild West of gaming and emulation, but I can't say I really miss it, no. The only real nice thing was that most news tended to be big because so much stuff was missing or not implemented yet that a lot of the news tended to be of a lot more games suddenly working due to a new feature/chip being implemented or even an entirely new system that wasn't emulated before... but that's more because of how little we had, nowadays that would be almost laughable if big news was that a SNES emulator added FX support or something like that.
>Sites full of malware >Sites that did that "Click this add, put in the 5th letter, click the second add, put in the 3rd letter" etc etc to build the password to access the download link... with it usually being broken because the ad link changed the contents of the page it leads to >Downloading on dialup speeds that would take 5-30 minutes for a single SNES ROM depending on your modem/ROM size. >The space ROMS take up actually mattering and filling up your hard drive back then (CD Burner? HA! Maybe in a few years if you had hundreds to spend and paid more for a blank than the game itself would cost)
nod rly tbh
i definitely DONT miss the way shittier emulation. or having to avoid whole genres of games simply because i knew theyd be unplayable with high input lag
esoteric sound/gfx bugs too. sound getting mangled mid-game really drives me up a wall, so i certainly dont miss that
i also remember having to switch between several different emus sometimes based on which ones worked best with particular games or romhacks
if youre talking like forum boomer shenanigans, idk dude. id read threads to try and fix issues i was having emulating. but if you want me to get all misty-eyed over some dead forum i didnt have an account at or whatever idk what to tell you
I was in the threads where toadstool was being developed. Was really rich in participation and content. VLtone really broke the barrier of mario 64 level editing. Props to that guy. I remmebr when it was finally released he put an easter egg in where if you used certain UI elements In a certain order or something it would change mario into Luigi with a custom model hi baked it. Was amazing when people found it.
>Anyone else miss the old emulation scene?
i was into pirating wares on snes and megadrive way before there was a snes or genesis emulator via bulletin boards. most of us old fricks thought these emulator children were absolute morons - and they were proven right time and time again when every single rom site got shutdown, hacked or sued out of existence. people like me rode off into the sunset to enjoy another day and another console or computer to hack.
>Emulation is bigger than ever >Even most normies know what it is now >Can easily get fullsets on archive and a hundred other sites >Even every current major console had emulators to play their older games >"PEOPLE like mE rode ofF IntO tHe sUNSEt To ENjOy aNotheR DaY aND AnoTHER coNsoLe Or cOmPuTER tO hacK"
moron
what happened was a group of lamers called "nointro" started removing crack intros and trainers from games and tried to take credit for their existence online. this mostly started accelerating during the gameboy advance days. unfortunately for the lamers in nointro (several of their members having lengthy child sex convictions going back to the 1980s btw) they failed pretty fricking hard.
Tell me you was one of those idiots who put intros in games without telling me you was one of those idiots putting intros in games
Zophar's Domain was ran by the biggest manbaby c**t on the Internet though, a b***h called Sampgas.
also, Zophar has manboobs:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080310223027/http://zophars.manboobs.fit.in.cixels.gaping-an.us/
(requires Ruffle to be viewed).
From what I saw of Zophar he seems OK granted I wasn't part of the scene in the 90s was mostly a console person back then with occasional C&C, or AoE, Rainbow Six wasn't till way later in my life I went to PC|2005. :3 Hes on Twitch though-had searched for his site during this thread.
Kind of fitting that the last page ever posted was of one of the two main characters, the one who was usually portrayed as the smart one, depicted as an elderly out of touch old man complaining about how emulators used to be while his grandkids ignore him and go off to play the latest emulators.
I remember actually asking the author if the comic was ever going to update again after it had gone for months without one, and getting a reply back that was just a smiley face and a link to the page on picrel that he had just posted... too bad it never updated again after THAT.
>http://www.overclocked.org
I'm amazed that this is still up. Someone has been paying for the domain and hosting for this site for nearly a quarter of a century despite not touching it.
Could it possibly somehow be tied to OCRemix so it's being renewed along with that for some reason? The link to ocremix on the site points to remix.overclocked.org, but then redirects to https://ocremix.org/ But yes, I am surprised it's still up too.
Shame that the proto-AVGN style reviews they made of random (usually arcade) link is dead though, points to mvt3k.overclocked.org which just tries to redirect to a page on ocremix but fails.
At least those are still on archive, which if their captures are anything to go by, went down sometime between late September and November of 2006. Although the site it started to redirect to, www.djpretzel.com/mvt3k, appears to have kept it going until sometime in 2014. Last working capture was Jan 1 of 2014, and then in December it was full of 500 errors... with there being no captures attempted again until November of 2018 which are all broken after that.
Strangely however, the new djpretzel url only has up to episode 14, the original website says there was 24 (The last one being posted on 12/12/2000) so there was no new content in that section after 2000 anyway (Unless you count people leaving comments several years later on the djpretzel version).
... sadly though even on archive there are a lot of missing images. I wonder if the original files are on overclocked.org somehow if you can prevent the redirect to djpretzel. I would love to be able to recover these.
>Anyone used to read Overclocked?
Yeah, see pic related.
>Still runs well today but on modern OS freezes for 5-10sec for me I first load it up, then no issues afterwards.
It's an excellent emulator and after like 20 years or so I'm still very used to it, but I do notice it takes up a ton of performance in Task Manager now. I dunno how much it did that before since I was very young and didn't know enough about that at the time. It's my go-to after all this time though.
Blastem seems pretty neat too but I'm not quite as adept with it.
> I do notice it takes up a ton of performance in Task Manager now
Enable Options -> Sleep while waiting.
I guess it was fun keeping track of all the new advancements. Nowadays it's mostly edge cases getting ironed out when back then entire games would suddenly start working and you'd be thrilled. Also it was crazy that random websites could just casually host roms. But at the same time you had to dig deep to find certain things and deal with all the bullshit like fricked up dumps that had trainers or group intros tacked on.
whats a trainer?
During the copier era the pirates would often slap an intro on a rom to show that they had dumped/cracked/etc the game.
This was called a cracktro, sometimes they'd add toggeable cheats to it, and would be called a trainer.
that reminds me... what was with GBA games having so many intros and trainers?
Good question, maybe they just really missed the good old Snes piracy days? (they were comfy)
There used to be SNES releases with intros and trainers as well. It's just that these roms kinda went extinct and got phased out by goodset dumps because they date back to BBS days while GBA releases were spread wide because the scene started leaking more shit since the early 2000
https://archive.org/details/SNESSceneArchive
what happened was a group of lamers called "nointro" started removing crack intros and trainers from games and tried to take credit for their existence online. this mostly started accelerating during the gameboy advance days. unfortunately for the lamers in nointro (several of their members having lengthy child sex convictions going back to the 1980s btw) they failed pretty fricking hard.
>unfortunately for the lamers in nointro (several of their members having lengthy child sex convictions going back to the 1980s btw) they failed pretty fricking hard.
Do tell anon
It was after the 2nd "eternal september" event, when the masses moved onto the internet as high speed internet made video and online gaming more viable. The piracy groups got flooded with new kiddies, and many started their own groups by just copy+pasting the releases of other people. So as a frick-you to these wanna-be groups, they started putting intros into their releases. good luck claiming that rip as your group's when the intro clearly says MUGS or Mode7 or whoever.
Then the wanna-be's started hacking the releases to press the start button just after launch to skip the intro, so the scene groups started making the intro's unskippable for 30-60 seconds. That's when people started to complain, and no-intro was born.
TL;DR version: Attempted method of filtering out wanna-be kiddies flooding the scene, was mostly successful.
>That's when people started to complain, and no-intro was born.
Wow, I always assumed it came out of a response to goodroms and its obsession with cataloguing every single dump and hack ever made.
Interestingly enough, no-intro's initial mission was to strip the intro's out of effected releases. It wasn't long before they realized that doing their own proper dumps was far superior, and easier, than trying to hack together what they think the right dump was before an intro was hacked in.
HOLY FRICKING ZOOM ZOOM
made my day
To be fair, you have to be fricking 40 years old minimum to remember trainers. We're ancient.
I'm bordering on zoom zoom and I know damn well what a trainer is, that anon has to be baiting
>nostalgia over using shitty inaccurate emulators playing broken, corrupted roms
i guess theres always someone for everything though
We're squarely in the time period for kids who literally grew up playing retro games in emulators. Hardware gays and emugays join hands in this time
nah emulation had soul back then, shit is soulless now
I remember when that snow background was specifically a special feature that happened if you loaded ZSNES on Christmas Day. I was very surprised when I did exactly that and saw it. This is going back even further though, before I think even transparencies were supported. I remember brute forcing my way through the Mist Cave in FFII (yes, II, because IV hadn't been translated yet) because at the time I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be like that.
For me, it was the ship graveyard in FF5. I finally got through it when I got fed up and started pressing random buttons and accidentally discovered how to toggle layers off and on.
>talk about DeJap's projects
Hey, I worked with that group. lmao. We didn't do a great job but so much of that stuff was completely new to us. We were basically high school/college students and they had enough "hackers" who were competent enough but they badly needed an actual fluent translator and editor. I was trying to help with their translation when I had only one year of Japanese classes under my belt and I tried to work on Rudra no Hihou with them. I remember our website had this dude with the user name "Anus Village" that was a huge druggie always sharing his various drug use stories on mushrooms and acid with everyone. Good times. I feel bad that I did such a shit job for them but nobody spoke Japanese back then.
What was the deal with dejap's "hard drive crash" right before they were about to finally release the star ocean translation and then delaying it for another 2 years and never dubbing the voices like they originally promised? Was it all a ruse or were they really that incompetent that they didn't backup anything?
RPGOne also suffered a suspicious amount of HDD crashes. Though I suspect that was a cover for ChrisRPG's very real health problems that eventually took his life. I don't necessarily begrudge someone for making up an HDD crash if he didn't want to divulge that he was literally dying.
Couldn't answer that for you. I wasn't a core member. I worked remotely with them and hung out on their forums. Although now that you mention it, it seems entirely possible that none of them directly communicated in any kind of chat. They e-mailed me text dumps for Rudra no Hihou and Bahamut Lagoon. I translated what I could. Namely all the names, items, weapons, and basic text like opening treasure chests. I remember Rudra no Hihou's text dump weirdly had a shit ton of redundant text about putting objects into your bag for each event where that happened. A lot of dialogue was too complex for me at the time. I mailed back my work and they implemented it but I wasn't actually closely involved in their projects or inner development on these translations.
We were young and inexperienced people trying to do that stuff and they very much had a bit of a lazy, carefree attitude about it. They were fun to talk to, but definitely took a slow pace. I would not be surprised at all if they just hadn't backed anything up.
>it seems entirely possible that none of them directly communicated in any kind of chat
There was definitely a dejap irc channel back then.
Maybe, yeah. I didn't use irc back then so that's probably why I wouldn't be aware of it.
I think of DeJap the same way I do Working Designs. They were products of their time, doing the kind of work that nobody else was going to, which made them valuable. But they were products of their time, as well, for better or worse.
>he posted the revolting new phpbb forum
You should have seen the WWWBoard version, that shit was wild.
Actually that was ikonboard. It was written in perl, not php.
You're just depressed and jaded.
>people reminiscing about good memories
>"Nah you're depressed and jaded"
sounds like you're P R O J E C T I N G
It's not reminiscing about good memories. It's "things were better then even when they weren't".
Different thing entirely.
I do miss cool interfaces like this, but I'd never actually want to use ZSNES again because of how poorly it would run certain games.
>captcha: WVGAYV
god zsnes is so full of SOUL
It was about being part of a community. And the excitement of being able to play console games for free on your computer for the first time. It felt a revolution in gaming.
Yup, it must have been 1997 or 1998. Playing Link's Awakening and Metroid II on a Game Boy emulator was like you found a cheat code to real life. Which I guess is pretty much exactly what theft is but still...
>watching mindrape copy nesticle source code off sardu's samba share barebacked over the early internet
>developing the earliest cart dumpers
>anthrox/elitendo/paradox
>bullying the proto-troons on irc
yeah i'm thinkin i'm based
Why was the console warez scene so scummy? They pretty much served as game supply for copiers and modchips they developed
i dunno we all met either through BBS or on irc or usenet groups. i guess we felt superior and annoyed by people that also can't figure things out on their own. you see the same shit with torrent trackers as we saw with ftp courrier sites though with U/D ratios etc.
there were no mod chips in this era. the copiers that were developed based on the cart dumpers were all in the ~$400USD range. we had to bring in thousands of units from Front Far East, Bung, China Coach Limited etc. literally tens of thousands of dollars were detained in customs for months at a time.
no one wants to spoonfeed some 13yo on dial-up using their parent's computer.
No, I get the elitism. But some groups used to pretend it's all for internal scene use while advertising stores where you could buy these devices in the nfos.
The reason I brought up modchips is because companies like divineo were ran by a scener (Max Louarn) who was with Paradox way back since the Amiga days. Monetizing warez was always a thing even though some groups kept appearances as if it was all clean.
i remember it used to be very hard to find working links for a lot of roms. wild goose chases of clicking bullshit links
Yup, it also coincided with the worst of the malware era. Popups that would run away from your mouse as you tried to close them, random infections that completely fricked up your machine after spending 10 minutes online. It also took a long time to get shit even if you were on 56k.
>HEY EVERYBODY
>IM LOOKING AT GAY PORNO
It's a fricking miracle I never ran into this especially as a stupid kid during that era. I don't even remember how I heard about it. Does it even work properly anymore?
I remember that website.
There was one with the guy from CHIPS and it repeated what you wrote and the meme macro said "You're a homo"
This was in like 2000 or so
GNAA?
Oh man, that is a bit of an unlocked memory reading that.
Those were fun times. Now it’s about scrolling through 500 irrelevant options in Retroarch after 20 years of feature creep
As someone who lived through the "warez" era of piracy, not really, no. A lot more viruses, it was harder to actually get things working and it was way harder to tell whether it was a (You) problem, a hardware problem, or a software problem. People back then also only had the most major of releases available for piracy and didn't catalog entire libraries of games, especially since they were mostly PC/DOS games and console emulation was in its infancy. The websites were also just a giant fricking mess since people hadn't really ironed out web design yet and all of them had their own style, usually replete with low res gifs of skeletons smoking cigarettes or something.
Piracy nowadays is easy. Just google it and it's yours if you want. Entire libraries neatly catalogued. Zoomer pirates have it good.
>piracy has never been easier
>zoomers overwhelmingly don't know how to pirate and/or reject it on """""principle"""""
like pottery
100% absolutely. Used to be involved in the scene, worked on a couple of ROM sites. It was so unbelievable to be able to play Super Mario World on a crappy Pentium 2 computer.
I had nothing to do with pic related, but it was one of my favorite websites once I lost access to internet at home for like two years. I'd download roms on floppy disks from the local library, but unfortunately by that point they did not have any of the Nintendo or Capcom roms, so it was mostly hentai bootlegs and obscure Japanese titles (like Wagan Land, Ultraman Battle Pinball, etc.)
Yes, warez viruses were a huge issue. You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games, but then they'd redirect you to another one, make you watch ads for a minute (JavaScript timer keeping you on the page), in an endless loop, only to download the same exact file regardless of the ROM (which would be a virus). So if you found a good website that actually cared about the games and not interested in screwing over visitors, you'd stick with them.
I loved Zophar's Domain, too. Downloaded most of the ROM hack editors from there.
>You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games, but then they'd redirect you to another one
That's because most rom sites never hosted shit themselves, they would always leech links from other sites that did.
dood i loved cherry roms
seriously, it was the first place that just had all the roms with no BS
anyone else remember that update to Zsnes when they rewrote a bunch of the core in ASM and all of a sudden you could play games in 16bit color with only a tiny bit of frameskip on a pentium 120?
One of the absolute all-time best moments in emulation, along with the releases of Nesticle and UltraHLE
>You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games
Oh frick me now I remember having to do this shit
I don't miss it at all
>You'd find a ROM site, then they would ask you to rate them 5 on a web ring before you could download the games, but then they'd redirect you to another one, make you watch ads for a minute (JavaScript timer keeping you on the page), in an endless loop, only to download the same exact file regardless of the ROM (which would be a virus).
It was the old "FTP topsite" system with the word ROM slapped over it. Before he got onto usenet and started getting the pieces directly from the source, my uncle used to go around to all those topsites and go through all the BS to get the parts. He had a collection of burnt CD's in his closet of all the games he downloaded for PC and PS1 in the late 90's and early 2000's. Every time we went to visit we would always go home with a stack of burnt games, some requested but also a healthy selection of random titles.
I probably never would have played Starshatter or Shattered Union if not for that. Played and beat the hell out of both. Flawed games, but they have their charm. SU is a janky TBS hex-grid game, but it's kinda entertaining how well they mapped out the US into the game system. Starshatter is a space combat sim where you really need to train on how to properly take off and land in order to avoid crashing and wasting your limited pool of ships. You can fly fighters or direct your fleet, a lot of the game is determined by user action. Has one real earworm of a music track. First 2:50 of this is the original track I remember, the rest is an extension on the track from the remake.
>it was harder to actually get things working and it was way harder to tell whether it was a (You) problem, a hardware problem, or a software problem.
Related, people were often way less helpful. As much as people can be casual dicks on /vr/ if you ask a question about getting MAME working or something similar you're very likely to get an answer. Back then you still might get an answer but 1) communities were smaller in general, and 2) the insular nature of them and the 1337 culture at the time meant they'd frick with you or at least try to for no reason other than boredom.
And this is exactly why zoomers are so tech illiterate. Back then you would have to actually learn how to do things yourself and not have everything instantly spoonfed to you.
I think it's a combination of things. Today a lot of shit "just works" so you don't have to troubleshoot it. Back in the day you didn't have a choice but to fiddle with drivers and shit. But at the same time if something does break today it's usually unfixable so people don't even bother trying since it's futile. Apple doesn't want you fixing your own iphone. Meanwhile back in 1998 if you fricked up your family PC by downloading a virus while looking for SNES roms you suddenly became John Carmack because you didn't want mom and dad to find out.
>the insular nature of them and the 1337 culture at the time meant they'd frick with you or at least try to for no reason other than boredom.
yeah i remember going into mirc chats and just understanding ahead of time that everyone was going to be hostile to you and call you homosexual and racial slurs. the late 90s/early 2000s internet was wild, it was basically an autistic gentlemans club. take me back
I still have hundreds of megabytes of irc logs from those days. Reading them feels like being on a completely different planet from what the internet has become today.
Normies were not on the Internet back then. Home computer ownership didn't cross 50% in America until 2000. If you walked into a video game chat room in 1998 you were surrounded by a very specific niche and a very specific age group.
Good times bros.
are there any irc servers and channels out there that are good to hang around?
you guys need to get over the retroarch/native port stigma.
shit is just as exciting, insane that we have native PC ports of OoT and Perfect Dark.
No
Old good
New bad
The difference is those games were actually brand new and at the cutting edge of 3d graphics at the time. I still remember the day UltraHLE came out and how huge that was. It'd be like the equivalent of having a PS5 emulator that runs games at full speed today. But actually a lot better because modern games aren't even worth emulating.
maybe it's a perspective thing. I wasn't there for original N64 or SNES emulators but I experienced the same thing with GBA and DS games later on.
I feel a similar feeling from booting up Switch games like Mario RPG or Mario Wonder on my Steam Deck only a few months after launch.
some of the first games I saw was Ocarina of Time on an emulator and Morrowind on PC, it was fricking wild.
I thought games used to just come out on everything that could play it back then, lmao.
Chrono Trigger for me. The future part of it was set beneath layers of grey fog. I thought it was supposed to be like that, then altavista provided the answer. I was so happy when I got it to show properly.
shoutouts to the random dude's angelfire page where i finally downloaded a working rom of river city ransom
is that a us acres gif
OH FRICK! I forgot about that place!
Is this on wayback machine or archived somewhere? I can't find it.
it moved here
https://ironmouse.za.org/dragon/index3.html
but it seems that most if not all of the pictures are just gone.
for some reason the non H site seems fine though, if not a bit disjointed
https://ironmouse.za.org/dragon/
Ah. Still, nice memories.
My homie. My teenage years were spent fapping to this site.
>https://ironmouse.za.org/dragon/index3.html
No I do not miss the days where I had to keep clicking on links to vote for a site to make it on top of some list no one fricking uses to download one rom.
Being on dialup, you had no idea which emulator was the best and you just used whatever you got your hands on. For a long time I used SMYGB and Rew (didn't even know it could do NES), then finally got my hands on VBA which played all GBC games that mattered flawlessly.
A bit later, two events of note I recall were the release of nullDC that liberated everyone from having to use Chankast and of course Dolphin announcing multicore support, 20fps on Wind Waker was bananas back then, then the open source and Wii support. Closed source development was like waiting for christmas, the devs would always tease you with screens.
Also incredible that emuparadise is still alive after all these years although I preferred snesorama which is now dead. Do they still have a warez links section on the forums?
I just looked it up and one of the guys from dejap actually works in game localization now and writes books about game translations.
>https://twitter.com/ClydeMandelin
No, I don't. Emuparadise was cool but it seems easier than ever to find roms and romsets. I miss the feel of older forums in general, that's why I like Ganker. The fun of finding new rom sites that have games you've never heard of was fun. Now that's so far gone, the last remnants being CD romances top notch translations updates. Other than that, everything has been sifted through or sets have been completed. I find going through abandobware sites even an old task at this point, I still do it, but I know longer feel the same as when I was first delved into these unknown places. I've learned enough to filter most things out on a first pass of anything. Then go back and take a better look after the good cuts have been flayed.
I'm gonna agree with what others have said and say no. Emulation really didn't get good until no-intro and redump decided to get serious about documentation. Goodtools sets were fine for what they were, but their organization and documentation was ass and many places didn't even stock the full sets. TOSEC tried, but they couldn't even agree on proper formats, leading to multiple sets for each platform. It wasn't until emulation finally moved away from the warez scene that they finally started having romsets function as an archive instead of just a collection of dumps.
Redump is currently doing something similar with Windows PC games, providing clean rips of discs instead of the usual warez package releases with cracks included. It's going to require a sister project to archive all the cracks for each game so they can actually be used, but it's a step in the right direction. After all, it can be difficult finding a cracked scene release of a AAA game from 10 years ago, imagine trying to hunt down a cracked copy of a less popular game from 2003. Also needed is another project for all the updates that were released for these games, but in many cases it may be too late to find anything that isn't the retail copy or the final update.
I'm glad people are more focused on preservation now and not just piracy. If videogame dumps were still treated like warez, it would be virtually impossible to find most games not on a top 30 list after about five years. I just hope some group pops up doing the same thing for romhacks and mods. So many have been lost to dead links.
I remember when GoodGBx used to include some rom with animal porn.
>Redump is currently doing something similar with Windows PC games, providing clean rips of discs instead of the usual warez package releases with cracks included.
Redump sucks for protected games as they do nothing to dump securom and starforce properly, these discs are useless without cracks or mini images. Warez clone releases are playable at least even though they use those propritetary formats and require daemon tools but they are as close as to playable untouched discs we have now.
>After all, it can be difficult finding a cracked scene release of a AAA game from 10 years ago, imagine trying to hunt down a cracked copy of a less popular game from 2003.
Torrrminatorr has you covered.
>I remember when GoodGBx used to include some rom with animal porn.
What the frick? I need to know more, that sounds hilarious and very in character for old school internet shenanigans
>Animal XXX1 (PD) [C]
That's the one, even romhustler hosts it
>Redump sucks for protected games as they do nothing to dump securom and starforce properly, these discs are useless without cracks or mini images.
And the Total DOS Collection games may need cracks, serials, and other ways around the DRM, but the images provided are legit. While useless for people just looking to play in DOSbox, it serves a purpose for those looking to play on real hardware, or very accurate emulators like 86box. This is important for PC games since there are mods, hacks, and tools that are only compatible with the legit .exe file and not a cracked version. I do agree that Redump needs to do a better job of making full dumps of protected discs, having uncracked discs is better for long-term emulation.
Of course, like I said before, a sister project archiving all the cracks will be needed. As it is, our best source for old cracks is gamecopyworld. If they ever go down, we'll have to scavenge cracks off of scene releases.
I need to get around scraping GCW one day
>After all, it can be difficult finding a cracked scene release of a AAA game from 10 years ago, imagine trying to hunt down a cracked copy of a less popular game from 2003.
Pretty much me a few weeks ago. Was trying to hunt down an obscure and not at all popular game from 09, and I know that no-CD cracks can cause false positions and whatnot... but when every version made my virus scanner go nuts and virus total was reporting over 30 engines detecting something with many having a specific name, that's a bit of a different beast.
I remember when there wasn't any Genesis emulator able to run Virtua Racing, and was said that whoever makes it work will have half of the work done for a Sega 32X emulator.
Never knew if that was true.
>Never knew if that was true.
it wasn't, the 32x and the virtua racing chip wasn't even remotely alike.
whether the amount of work to implement it matches half of an outright 32x emu is a different question.
I have vague memories of being a young zoomer sonicgay in 2005 downloading stuff off of sonicstuff (the site with all the Donnie Darko ads) and using Kega Fusion to run the roms. That was a surprisingly organized area of emulation, and I do remember browsing through a shit load of rom hacking sites cause of how sonicgays were heavily into that kind of stuff.
With that said, I didn't know shit about how to get roms outside of those sources. It was great when emuparadise cropped up because that site wasn't fricking garbage and actually had what you were looking for most of the time.
I'm not sure if this was the answer you were looking for, tbh I think I might be too young to add any real input here, but that's how I remember it. I remember the communities were more soulful though but again, probably too young for any of that
In my experience, the best places to get ROMs if you were looking for something specific was usually IRC. If you knew the right channels and the correct xdcc magic words you could find almost anything.
Kega line of emulators were good. Fusion is and was a very good emulator and made by a former Sega employee. Still runs well today but on modern OS freezes for 5-10sec for me I first load it up, then no issues afterwards.
He trooned out? Sad.
If you knew about the good sites you didn't have to do any of that, just never download any .exe claiming to be a rom, always zip, 7z, tar.gz etc archives. Unfortunately the good sites would only last 1-3 years before they were forced offline, like emuparadise being one I remember. Some are still up like Vimm, must be hosted somewhere tendie and the other copyright seethers on old games they don't even make money off anymore can't get them.
>If you knew about the good sites you didn't have to do any of that
I learned my lesson eventually, but like many children I was rather irresponsible and stupid. Had a few mishaps along the way. It doesn't help that I discovered emulators earlier than I probably should have, when I was still in elementary.
>Still runs well today but on modern OS freezes for 5-10sec for me I first load it up, then no issues afterwards.
It's an excellent emulator and after like 20 years or so I'm still very used to it, but I do notice it takes up a ton of performance in Task Manager now. I dunno how much it did that before since I was very young and didn't know enough about that at the time. It's my go-to after all this time though.
Blastem seems pretty neat too but I'm not quite as adept with it.
No, not really. Well, I think there used to be less homosexual whiteknights who banned mentions of it. I guess because sites weren't federated by Reddit/Discord. Maybe less fear of using it too. For some reason my Nintendrone little brother really doesn't want to use emulators.
I guess ZNES UI was comfy, sure. There's a libretro frontend called ZMZ made to look like it. Idk if it works well, seems to be old.
o I will say I miss when there wasn't a new fork every week. Like I think for a time Mesen was best for NES and bsnes for SNES, then the bsnes dev forked it into higan, then killed himself and it got forked again into "ares." The Mesen dev stopped working on it and it got forked into Mesen-X, then the original dev came back and made Mesen 2... Same with Minecraft launchers. It's hard to keep up with this shit.
>then killed himself
"""""""""killed himself"""""""""" aka some guy on the internet claimed he is dead and there is zero actual concrete proof he committed suicide
well it wasn't surprising considering his, um, gender disorder
ZMZ should still work to be honest
The libretro core API basically never changes
I went to zophar's domain just a few days ago to get some emulators.
Not sure about what it was like back then but today, there's just so much drama going on in emulation scene spaces.
There was plenty of drama back then, too. Here, have some vintage emu-drama: https://web.archive.org/web/20030219171644/http://emulmao.joffeman.com/
I do not miss ePSXe + Pete's plugins at ALL
What I miss is that in the early days of emulation, there were seemingly dozens of websites where people would just download weird ROMs and do little humorous writeups on them. I would stay up all night reading these kind of sites in high school instead of making friends or chasing girls lol.
https://sardoose.rustedlogic.net/reviews/
https://web.archive.org/web/20060904153311/http://zeroes.overclocked.org/
Does anyone remember a site similar to that Zeroes Overclocked site that had the Ninja from Ninja Gaiden as the author and as a recurring joke? The gimmick was repeated use of screenshots where he says "..." and I think screenshots from Gologo 13. I wish I could remember the name, but it was one of those satirical NES review sites pre-AVGN. I'm not sure if it was hosted on tripod.com or geocities.
That sounds like Seanbaby to me. Most of his old NES site is hidden but if you Google the individual articles the pages come up.
http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/ninjagai.htm
His site is one of the first ones I discovered and I thought it was the funniest fricking thing I had ever seen. Tears streaming down my face funny.
Thanks anon, but it wasn't Seanbaby. Although the entire site was very similar to the one you linked. I wish I knew what it was because I remember thinking it was one of the most hilarious websites ever. It had a Norm MacDonald quality to it in that some of the articles were ironically bad.
No idea, but I have vague memories of tons of sites like that. Occasionally I'll stumble upon an old one and it's like finding a dodo bird in the wild.
If it also made fun of emulator authors, it was Emucult.
Were these the same guys that did "Zophar has manboobs"
Remember EMU-LMAO?
>https://web.archive.org/web/20080413105934/http://emulmao.emuchrist.org/archives/
Being on the cutting edge while also being a kid was something so unusual that I don't think I processed just how unique a situation it was for us. Being a millennial in the 90s and having your life changed because of a technological leap was par for the course but it not the kind of thing that just happens. It was probably like being a kid born in the early 1900s and suddenly cars and motion pictures are everywhere.
Radio,TV, recorded media, computers, networking, the 20th century had so many of those breakthroughs
It's wild, isn't it? The vast majority of human history was primarily agricultural and at best it would take a month to sail from one continent to another. Then the 20th century rolled around and we went from the first airplane to landing on the fricking moon in 66 years.
Millennials were pretty uniquely situated though even taking the whole 20th century into context. Computers existed when we were born but a lot of shit was still analog back then. We were using #2 pencils and shit to do our homework. We didn't grow up with cell phones and most of us didn't have the Internet until America Online really took off and even then it was somewhat of a novelty because you couldn't casually stay online forever because it tied up your landline and the phone bill would be insane. When I was in second, third, fourth grade my life wasn't THAT different from how it was for my parents outside of the existence of video games and cable TV. But then suddenly there was this massive transition. In fact, I remember having a conversation with my friends back in high school about how antiquated our high school was, both in technology but also in attitude since our teachers were relatively old at the time and had been teaching since the 70s. Simple shit but also representative, such as having a physical card catalog in the school library when the public library had already gone fully digital.
rip emureactor
I'm in the biggest mister cheerleader in the world. That said, yup... I hate how soulless everything is now. Just like israeli architecture. Everything is bland.
Speaking of old videogame humor sites like Seanbaby, does anybody remember one which was run by somebody named Spesshulboye, or some other variation of "special boy?" It was one of those comedy editorial sites focused on nostalgia for 80s/early 90s things (like cartoons, NES games, snack food, etc.) which were all the rage 20 years ago.
We are now officially further removed from the launch of the PS3 than this ZD screenshot was from Defender and Rampage.
Five hundred ninety-nine US dollars
It’s Ridge Racer!
Giant enemy crab
I miss the underground feeling.
I'm curious if the deep web/onion still retains that feeling?
>shit dial up connection
>want to play megaman x4
>download the iso split in 53 parts
>1 FRICKING week to download everything
>part 53 is available to premium users only
No, definitely I don't miss...
Game iso split into 250 files renamed as .txt and uploaded to file hosting services that only allowed text. They even built a software to put all the .txt files back to iso. Those were the days man, people got around shit.
i remember one of my first times online i found a megaman fansite that had a lot of info about the games, and showed me how to emulate.
then i went into a section called fan-fiction and read a story about sigma fondling zero and i left the site
sigma balls
There was an old Megaman porn site (aptly titled megamanxxx.com), that had content split across sections per game and character, using graphics from the games as layout and having Dr. Light make raunchy comments on each page of every gallery. It was hilarious.
WHOA!! Check this sick site out! Plasticman has SO MANY ROMS!
Make sure to delete them within 24 hours of downloaidng.
>Using Yahoo or Metacrawler to try to find the ROM of that game you can't locate anywhere
>The same 15 or so Angelfire or Geocities rom sites that you know don't have it keep popping up
>Trying to find a copy of Megaman X2 that isn't the incomplete half-dump but every site just carries that broken file
>Trying to find a copy of Breath of Fire 2 that doesn't have that trainer which not only doesn't work but breaks the game's save feature, but no rom site has a clean version
>Pretty much no such thing as romSETS or reliable places/databases to actually get them
>Shareware emulators
>Many less popular systems only had said shareware emulators as an option
>Many games either unplayable or very very broken due to unemulated features
>Have to reboot into DOS mode for some emulators, but use Windows for others
>Having to run dexor.exe with .xor sets on games like Star Ocean or Far East of Eden Zero and place the resulting files in the proper directory to bypass the SDD-1 chip because it was still not emulated
>Laughably inaccurate emulators that even back then you could tell was off
>Having to use frameskip just to get a playable framerate
>Having to use SciTech Display Doctor to get transparencies to work in ZSNES (Hell, I still have my physical registration card)
>CPS2 not being cracked for ages
>Who knows what else I forgot
It was am amazing time and felt like a crazy Wild West of gaming and emulation, but I can't say I really miss it, no. The only real nice thing was that most news tended to be big because so much stuff was missing or not implemented yet that a lot of the news tended to be of a lot more games suddenly working due to a new feature/chip being implemented or even an entirely new system that wasn't emulated before... but that's more because of how little we had, nowadays that would be almost laughable if big news was that a SNES emulator added FX support or something like that.
Forgot to add:
>Sites full of malware
>Sites that did that "Click this add, put in the 5th letter, click the second add, put in the 3rd letter" etc etc to build the password to access the download link... with it usually being broken because the ad link changed the contents of the page it leads to
>Downloading on dialup speeds that would take 5-30 minutes for a single SNES ROM depending on your modem/ROM size.
>The space ROMS take up actually mattering and filling up your hard drive back then (CD Burner? HA! Maybe in a few years if you had hundreds to spend and paid more for a blank than the game itself would cost)
>SciTech Display Doctor
omg, I had that too!
nod rly tbh
i definitely DONT miss the way shittier emulation. or having to avoid whole genres of games simply because i knew theyd be unplayable with high input lag
esoteric sound/gfx bugs too. sound getting mangled mid-game really drives me up a wall, so i certainly dont miss that
i also remember having to switch between several different emus sometimes based on which ones worked best with particular games or romhacks
if youre talking like forum boomer shenanigans, idk dude. id read threads to try and fix issues i was having emulating. but if you want me to get all misty-eyed over some dead forum i didnt have an account at or whatever idk what to tell you
Yes, I used to follow a French site called Taudyemu or something like that, that has news of latest releases and it was great. What an exciting time
I was in the threads where toadstool was being developed. Was really rich in participation and content. VLtone really broke the barrier of mario 64 level editing. Props to that guy. I remmebr when it was finally released he put an easter egg in where if you used certain UI elements In a certain order or something it would change mario into Luigi with a custom model hi baked it. Was amazing when people found it.
I remember my head nearly fricking exploding when I found out you could mod games in the first place.
>Anyone else miss the old emulation scene?
i was into pirating wares on snes and megadrive way before there was a snes or genesis emulator via bulletin boards. most of us old fricks thought these emulator children were absolute morons - and they were proven right time and time again when every single rom site got shutdown, hacked or sued out of existence. people like me rode off into the sunset to enjoy another day and another console or computer to hack.
>Emulation is bigger than ever
>Even most normies know what it is now
>Can easily get fullsets on archive and a hundred other sites
>Even every current major console had emulators to play their older games
>"PEOPLE like mE rode ofF IntO tHe sUNSEt To ENjOy aNotheR DaY aND AnoTHER coNsoLe Or cOmPuTER tO hacK"
moron
Tell me you was one of those idiots who put intros in games without telling me you was one of those idiots putting intros in games
Up.
Zophar's Domain was ran by the biggest manbaby c**t on the Internet though, a b***h called Sampgas.
also, Zophar has manboobs:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080310223027/http://zophars.manboobs.fit.in.cixels.gaping-an.us/
(requires Ruffle to be viewed).
From what I saw of Zophar he seems OK granted I wasn't part of the scene in the 90s was mostly a console person back then with occasional C&C, or AoE, Rainbow Six wasn't till way later in my life I went to PC|2005. :3 Hes on Twitch though-had searched for his site during this thread.
Anyone used to read Overclocked?
Kind of fitting that the last page ever posted was of one of the two main characters, the one who was usually portrayed as the smart one, depicted as an elderly out of touch old man complaining about how emulators used to be while his grandkids ignore him and go off to play the latest emulators.
I remember actually asking the author if the comic was ever going to update again after it had gone for months without one, and getting a reply back that was just a smiley face and a link to the page on picrel that he had just posted... too bad it never updated again after THAT.
>http://www.overclocked.org
I'm amazed that this is still up. Someone has been paying for the domain and hosting for this site for nearly a quarter of a century despite not touching it.
Could it possibly somehow be tied to OCRemix so it's being renewed along with that for some reason? The link to ocremix on the site points to remix.overclocked.org, but then redirects to https://ocremix.org/ But yes, I am surprised it's still up too.
Shame that the proto-AVGN style reviews they made of random (usually arcade) link is dead though, points to mvt3k.overclocked.org which just tries to redirect to a page on ocremix but fails.
At least those are still on archive, which if their captures are anything to go by, went down sometime between late September and November of 2006. Although the site it started to redirect to, www.djpretzel.com/mvt3k, appears to have kept it going until sometime in 2014. Last working capture was Jan 1 of 2014, and then in December it was full of 500 errors... with there being no captures attempted again until November of 2018 which are all broken after that.
Strangely however, the new djpretzel url only has up to episode 14, the original website says there was 24 (The last one being posted on 12/12/2000) so there was no new content in that section after 2000 anyway (Unless you count people leaving comments several years later on the djpretzel version).
... sadly though even on archive there are a lot of missing images. I wonder if the original files are on overclocked.org somehow if you can prevent the redirect to djpretzel. I would love to be able to recover these.
>Anyone used to read Overclocked?
Yeah, see pic related.
> I do notice it takes up a ton of performance in Task Manager now
Enable Options -> Sleep while waiting.
Wow, you managed to post something even less funny, congratulations.
>Unfunny "parody"
>By the guy who founded Sonic CulT
Checks out
>old irc logs % grep -r 'Black person' . | wc -l
>931
>old irc logs % grep -r 'homosexual' . | wc -l
>770
Yep, I'm thinking based.
>try to download rom
>popup
>shit internet so no gore for me
>.rm
I fricking hate you for reminding me.
No, I just want to play the games, emus are better now, that's what matters to me
I decided to play pcsx2 today, it had been a few yeears so I got the new version and damn it absolutely fricks. What should I get?
I still go there for music since the other site had to remove all of their Sonic OST's