Retronauts - 609: The State of Emulation

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Head to https://www.squarespace.com/RETRO to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code RETRO. While it started exclusively as an activity enjoyed by a small demographic of ultra-nerdy young people with knowledge of obscure websites, emulation has gradually blossomed over the past thirty years into something we all do regularly—often while obeying copyright laws. Without emulation, most retro games would be entirely inaccessible to all but the select few with the cash available to purchase pieces of decades-old plastic that are only increasing in price and decay. And would our little podcast even exist without emulation? It's a thought too terrifying to dwell on. This week on Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Read Only Memo's Wes Fenlon, and Zophar's Domain founder Zophar (check out his YouTube and Twitch channels) as the crew discusses the many big moments from emulation's history—and how the subject has recently become more relevant than ever. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 50+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts, you must delete this podcast within 48 hours of downloading. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie. In this week's topic is emulation, a topic we rarely touch upon, which is pretty funny because without it, we would not be able to do our jobs. And I dare say few people would care about retro games if emulation didn't exist. So I last touched upon this topic about, let's say, 600 episodes ago. So I figured it was time to check back in and see what has happened in the last 11 years

since we talked about emulation. Before I go on any further, I want to introduce our experts who know so much more about this topic. They will bring great shame onto me, but it's no fault of theirs. Who was our first guest on the line here? Hey, Bob. That's me. West Fenland, senior editor at PC Gamer. Very happy to be back on the show. And glad that you picked me for this episode because I've been doing a newsletter about emulation for the last, geez, it's been a year now called Read Only Memo.

and I'm sure you sell yourself short. I'm sure you know lots about emulation, but excited to be here to talk about it. Thank you. And who is our other guests on the line, new to retronauts? Hi. My name is Brad. I'm more commonly known as Zofar.

You may have heard. Now, to me, that is a legendary name in terms of the subject we're talking about today. Brad, I can call you Brad. Is that correct? Yeah, totally fine. Okay. Brad, what are you known for? So back in 1996, I created a website with a group of people called Zofar's Domain, which was an emulation archive, but it was a little bit different from other sites at the time that dabbled an emulation in that when I got into emulation, which I know I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit, I was looking for a site that had everything in one place.

In other words, some sites had just news, others had the emulators. There were sites that had utilities that you could modify NES headers and things like that. And you had to go to all these different sites to try to find anything. So notwithstanding the commercial games themselves, which I ever hosted. I wanted something where you could just go to one place, get all your emulators, utilities, news. And so I got a group of people together that I met on the internet. And we founded Zofar's domain in 1996 and went from there. And I think all of our histories will involve your website in some way, even though we didn't create it or work for it. I think it's just going to be fundamental to all of our introductions simulation.

Before we begin, I want to talk about our histories. Let's start with Wes. Wes, what is your history with emulation? What led you to fall in love with it to the point where you're writing a blog about it this very day? Yeah, well, I feel like I have a less exciting origin story than Zofar, but I have kind of just like the quintessential, like early Audie's experience of encountering emulation, which was playing Super Nintendo games in like the computer lab at school. I don't know if schools still have rooms just dedicated to.

computers. But when I was in high school, we had, you know, a couple classrooms. There were just rows of computers. And luckily, the computers faced away from the teacher's desk. I don't think they really understood what they were doing when they put a bunch of 16-year-olds in a, in a room when they couldn't see the screens without, you know, walking down the rows. But ended up playing a lot of like Super Metroid and Mega Man X and all of these games that I wouldn't have experience. Otherwise, I didn't have a Super Nintendo and just kind of first be included. into this ability to play a console game on a PC, you know, it felt super magical, right, in the way that I think it did for a lot of people for me. So I was doing that. I was playing,

you know, Newgrounds, Flash games, that kind of thing. So it's kind of just dabbling in games, and that really captivated me. And around the same time, I read this article in issue 148 of electronic gaming monthly. It was the, like, GameCube launch issue. November 2001 and they had an article about emulation and it kind of goes into both the technology and the history of it a little bit it's like kind of basic stuff but they got some good comments from people in the industry about it and I actually wrote an essay in school about this article like so I don't really remember why I did that other than I must have been super into it right so that was kind of just it had clearly grabbed hold of me at that point and since then I've

kind of always loved messing around with the technical side of emulation and being able to enhance games on my computer and all that good stuff. Well, you know, it was the early odds. Those teachers were very lucky that you were looking at Super Metroid and not much worse content on the internet, which had no safeguards at that point in history. Yeah, there was a bit of a game in seeing if you could dodge the school filters, right, and like what you could find on the internet back then. But Brad, where did you find emulation and what led to the creation of the a famed website so far as domain. It's a great question. So I would say it was somewhere around late 1995, early 1996. I was in high school and, you know, my favorite systems at

the time, I loved my Nintendo, my Sega Genesis, my Sega CD. That era was like the big gaming era for me. And a lot of my games and the systems just stopped working. You know, we used to blow on our cartridges in the Nintendo days and that actually ended up making it worse, but we didn't know that then. So, you know, I have the cartridges wouldn't load. anymore. My Sega CD games, the laser notoriously, goes on a disc drive in a Sega CD very quickly. So some of my favorite games like

Lunar and Lunar, too, like they weren't working anymore. So here I am in high school. You know, I had just gotten a job as a bus boy making $3 an hour under the table. That was the money I had. So I'm like, this kind of sucks. And then one of my friends at school had mentioned to me, you know, hey, I hear

there's these programs online. He didn't even call them emulators. He just said, there's these programs online. You can download them. and you can, you know, play, you know, Nintendo and stuff, like, on your computer. And I'm like, no, no way. That sounds like a prank. Like, that's true. It ain't true.

So I started researching it. And, you know, at that time, I had literally just, I was into BBSs at that time. So, like, you know, if you remember, like, major mud, legend of the red drag and door games, all that stuff. I was into that. But I had just discovered the internet. So I go online with my dial-up modem at a 14.4 bod modem at that point. And I'm going online. I find IRC and all this stuff.

and I find three emulators in short fashion. INS, Pasifami, and Super Pasifami. INS was, at the time, a popular Nintendo emulator from Marat Faisulin, and Pasifami and Super Pasifami were Nintendo and Super Nintendo emulators from a programmer, I think his name was Nobuaku Ando. I hope I have his name right. Unfortunately, I heard he did pass away a number of years ago. But those three emulators were very formative in what ended up happening with Zofar's domain

because I spent, I can't tell you how many days I spent trying to get these things to work. Pacifami and Super Passifami at the time were, you know, the program was Japanese, and the programs were in Japanese, and I didn't even have the right font. So everything looked like weird ASCII code. So I didn't even know what I was clicking. And there was menus upon menus upon menus. It wasn't user-friendly at all. Even if it was, I couldn't read it.

So I'm trying to find, what do I do? How do I figure this out? And I'm trying to, there was no Google. Google did not exist. I was using Alta Vista and Lycos, I want to say. And I'm trying, and there's nothing. Like, there's nothing about emulation when you're searching. It's really hard to find anything at that point.

And I ended up finding a utility known as Yukon, a DOS command line utility that allowed me to apply an IPS patch to pacifami and super pacifami. I don't even know how I found this, that someone had made. a fan, think of it as a fan translation, a fan translation of a fan emulator project. And I was, and then I had a, I found out, I don't know if you're aware of these emulators, but they used a split NES format. So you had PRG and CHR.

The PRG file contained all the program data and the CHR contained all the character data. There's a reason I'm going this deep. So I'm looking for, you know, finding the games, however I find the games. And I just thought, wow, this is incredibly convoluted. And when I finally got it working, I had a game where you could play it, but there was no sound.

It was just the graphics. So then I'm like, okay, well, this is cool. This is like proof of concept. Like, it kind of works. Like, I see Link. It's moving at like five frames a second, and I can't hear a thing, but it kind of works. So then I moved to INS. And I had Windows at the time, and it was Windows 95 back then.

And it also kind of worked. It used the NES format. That was Murat-Fi Zulam. created the NES format, by the way, which is the format we still use today with an extended header to define the different memory mappers and whatnot. But that worked a little better. It still ran kind of slowish. At the time, I had a 486-66 megahertz is what I didn't even have a penny at that point.

So it was like crawling. And it had sound, but it was really archaic sound. So I'm like, okay, well, it kind of works. This is a cool idea. I wonder what else is out there. I'm like, I'm going to go find a site. I'm sure there's, like, a site that, like, kind of like, you know, back then there was Circuit City, and you could go into Circuit City, and there's all electronics.

You go computers and TVs. So I'm like, there's got to be like a superstore, but for emulators. And I found a couple of cool sites, archaic ruins and Node 99, but guess what? They didn't have emulators. They had news every now and then they would post about, oh, this cool emulator came out. Oh, this cool thing. But that was it. So you had sites that hosted utilities, and I'm finding sites that host emulators,

and finding a site that has news, but there's nothing that, like I was saying, there's nothing that has them all together. There's just nothing. So I was like, okay, this is really cool,

but I'm not that, I'm not that much closer to fixing my problem, which was I want to play my old video games again that stopped working because I'm a broke high school kid from Philly. So I was like, I'm going to just try to solve the problem

by creating a site myself. Let's see what I can do. Now, I knew nothing. there was no school for programming at that point and where I went to high school anyway like you know computer class consisted of these 1984 Macintosh computers

with a little seven inch screener in black and white and they'll teach you how to use McPaint that was computer class so I'm like I'm going to have to figure this out myself so I taught myself HTML and I'll be totally transparent how I did it I went and I looked at every other website that did it correctly and I would try it and I would upload it with my FTP program which was

Cute FTP, by the way, is what I used back then. And then I would see it and be like, oh, that didn't work. Whoops, try it again and edit it back. That was how I made Zofar as the main in the beginning. But in talking to people on IRC that were into emulation as well, they had a decent community in FNET, number MU, a couple other channels, bunch of channels ended up forming. But I said, hey, does anybody want to help me out? Like, I feel like we could use someone that can do graphics. I have no skill with graphics.

I didn't then. I still don't all these years later. And I found this awesome dude that, you know, was totally free. I mean, a lot of us were teenagers at that point anyway. Made some graphics for the site. I found another gentleman. His name was Alan that said, hey, I can do some CGI and Pearl programming for you. You know, get up some message boards, some polls, stuff like that.

Because there was no, like, there was no YouTube, there was no Twitch. There was no infrastructure. It was here's space. Here's how much we're going to charge you for the space in bandwidth. Now go upload everything. But once we got going and, you know, we formed the team, the rest was history. So I got into emulation because in high school my systems broke.

I wanted to plug him again. I tried to figure it out. I couldn't figure it out. So I decided I would figure it out by making something so that the next person that was like me that was just trying to learn about emulation didn't have to go through all the hoops, you know, that I went through to get it all figured out. Well, yeah, your page was a regular part of my browsing for about a decade. And it's also because it's also the reason why when I finally played Lunar 2, Eternal Blue,

I could not take the villain seriously. I heard the name first through an emulation website. I was like, who is this guy? Is he going to show me when ZSNES update or is he going to take over the world? Is he going to throw ROMs at me? What's his ultimate attack? I mean, my story is, like, I feel like I got in at a very important time because looking at how dates line up, I feel like I started getting into emulation

weeks after the emulator Nesticle launched. And we'll talk about that in this discussion because that's April of 97. I remember, I was homesick, in quotes, from school. I think I just wanted to play on the internet, and my mom, believe me. Sorry, Mom. And I was browsing my normal websites, which included a lot of mystery science theater websites, I believe. And one of them had a post saying, oh, you won't believe this. You can play Nintendo games on your computer.

And I feel like that's the first thing anyone hears about emulation. Like, this is true. I'm not making this up. And it did sound like a lie. So I went and I pursued it. And I'm sure you'll both agree with me. When the first time it happened, the first time I loaded, I don't know, Legend of Zelda on my computer. It did feel like magically. This should not be happening.

What's going on? There's a whole new world open to me. I can suddenly play all the games I either couldn't find or couldn't afford or couldn't rent. And this started an obsession with emulation, an obsession with trying to play every game. And without that, I would not be hosting a retro gaming podcast. I would not have access to the resources I needed to build this love of retro game. I totally understand that. What of my favorite things to do? And it's going to sound bad. But Like, I loved inviting my friends over, hey, do you know I can play Legend of Zelda on my computer? No, you can't. Let me show you.

I had to fire it out. And again, it was so archaic, but it was so much fun to show what you could do. I did a similar thing because a friend of mine really loved the game Act Razor. And this is like, I don't know, 1998 or 99. He couldn't find another copy or his copy broke. And I loaded up on ZSNS or SNS 9X or whatever was the emulator at the time. It's load up my basement. I invite him down.

I say, look, this is Act Razor, hand him the Gravis game pad, he cannot believe what he's doing. It was a magic trick for a very long time. Until I got to college in the early aughts, go to a friend's dorm room. He's got an Xbox with every emulator and every game on it, and I realize, oh, everybody knows the trick now. But from the mid-90s to the early aughts, it did feel like, this is magic, so many big breakthroughs are happening, and so many new walls are being broken down in terms of what can be emulated. And, you know, exciting things are still happening, but those early, those first really like five years after Nesticle felt so special and so magical. And again, that provided my education. Other teenagers were out, you know, learning how to drive and making friends and meeting women or men.

I was, you know, spending long nights in the basement all summer long playing all the Genesis games I couldn't play because I never had a Genesis or playing imported games that were just simply not available and I couldn't buy them because they weren't in stores. So, yeah, without emulation, who knows where any of us would be right now. Retronauts is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're looking for a platform that will assist you in making your mark online, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it, oh, so easy. With Squarespace, you can create an appealing, attractive website, build and nurture a community, and sell anything under the sun, within reason, of course, all in one handy place.

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You can play Super Mario Bros. 3 on like a million different platforms at this point is if you weren't deep into those emulation communities hanging out on FNET like Zofar was, you didn't necessarily understand the difference between what an emulator was doing and what another piece of software represented. I remember finding this game called Zelda Classic where someone had actually reprogrammed

the original NES Legend of Zelda for PC and to me that was like the same thing as being able to load up this Super Nintendo emulator or Nintendo emulator and play those games on my PC like I didn't understand this thing is emulating a console and we'll talk about what the heck that actually means versus someone has just written a ripoff program of the Legend of Zelda that runs natively

my PC, right? And today, it's, I think it's a little bit more obvious because we play old games on new systems and there's remasters and remakes and all these differences. But back then, if you didn't really have the technical understanding, it was all just some variation of magic that at one point you couldn't play Nintendo games on a computer and all of a sudden you could. And it was really cool. Yeah. And I think over time, playing with emulators gave me a great understanding of how games were made. You can look at all the sprite data. You can turn off layers, you get a sense of oh I'm reloading the game something different is happening oh that's RNG I didn't know the term RNG but you start to understand just how everything works so you know that gave me a greater appreciation for games which did seem like magic and then you see just here are all the parts you can access and it just makes you open up a whole new world of understanding for you. Before we go on for this discussion, I want to say this is a very big topic.

This could produce thousands of podcast episodes, and I think we'll come back to it. So I want to cover some big moments in the world of emulation and then move on to talk about some current stuff because, you know, What really spawned this was the Yuzu Nintendo news, bringing emulation into mainstream discussion. And it made me remember, oh, all these good times I had. So much of my education in video games is through emulation. And I want to celebrate it and talk to experts in the field. Right on. Yeah.

If we want to go through big points, like somewhat chronologically, I'll mention one thing really quick and then turn it over to Zofar to talk about Nesticle, because he's got the inside line. there. But I had a really fun interview last year with Mike Micah, who works for Digital Eclipse, works on the preservation collections of games like the Teenage Mutant Turtles Collection and Atari 50th. And before he worked at Digital Clips, he was actually a fan of their games because in the early 90s, or sorry, the mid-90s, it was 1996. So around the time the hobby emulation scene was really getting going, digital clips actually did the first, like, official, commercially licensed emulation releases of games. They released the Williams Arcade Classic, so games like Joust, Defender, and Robotron were on there. And so that

was, I believe, the first official release of video games from an older console being emulated onto newer, newer systems. And he, at the time, found that completely magic in the same way that we found Nintendo games being emulated as magic. And very shortly after that, there was a Pac-Man emulator by a guy who ended up becoming the creator of Mame. He basically created his Pac-Man emulator and then clearly had greater ambitions than that and went on to make Mame, which is the arcade emulator that has persisted for like 30 years now. Wes, was that, was that Pachan?

What was it? Do you remember what it was called? I think that is correct. there was another one that was Dave Spicer's Sparkade that was another Pac-Man emulator, but it got kind of left in the dust by maim eventually. I've been racking my brain for so long, trying to remember,

because I tell people this when they talk about maim, and I said, you know, there was an emulator before maim from the same author that just did Pac-Man. I can't find it. I have some old archives of Zofar's domain that predate the Wayback Machine, but it's from like February 97 and I and it's not there like I pulled up the arcade emulator page

that I had from that time and PACM is not on there but I swear that's what it was called it's always bothered me I've never been able to find it anywhere but I know I know it existed and I had to have had it um for a brief time I must have had it on the site so it's neat yeah I'm pretty sure that that is the name of it I think you have that right um so yeah that the it's interesting that the commercial emulation scene and kind of the hobbyist scene were, they both kind of had a big moment around the same time. But I think it took a lot longer for commercial emulation to sort of get proven out as like a worthwhile thing to the industry.

You know, a lot of game companies did not necessarily care about preserving their history, about re-releasing their games. And we'll talk about the virtual console, right? But it took a really long time for that to become more and more accepted. Whereas in 1996, at the same time this Williams Arcade Classic stuff was coming out, I mean, the hobbyist scene was about to freaking explode, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so that was 96, I was wondering, because before that, we would have, you know, new packages containing old games, like, let's say Super Mario All-Stars. But the appreciation for old games wasn't quite there yet.

You would still want to play Super Mario Brothers, but you would say, oh, this game looks ugly now compared to the Super Nintendo graphics. Yeah, things were changing so quickly. in games right that i mean we look back at um the old games media at the time i'm sure this has come up on retronauts before that you know magazines around the beginning of the playstation era are like 2d graphics ew like get rid of that right like we're you know it's all about 3d now and it really took is like papercraft that you could make yourself at home sorry wes they they trashed the uh they trashed the lunar one and two remakes on the playstation saying oh it's 2D, it's archaic, you know,

just working designs thinking, which of course it's game arts, working designs just translated, but like, you know, you look back on that stuff now and you kind of chuckle, but, you know, then it was all about the latest technology and you know, you know, 2D to 3D and all that, you know. Yeah, every character is 200 polygons, all flat shaded.

And now you look at the 3D games from 95 to 2000, you just chuckle how horrible they look. But the 2D helps up. I think we owe almost all of the current appreciation and popularity of retro games to the hobby emulation scene

really proving there was an audience for that but I think that really started with Nesticle right right Zofar would you say that's right yeah because up until that point like I was saying before there were there were emulators none of them they the programs did amazing work right but there wasn't no one had yet

really put it all together where hey here's this program and it's going to do what you think it's going to do you're going to be able to play your games like it's a Nintendo or you know or whatever. So I never, I'll never forget when Sardu, Iceratus, but he went his, he actually went his cronk, and then he became Sardu. He had a few names, but anyways, he had a neat sense of humor. He came in IRC one night and just released Nesticle 0.2. That was the first version, 0.2. He just, it was like February 97, I want to say, around that time. And I was in number

MU on FNET, and he just comes in and announces that he's released a simulator. And there was such like i'm never forget it's like you know if you're into twitch at all how like someone will raid you and like a whole bunch of people will be in there talking about whatever all these people you just all started flowing in and other channels are like yo the eyness killer has arrived that's what they called it the iness killer was that the first time he had ever been in the channel or had he been in before the chatter i think i never asked him this but i think he had been there for a while and just never spoke like he was very low key so because up and he hadn't released anything publicly up to that point you

would never have known, like, who would he be? It would be no different than anyone else coming in, just asking about emulators or, you know, stuff like that. So when he released it, everyone was just firing a million questions at him, like, how did you do this? And I can't believe how well it runs. And I love the bloody hand. Everyone loved the bloody hand. And, you know, the, I don't know if you want to talk about the mascots that he had on

the about the about. Oh, sure. Do you want to talk about that? I mean, we must when we talk about Nesticle. But Brad, before the, before Nesticle, you mentioned you were playing around with other emulators. history of NAS emulators before Nesticle, whatever information was available. It seems that hobbyist emulation existed at as early as 1990. There was an emulator for the FM Towns

system. And there were actually two. There was family computer emulator and Paso Fami. But Paso Fami is the one that made it to Windows. And that could have been the earliest one for Windows in 95. But Nesticle was the one where everything just worked. You just had one file that you ran. And I think, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. I'm listening. And the big appeal is, which you mentioned earlier, which we can't talk about on this podcast. Not the big appeal, but what helps sell it to people in 1997 was the UI, where, if I'm not mistaken, the icon was a pair of testicles. Not photorealistic, but it was a cartoony sprite drawing of testicles, which when I'm showing people the magic trick in 1997 saying, yes, you're clicking on testicles, but wait. And the UI, I believe, dripping blood, your cursor is a severed hand.

Oh, go ahead. So the blood, the dripping blood was genesis, which was his... Oh, thank you. That's okay. That was his genesis simulator, which I got to beta test as well. Awesome. I love that. That was one of my favorite emulators of all time, actually.

And just so we're clear for the listeners, it's genesis. Correct. Yes. He actually had three. So there was nesticle, which, of course, is a play on, you know, genesis, you know, assist. And then there was one more. I don't know if you've heard of this one. It's the least of the three popular emulators that he wrote,

but I loved it too. He wrote an emulator called Callis. You ever hear of Callis? So Callis was a Capcom System 1, CPS1, which is in the word callus, emulator. So it would run games like Street Fighter 2 and Final Fight and Punisher, like that line of Capcom games. But that had a reference to, which I also don't know if you want to talk about

on this podcast that a lot of people don't get um you know that's ringing the tiniest bell because i i think at one point in my life i thought the future were all these emulators with disgusting names he he loved he was all about the end jokes i love this he was such a great he's still around somewhere but he's a great dude but he would always like he would have these jokes that like only he got or him and like a couple other people would understand just for fun like he would do stuff like that like when someone finally found s nesical years later on that disc um he worked He went to work for electronic arcs Tiburon, and he did things like that. And then I remember he posted when I came back a few years ago, he actually replied,

I can't believe you guys had this much time on your hands and you found that emulator. But that's so, but the point I'm making is like he loved the in jokes and he loved to just mess around with people and, you know, just poke. And that was the 90s. Like that's, you want to, like, for those that weren't around for the 90s, like, what were the 90s like? like that's what I think about I think of Nesticle I think of the show South Park like just pushing the boundaries pushing buttons just for fun like that was that was what we did like to see what you could do to see what you could get away with that that was the era I think another thing that went along with that punk sensibility for Nesticle that was actually a really big deal at the time is nesticle was free and the other NES emilates Pasofami and Ines both 35 bucks you had to pay for or find the pirated version that I'm sure was circulating all over the place, right? But, like, technically it was being sold, just like the games, you know, ROMs were everywhere, right? But you were supposed to pay for them.

And I can tell you, oh, I was going to say, I can tell you a 14-year-old could find those cracked versions and did, and I was that man. Or boy, boy, cannot try me. I totally understand. Like, I'm with you there. But, yeah, it was completely free, and it just worked. You would load the emulator, and you would load up your NES games, and the games would play. Now, what's interesting, it's all rose-colored glasses, because I do something on my Twitch stream, I call it Zofar's Domain Day, where every year on our anniversary, I'll load up some old emulators, and it's not nearly as accurate, not even close to emulators today, but in 1997, where what you had was emulators with no sound, emulators with really, really crows. and missing channel sound and you know five frame a second performance on those kind of computers

back then nesticle was so many leaps and bounds that you could play the game you could hear music you could plug in your joystick he he added features like the old microsoft sidewinder controller was popular in the late 90s if you remember that before the xbox controllers really you know got popular in 2000s like you could play with that you could save a state like that was a big thing no one had even heard about that before unless you had like an action replay for like $100. I didn't know anybody that had one of those. Like, you could freeze the status of your game to save a state in games that weren't designed

to do that and just continue right where you left off. You could modify the palette. Like, this was crazy stuff. This was like groundbreaking. Nothing like this existed. Like, and it was all easy to use. It was clear. The menus were you know, what would, how do you get to the palat? Click on palette. How do you save

state? Click save state. It was just, you didn't even need to read the read me file. It was all sub-explanatory. You're going over the features, Brad. It made me think that this just set the standard for, I and what an emulator was expected to do because with save states those were so revolutionary you could finally finish games you could not finish before legitimately by setting your own rules and then later you could also use game genie codes at a hex values in the game to change things around the way you want to you could find your own codes like it had code finders where you could look it was it was just wild the stuff that I just end up doing once nesticle hit the scene it was groundbreaking and you didn't have to worry about like how many of us had to sacrifice an hour of progress in an RPG because we had to like turn the console off you know or like leave it on and hope that someone doesn't reset it overnight or you yeah it doesn't freeze or something right exactly god say the saving being able to save state and just you know close the program like miraculous miraculous

unbelievable unbelievable like like bob said it it set the standard but it didn't just set the standard for other hobby emulators that we're going to follow right like save states became an obvious expected feature in all official emulation as well like once the virtual console came out once all of these you know retro collections became a thing would they have done that and come up with that probably but but they but they had to put it in because it was so clearly what people associated with emulation at that i would say i would go as so far as to say that if it hadn't been for the emulation scene of the 90s showing that it was possible and popular and people wanted it And I'll tell you right now, Nintendo would not have done it.

Absolutely, there would have been no virtual console. Nintendo, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole with this. They make amazing games. Thank you, Nintendo, saving the video game industry in 1985, Mario and Zelda, and all these great franchises. They still to this day, even though they use emulation, they are incredibly anti-emulation the moment they feel that their IP is being attacked. The second they get away, that's just how they've always been.

So I, and I love, look, I own a Nintendo, I have a ton of Nintendo, Super Nintendo, N64. I have all systems. But I think it was emulation that forced Nintendo, specifically Nintendo now. It started with them. And then it went to Sony and others. It forced them to look and say, you know what? As much as we don't like that people are taking our IPs and doing what they want with them, there is a market here.

And if we're smart, we'll take that. We'll build our own emulator or find someone good to make it for us. They ended up using, what do they use? Canoe, I think, is what was on the NES and S&S classic, the name of their emulator. And we will market it and sell our games again and make some, and they did that. And I'm okay with that because that's Nintendo. They have the right to sell their games 10,000 times if they want,

and I have the right to buy it one time and then emulate it, right? That's do you. Yeah, I mean, piracy or, you know, playing copies of your own games legitimately does show companies that these products have value. And who knows if that incentive would be there. If lots of people weren't going to ROM sites, which is our next topic, which was a, as a hot issue, maybe still is. Now, now I feel like it's just so easy to download any ROM because the internet is, is less guarded. And when it comes to that kind of stuff, because there were, you had to know where ROM sites were.

They were always closing. They were always being cease and assisted. And now, just in searching for some of these topics, I just get the, oh, here's the patched iso file. Here's, here's all of the ROMs. So it feels like, I'm sure these sites are still taken down, but not, not. is like careful of a topic and the joke up front was a lot of rom sites said oh wow I can

host these ROMs that you have to delete them they're just for a trial at 24 hours just to be clear and I know you were around then the vast majority of people then knew that was bogus there wasn't real it was full crap it was something

they'd put up to make themselves feel better we knew that you know when you take a game and it is a commercial game that is being sold and then you upload it somewhere you're it's piracy like we knew that we all knew that um i'll say i was just young enough when i first started dabbling in the stuff that like i'm sure 70% of me knew it was probably bullshit but there was part of me that wondered like like well i don't understand copyright law right like i know nothing about copyright law i know there's like it's this

concept of fair use that a radio program can play a few seconds of a song or something i I'm like, maybe it's okay. This is where I first heard the meme about if it's on the internet, it has to be true. Like, was that, it was that moment. If you're a cop, you have to tell me. Yeah, right. But, like, I was there, you know, when there weren't nearly as many, you know, ROM sites, not nearly as many. And it was one of those things where I was number one, very careful.

I did not host commercial games on So Far as the Main. Never did. If anyone ever tells you that it did during the tenure that I was there from 19. 96 to 2,000. That's not true. We never hosted them. We had some public domain stuff. We had like fan-created ROMs and, you know, we had some public domain stuff. And we even hosted at one point, I don't know if you remember the game Zero Wing. If you don't, you certainly remember all your base. That actually went public domain at one point. They released the publishers and the programs released a source code for it. So at one point, that was hosted

to during its public domain here. And then somebody bought them. But it was just interesting that you know you couldn't really I couldn't say to people on Zofar's domain go to this site here's all the links to the ROMs and have fun like I it was more of like here's here's some sites that you may want to check out and what's there is there what's not is not it was very vague they would go up and down all the time we had a few links just to the general site that would get you places and then after a while we see stop linking even that because it just it got too gray but now like you just said you can literally go anywhere you want and you can find an entire

catalog of a game system whereas during my era I was there when games were actively being dumped for the first time I knew I'm not going to name this person but I knew the person that dumped Dragon Warrior 3 Dragon Warrior 4 Wizards and Warriors I could name me at least 50 games

right now that the copies you see today are likely the copies that this man dumped in 1996 and 1997 back when not every Nintendo game was readily available on the internet you know he'd release packs of them to the internet

and now you know they're everywhere but it was an exciting time you know because you never knew like we'd wake up one day what new emulator would there be what new game just got dumped that you know hasn't worked I've had it sitting in a shelf the thing doesn't work anymore and now I can go and play

it again because it just got released. It was so exciting. Every day was some new exciting, you know, revelation. And I do want to move on from NES emulation to talk about other emulation, specifically S-NES emulation, because from my perspective in 97, it's just like, all right, you emulated the NES very good. Well, this is as far as it goes. There's no more magic can happen. This is already too good to be true. Couldn't possibly get better. Again, we were kind of naive.

Maybe I was just kind of naive. But then Super Nintendo emulation started to come into its own. And like NES emulation, it was a. slow progress, but that slow progress was basically just months of trial and error in releasing new updates. And my old person's story, that sounds very quaint, it's sort of like watching a silent movie and you're running away from the train as it approaches the screen. I remember it was before the release of an emulator. It might have been ESNES. It was one of the first commercial emulators, or sorry, hobbyist emulators with sound support for the Super Nintendo. Virtual

Supermagicom, VSM. That could have been it actually. So that might have been it, but before they released the emulator they released a wave of here is the emulator playing the intro to chrono trigger and i downloaded that i listened to it and that got me excited so this is how this is how things were happening in 1997 or 1998 but yeah it's just um that was the next magic trick that was the next breakthrough but uh to overcome some of the super nintendo's hardware tricks it did take a while and a common a common story a lot of people have is oh i played final fantasy two slash four i get to the cave of mist and now i try another game because that layer uh is not transparent for me and then it'll take a you know more time for that to work but i knew the savvy

gamer knew turn off that layer walk around freely i think um this era of emulators in particular speaks to me as very instructional for um gamers of our age group kind of learning like Okay, there's, emulation has sort of different priorities based on who is making an emulator and what era of a system's lifespan and documentation it's coming into. And emulation can broadly be trying to go for accuracy or trying to go for speed. And at some point, your emulator will hopefully do both of those things very, very well, right? But the older, the computer hardware was the more you kind of had to pick your battles and choose one of those things. And so a lot of the emulators at this point would have a lot of basically game-specific hacks or bits of programming that were kind of built to prioritize the emulator to run certain games well.

Other games maybe not so well, right? You definitely want your emulator to be able to run Super Metroid, you know, Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past, to Super Mario World, right? Those games need to run really well. And the way they coded the emulator to run those games really well might not. make a game like Aladdin or Desert Strike perform exactly the way it's supposed to, right? And so you might have to load one of these games up into two or three different emulators and see which one it actually worked in, which is something you don't really have to do so much these days. It can still be a thing, but broadly there's going to be one emulator that's like

the best choice for 99% of stuff, right? But that was not the case back there. Wes is 100% right. It was not the case at all then. It was all mostly speed, right? You would optimize for speed in the best majority of cases because the best computers in 1996 were, you know, peniums, you know. And so, you know, you would have scenarios like Wes said. Ultra HLE is an excellent example of this. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be jumping away from S&S real quick. But when N64 emulation launched, nobody thought you could get a, you could have an N64 emulator running at playable speeds, no less, on a, p2233 for example an entry level penny and two nobody thought that you could even do that um and yet if you had a 3d graphics card uh ultra hale ran really really well i remember i had a voodoo rush at the time that's been gone way back now um video card was like this long and i had to buy a new case for it because it kept bumping into my powers of but on my syrac 686 p166 i was actually able to run ultra hale with my with my voodoo rush and actually it actually ran decently but to your point there were hacks upon hacks upon hacks even the term ultra hLE high level emulation it didn't emulate everything at all it was recompiling

and it was doing all kinds of tricks for each game so that the games would run but it wasn't you know not like you would think of an emulator now where you know now most emulators are going for accuracy right you want to be able to load up and I'm sure we'll talk about stuff like the mister and FPJ emulation at some point here tonight but that wasn't the case then like you said it was all about just making it work it works well enough

it's good enough and it's playable and with like Nintendo and Super Nintendo emulation it really was plug and play once they got a lot of things figured out with Super Nintendo I do remember oh I'll boot to DOS and then run this in DOS because I can get a few more frames at a super punch out but in the early

days it was me playing RPGs at 20 frames per second before emulators got a lot better playing like Final Fantasy 4 and Chrono Trigger and things like that but then you're talking about Ultra HLEBrad, that's the era of you need to tinker, you need to know

what plugins to use, every game these different settings. It's suddenly a much steeper challenge to get a game to run the way you want to. I think a lot of people, they stopped at this point because of that added challenge. Yeah, no doubt. That's just like when Emulation

really entered like the PC ass PC space, right? It's like, yes, you can play this cutting edge contemporary console game on your PC, but you better have a fast PC. You better be willing to dig around in the forums for the advice of which plugins you need to be using and every little thing you can do to get, you know, two extra frames of performance out of it. And I was, yeah. I think that what you just said, though, that is when Zofar's domain really took off because it started out, like I said,

just that era of, you know, trying to create a solution to find things in one place. Then you had things like Nesticle, and it really started to get popular once that emulator came out. But then you started getting emulators, like you said, with a lot more functionality, Ultra HLE, with all this configuration, ZSNES, to circle back to Super Nintendo emulation, was a great emulator that also had a lot of advanced features and tons of different resolutions and drivers you could mess with. And so this is where I think Zofar's domain really plugged in, because by that point, we had a robust community on IRC, we had a nice message forms.

You know, we had general emulation, talk to the town. one for Super Nintendo, one for Nintendo. You could ask questions. People would reply, right? No different than if you're like in a really big discord, like the Mr. Discord is an example of that where people will reply to you really quick now. We had that. So I think that that was like the perfect timing and that's when it really started to take off too.

Yeah, you suddenly needed customer service. You couldn't just like the bloody hand select Legend of Zelda and then go to town. It did get a lot more complicated. And you know, we're still in the 90s and yeah, we're jumping around a lot. There's a lot to cover. But since we're still in the 90s, I did want to talk about BLEAM because this is the hobbyist idea of emulation entering the commercial space in a big way. So this was a PlayStation emulator for PC, which also would see a very limited Dreamcast release in the form of BLEAMCast.

I think they had to make the BLEM for Dreamcast because the name BLEAMCast was just sitting there. But yes, BLEM was the commercial emulator. and then on Dreamcast it had like three separate releases only supporting Tekken 3 Metal Gear Solid and Grand Tarismo 2 and this is when the battles start happening

the lawsuits start happening Sony takes BLEM to courts and Sony loses but BLEM is bled dry because of legal fees and there's no more BLEAM yeah and just before BLEM like

around the same time there's also the connectic virtual game station, which was doing the same thing for PlayStation, emulating the PlayStation, right? And this really speaks to the fact that, one, the PlayStation was an exciting new bit of hardware that people were really keen on. Two, Sony really did not do much in terms of like security on their console, which is why modern consoles are much, much more complicated to emulate when it comes to bypassing security measures, because at the time, that was not really a thing that they were considering. They were worried about people copying discs. They were not worried about people copying how the console function. So these two commercial

emulators from very, very, very skilled programmers came out around the same time that both recreated the PlayStation to play on a computer. And Sony sued both of them and essentially lost both cases and did the thing corporations do, which is either buy them out. which is what they did with Connectix. They just bought the software from the company, which made the company a bunch of money, and Connectix moved on to work on, like, virtualization stuff for Microsoft. So they were kind of fine to, like, jettison it at that point.

And then Bleem, like you said, Bob, they got bled dry by continuing lawsuits over, like, can you use the screenshots of the games to market your product? And basically, if Bleem had been backed by a billionaire, who was willing to, like, fund their legal fees, we could be looking at kind of a different, you know, that would have been an alternate timeline where emulation went down sort of a different legal path and is, like, appreciated differently today.

But the way it worked out, they kind of just had to fold under the weight of a giant company threatening to sue them over and over again and make their life miserable. Yep. But on the other hand, I like to think, too, that had that not, and by the way, Blame is an amazing piece of software. I never messed with the connected to one.

But I was around for, you know, we had news articles about it. But Randy Lyndon did an amazing job on BLEM. But had that not happened, let's say that BLEM had not been bled dry and connectics had not sold and they continued on as they were. Would we be seeing a lot more emulation programs that were commercial now? Would everything be commercial now? Would all the free programs just fade into the sunset? Like who knows?

So I like to think, you know, if I hadn't left Zofar's domain in 2000, while I have emerged back 20 years later, like, I don't know. Maybe everything was meant to be. Yeah, that's how I kind of look at it was meant to be. And, you know, it's a shame that it happened. On the other hand, I think that it made future emulation projects just a lot more mindful of, you know, if a legal matter should arise, what should we put, what kind of emulator should we make?

And what should we do when it comes to biases? And, you know, how should we market it? Should it be free? Should it be commercial? I think all those were decisions that got weighed after that happened. Even though Sony lost both cases, because at the end of the day, if I'm going to put all my time to a project like that, I don't want to get sued into oblivion, even if I win and have nothing left to show for it, you know? So I think it made developers a lot more careful after that. And towards the end of the late 90s, around the time of BLEM, we're seeing some emulated game packages on Sony's PlayStation console.

and from my experience they weren't usually that great in terms of emulating the Super Nintendo and I don't know what kind of trickery went into it it sounded very complicated but if you're around at the time you might have played their compilation releases of Final Fantasy 5 and 6 and Chrono Trigger in Final Fantasy 4

generally had a lot of problems it was a much lesser experience than actually playing the cartridges or the emulator perhaps giving emulation a bad name for people's first experience if that happened to be their first experience. And, of course, there were, I think a lot more of this happening in Japan because they were releasing the Rockman games or Mega Man games,

individually as singular PlayStation 1 releases. But as we all know, Sony's executives did not really want a lot of 2D games on the platform making the hardware look bad. So we're not getting a lot of these things in the West. Yeah, I think, sadly, that's somewhat a tradition that continues today. you know, as much as there are quality emulation packages, often what is officially sold is not as good as what the hobby scene is doing itself. I mean, there are exceptions to that, but like when Nintendo put out the first wave of Switch

online, I forget exactly what they call it, but like the Switch online membership equivalent to virtual console, right? Some of those games had some pretty obvious emulation issues that weren't present. in Nintendo's own emulation like on the Wii and they aren't present in emulators that you can download for free off the internet and play Mario Kart 64 in, right? Like it should not be,

Nintendo should not be messing up emulating Mario Kart 64 20 plus years later after that game came out, right? But we still see cases like that all the time, which goes to show how hard it is, honestly, to write a great emulator, but also where the source, of like commercial compromises that so far was kind of alluding to come in right is like how much time do you spend on this how much expertise do you put into this when it is a purely you know uh

fandom or passion driven thing ultimately you're not going to have many people working on it but the people who are working on it really care and they're generally incredibly good at what they do and Nintendo again not the harp on this they're very proud very proud company right very proud leadership they don't really seem to have interest in talking to the the community you know their minds were nintendo we know what best and yet no maybe not when it comes to emulation not not exactly um if you look at the nes uh n s n s ns and n64 controllers that nintendo is selling you to play on their switch their version of the virtual console i don't know if they even called anything i have i have the switch by the way and i do have a nintendo online membership

just so you know i give you money nintendo they'll do it give you money um but it the controllers that they sell for those virtual experiences, the lag on those controllers, and there's, you can, like, if you look up, the Mr. team created an entire list of like every controller ever in like the last 20 years and it includes those controllers, the

controllers with some of the worst latency is the NES, SNES, and N64 switch controllers. Figure that out. Made by Nintendo. God. You know, by the way, I think it's just called Nintendo Switch Online, which frustrates me because I wish it was just called something else. Just

call it virtual console again. Yeah. Give it a name, yeah. Give it a name. M. M. M. M. .

P. We'll talk about it. Nintendo next because we're going to move into the 2000s. And this is when, you know, developers and publishers are really running with the idea of emulation. And Nintendo, they are first to really just take this and run with it in terms of providing a way for you to play their old games. So one, strangely enough, the biggest, earliest thing for Nintendo in terms of

emulation was Animal Crossing because this, they released for the GameCube, which was late 2001 for in Japan and early or sorry September 2002 in America this was a breakthrough in that you had to unlock these you had to find them in the game but you got a very healthy collection of NES games the best rewards things you could play there were a few that were trickier to obtain I use the game shark things like Punch Out and Super Mario brothers and the legend of Zelda but they were essentially free with the price of admission this would never happen again but it showed there was an interest. People are like, oh, this is the coolest thing I can do in Animal Crossing.

Look what I can play. I can play the old Mario game, the old pinball game. And, yeah, it was very fun to see in 2002 for us. Yeah, around that same era, they were also doing the E-reader for the Game Boy Advance. And they release some NES games for the E-reader, right? So you could slide five or ten paper cards through this scanner and load up an NES game. into memory on your GBA and then play, I don't know, you know, punch out and probably excite bike, you know, a few of the, like, the really basic early games.

A weird time for Nintendo. But as we have kind of alluded to in this podcast, I think they did not use the word emulation to talk about this stuff, right? You know, but it was there. They were kind of cluing in to that audience interest in their old games and sort of putting feelers out and being like, do people still care about? excite bike. Do people still care about the original Legend of Zelda on

the NES? And it turns out, yeah, people did. Yeah, and still do. Yeah, there were the free games in Animal Crossing, again, only in the first version in America. That would never happen again. What a damn shame. And then we're building the path to virtual console for the Wii. So we have, like you mentioned, Wes, the e-reader

cards of the very simple black box NES games. And then you have the next version of that, which is, oh, we're going to release these NES games on cartridges. the aspect ratio is going to be horribly squished but you'll like it anyways because look how novel this is. We're going to sell you a Game Boy Advance

that looks like an NES. So that is the next step towards building a service that will allow this to happen in a much more digital way. But it's all happening and then in 2006 we get virtual console which honestly this podcast was founded on complaining about. I was not part of it then but I was also complaining. And Nintendo has kept this up in some fashion throughout the history of their consoles 3DS,

Wii U, Switch, and we do gripe about what's available, but I think their preservation efforts have been pretty good compared to many other platform holders. And even though it's a Netflix-style library, you can't own, I am pleased with what's available. I love getting on a plane and saying,

like, oh, here are 40 NES games I can play. The same goes for Genesis, Game Boy, Advance, Nintendo 64, not that many for each, platform but still it's very healthy. I would be fascinated to know like to be the fly on the wall to understand all the logistics around why the virtual console kind of petered out and took on this much more limited form when they got to the history of Nintendo Switch online because you know so badly I just want to say why don't you just maintain this store where people can buy hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of classic games at $5 a pop surely this is a good

idea. I guess the licensing for it and everything was just a nightmare I don't know. I think it's just licensing and contracts. Like, if you think about some of the interesting things that happened after the virtual console ended, like Sega started trying to sell 20 versions. And I love Sega, by the way, but they tried to sell like the 700th version of Shining Force this time on the iPhone and the streets of rage for the 76 time and then Sega forever. So I think a lot of the license holders just they wanted to pull back what was on the virtual console so they could sell it themselves.

How many beautiful things in this world has paperwork robbed us on? That's what it comes down Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like Netflix Where Netflix is the home for streaming And then everyone's like, no, give me the stuff back We're going to make our own streaming platform And now there are just all these little islands of content Yep, and in some cases they bring them off of there

They would form their own streaming network And then Roy's, oh crap, this is really hard and expensive Hey Netflix, can we have a deal with you? And then it comes back And it comes off the streaming platform like CBS right now, CBS. But yeah, you see that everywhere. But like West said, like I'm also, and what you said, like, it's good that Nintendo is leaning into this more now. I think they still have a ways to go.

I think they would be pleasantly surprised, although I don't think they'll ever do this, if they would just talk to the emulation community, they would learn so much. And they could make a lot of profit if they implemented some of the things that, you know, for example, the Mr. Team learned about FPJ emulation and low to no latency and just things like that that would make games like, say, Mike Tyson's punchout actually playable. Whereas have you tried to play punchout on the virtual console on the weed?

Do you ever try that? I know better. It's not a great experience fighting Mike Tyson on that. One of the real bright spots of the virtual console, which I think was previously just a domain of the hobbyist scene, was that they were, they did actually bring to the West a few games that had never been available to people were never sold in the U.S., right? Like sin and punishment is a classic example. that was a game that I had never heard of or never played until they released it on the virtual console. It's this amazing run-and-gun shooter by Treasure, and they released that on the virtual console because they realized, you know, this game is only in Japanese, but people are going to be able to play it anyway.

Like there's not a lot of text in it. It doesn't really matter. And, you know, that really was kind of going in parallel to the fan translation scene blowing up on the PC and gamers going, well, If I can't play an official version of this game, I'm going to figure out how to play an unofficial version. And I think without the virtual console kind of testing the waters for that and proving some success, I think we would have fewer official releases now where people are actually doing releases of old games and doing new translations for them, things that people have been begging for for years, right? That's something limited run games is doing. I think there's like a lot of cool, exciting stuff like that happening in the scene now that would not have happened if

there weren't some versions of those games being sold and game companies going, okay, we can actually make money on this 10-year-old game by, you know, by putting a little bit of effort into translating it or re-releasing it on a new system. Yeah, I'm thinking of Moon, that very quirky, interesting adventure game RPG. I'm also thinking of the Cuneo collection, which we, I mean, River City Ransom, everyone loves that. I think we're all sick of seeing a new remake of that every five years. But, hey, here's a dozen Cuneo games you've never played in English.

they're all translated a fairly fairly okay i think about i'm going way back now but i think about like final fantasy five so during that era you know so we're now in 1996 again you know super nintendo's era was coming to an end you know n64 was uh was out but there was a lot of demand in the emulation community for games that were released in japan that were didn't come to the u.s and one of the big ones was final fantasy five until the final fantasy five until the final fantasy five fan translation projects. And there were a few of them. The one I remember the most was the Demi Force translation from Steve Demeter, another

awesome dude. But there was no, like, I didn't know there was a Final Fantasy between two and three. I was like, Final Fantasy Five, what happened to four? And then they explained to me, well, actually, they're up to six now. Three is six. And then I learned that there were all these Final Fantasy, two,

three, and five that we never got. And so, I think that Square looked at that. I've never talked to anyone who worked at Square, but this is what I think, that they saw this community of people that were translating their games, and they said, wow, that's a great idea. We should do that. We should bring some of these games to the West and see how it does. Because ultimately, that's what they did, right? You were just talking about Final Fantasy Chronicles for PlayStation and that. I think that is because of

things like fan translation projects in the 90s. Oh, definitely. I mean, when Final Fantasy 7 comes out in September of 97, you could have been the very smart person in your friend group to say, now I'll explain this all to you because you'll have at least played a little bit of each of the Japanese versions of the games that were not released here.

And yeah, you write about this a lot, Wes, in your blog. The idea, the very teenage 90s idea of, I want it and they won't give it to me in terms of these Japanese games. Totally, yeah. I mean, unfortunately, the official release, as you were saying,

Bob, like, ended up being rather painful to play. I think I left. I don't remember if Final Fantasy 5 was too bad, but I remember Final Fantasy 6, like, there's still a piece of my soul stuck in that Wizards Tower from having to open the menu to heal a million times in the menu taking, like, five seconds to load every single time. But it was, I think, so far as right, that that game probably would not have been released when it was. Maybe, I think eventually every Final Fantasy would find its way to the States, but I think

it happened then because they saw this movement on the internet. There was actually a really cool little interview snippet from a couple years ago from the producer of the Live Alive remake for Switch that I forget the producer's name, but he basically said thank you to people who have kept this game alive through translations or through whatever like their fan community things are because that game was never released in the in the states i believe that's right it was only released in japan yeah and so that had a fan translation many many years ago and that's the way that most people in the west know about it because they weren't going to play it in japanese but they played that fans translation

and that eventually paid off in an official release it just took a really long time and we're back in the aughts by the way and you know we do we do complain about nintendo and there are reasons to complain but i will say who really dropped the ball with this is sony from my perspective, because around the same time as virtual consoles, Sony was saying, oh, okay, there's money in this. People have an interest. We see this. And they're taking the same efforts to make PlayStation 1 games available for PSP,

PlayStation 3, and Vita. But this initiative barely lasts a decade. And now, frankly, I had to do too much research to find out how you play PlayStation 1 games and PlayStation 2 games on the PS5. And from what I read in this, again, very unclear, it's all cloud-based. you're not actually running an emulator on your hardware, at least for PlayStation 3 games. Somebody helped me out here.

Yeah, so it was, I don't know what they're calling it now, but a couple of years ago on the PS4, they called it PS Now. And PS Now was essentially cloud-based gaming, where I don't know if they were using an emulator in the cloud or if it was actual hardware, but you would play the game, and it was streaming the game to you.

I didn't really notice any latency that I could tell, but I was playing like RPGs and stuff, because I did give Sony some of my money just because I wanted to see what it was like and there was some games like oh man this is cool I never play this one I ever play this one and you know I could have easily emulated it but at that point I was super into the PS4

so I went and I paid for it for each month and it was a beta test at first it used to be a lot cheaper I think it was like five or ten dollars a month like it wasn't much then the price went up but that was called PS now and it was all streaming and cloud based worked well enough I thought it was a neat idea I don't I after the price went up I stopped messing around with it so I don't know if Sony is still calling it PS now if they're calling it something else I think that's what it's still called yeah I I haven't turned on my PS5 in a very long time other than accidentally hitting the power button so I honestly don't know if you can play emulate any games like natively on hardware but I don't think so I don't think that that is a feature I think you have I don't think here we want you to know so I just found out they they shut down play

PlayStation Plus in 2022, and they incorporated it into the PlayStation Plus Premium Tier. Okay. So what was once called that is now called PlayStation Plus Premium. It's taking a 10-minute conversation to figure out how to play. Yeah, PlayStation games. I tell you all you need to know about the business mom. And I mean, I'm sure we complained about the selection of PlayStation 1 games on PS3 and other platforms at the time. But, I mean, frankly, it seemed incredible.

It seems incredible now just the sheer amount of games that were available. some import games were available. Obviously, there were big gaps in what was available, but towards the end of the system's lifespan, there were just so many things that were playable. And I mean, we've heard very negative comments about retro games from top Sony executives that we're not hearing for Nintendo executives

that are very disappointing. But I feel that they were off to a great start. I feel like Nintendo is keeping up some effort, but Sony, I don't think they see the money there, so they don't really care. Yeah, I mean, Sony, if you look at the kind of game, games that Sony prioritizes making, it kind of makes sense, right? Like, they are blockbuster games, first party.

Like, that's the stuff that really moves the needle for them and that they are passionate about. And that doesn't have the sort of same legacy connotation that Nintendo does as a, you know, Nintendo as a brand as an institution, right? Like, Nintendo has to care about 40-year-old Mario games and 40-year-old Zelda games because that is so core to what Nintendo is. in a company. Sony has always kind of marketed itself as like being on the bleeding edge, right? And I think they could absolutely find a huge audience of people who still care about those old games

and have success if they wanted to invest in making them playable on their new systems, but clearly that's not where their focus is. And I think some people do appreciate this, but I really appreciate the fact that Microsoft has kept their backwards compatibility program running as long as they have with the Xbox and how effective it's been and how better, like how much better you can make old Xbox games run on the new systems.

It's not everything. It's not perfect. But when it works for a game you want to play, like it's really damn good. I think that's really cool. And I find that's a feature that's not advertised that much by Microsoft, the backwards compatibility. Yeah. Yeah, because I think it's, Microsoft is similar to Sony. And this is

why I've always wondered how, I think it's just Microsoft has so much money that they can running what they want to. It doesn't matter. But Microsoft's kind of the same type of market that Sony's going after, which is that whole cutting edge, hardcore gamer, modern gamer thing. But Microsoft doesn't see a reason

to sunset their backwards compatibility. If it works, it works. It's Windows-based anyway. They might as well leave it in there. Whereas Sony, think about the architecture, how it changed from the PS1 and PS2 to the PS3, totally new architecture, wasn't backwards compatible really at all. And then they

to the four and the five, and their version of backwards compatibility was cloud-based gaming. So I just think it's just two different approaches, but they're both going after the same customer, whereas Nintendo, this is why I always get, I always wonder, like, why did Nintendo A not do this sooner and B, stop fighting against emulation? They are, that's the customer. Think about the games that are most popular on a Nintendo system. It's all the old classics, just new versions. It's Mario.

It's Zelda. Metroid made a resurgence with Metroid Draged. and the Metroid Prime series. Like, that's the, it's us. We aren't, Sega may make for a bunch of systems now, but there's a lot of Sega stuff on Nintendo's premium version

of their online membership. You can download Genesis stuff. So we're Nintendo's base. So that's why, like, I don't really have a problem with Sony not really leaning into it because that's not really where people are going.

They're looking for the retro experience. They're looking at Nintendo. That's correct. I mean, you're totally right, both of you, that Nintendo, they're all about their legacy and their legacy is worth celebrating. I would say Microsoft and Sony have legacies worth celebrating,

but as far as Sony wants you to know, our legacy starts with uncharted one. Forget about Parapa and all these other characters you might have heard about. Ap escape. Yeah. I mean, to give Sony their flowers a little bit, there was a great few years in there that you were talking about for just a second, Bob,

where you could load up, like, PS1 games on your Vita. You could do PSP first, right? You could play them on PSP and Vita. believe. And that became a great way to play those classic games. And they released a lot of them digitally, like not all of them, but you could get a lot of really good stuff digitally. And before, there was sort of this awkward period for those games where we're moving

into HDTVs, games of that era really do not upscale well on HDTVs. And we've now had this entire boom of like a hobby scene built around making old games look better on TVs, right? You can spend $1,000 or $700 on a retro tink to upscale your games to 4K, make them look amazing, all of this filtering and scanline stuff. That's a really, really cool scene, but it took years for us to get to the point where those games can look really good on the displays that we now all have in our houses, but you could load up like a PS1 game with pre-rendered backgrounds and, like, low-poly models

on that small portable screen and damn, did they look really good on those compared to the big TV on your wall, right? So that was like a great window of time that where Sony actually had a really good emulation system that a lot of people really appreciated. Unfortunately, they did not see the value to keeping up with it.

But it was a good few years. Oh, definitely. And we don't have time to cover everything in the 2000s, but I did want to cover the Dolphin Emulator because this is the GameCube. And it's part of my personal history because there was a lot of excitement about this when it was emulating GameCube games. And one of the first things I did when I moved to the Bay Area to work for one-up full-time, the departed website, one-up.com, is post a gallery of Wind Waker running on Dolphin screenshots that I took myself. And that was one of the most popular articles of the month or the year.

So they had some kind of crazy metric. It was not my idea, by the way. I was interested naturally, but there was just so much excitement about emulating. I wouldn't say these were not HD consoles. They were near HD consoles. It was the next generation after the PlayStation and other things like that. That's really funny, Bob, because one of my first articles that I wrote as a freelance journalist, I was doing tech stuff mainly, but I was writing about games a bit on the side.

And I went and interviewed at one up and ended up not taking the job because I was very nervous about this cross-country move and whether it was a contract position. And it's like, is this contract going to evaporate in three months? And then I'm going to be, I'm going to be screwed. But end up doing like a few freelance articles. And one of the first freelance articles I wrote was about Dolphin and about being able to emulate these, you know, fairly recent games on your PC and make them look amazing. run them at 1080p, right? And at that time, I was having to like overclock my processor to, you know, 4.8 gigahertz just to make sure that the sound could keep up with the video and run

at a full 60 FPS. So we were both apparently getting really into Dolphin right around the same time. Yeah, maybe I ran a second gallery after yours was so popular. We'll never know because the website doesn't exist anymore. But, yeah, there's a lot of excitement about this. Other emulators, I mean, New Ground is being broken, PS2, PS3, a lot of things are, in the 21st century. have, before we move on to other topics, mini

consoles, which weirdly I've not checked in on these in a while, but weirdly enough, there's still a thing, but there really was a concentrated fad with these. I believe the NES classic kicked it off, but yeah, these mini consoles designed to look very attractive and

adorable on your entertainment center, and they came preloaded with a collection of games, some of them pretty good, and they could, from my experience and my friend's experience, very, very easily be hacked to just include as many games as you wanted. But yeah, I feel like this kind of petered out around the time COVID started, but there was a strong like three or four years when there was an intense demand for these things.

Yeah, that sounds about right that they petered out probably 2021-ish, something like that. But yeah, there was the NES, there was S-NES, there was Genesis or Mega Drive. There was, I think, a PC engine one. more recently there's been a recreation of the Brad's got his reappeared with the NES classic recently there's been a I think it's Japan only version of the

Sharp X68,000 PC that they just made like a tiny PC version of the PC yeah I think they just they just like hit the nostalgia center right because you get to play the games the emulation is pretty dang good so I'm sure it varies between many consoles like Nintendo's to their credit

quite quite good emulation of their stuff and it's just really nice to be able to just load the game up from a menu and you get the cute little console you get to put in front of your TV. Brad is showing off his little console. So I had, you know, especially with COVID but like I had to own these.

This was actually before COVID, the NES classic and then the S&ES classic. It's actually in my son's room upstairs. The S&S I gave it to him. And then I keep my Genesis down here. I never bought the Genesis mini too, but I do want to one day. But they're just so cool, not just to look at, but as you pointed out, very easily, whatever

word you want to use, hackable, jailbreakable, mine may or may not be. That was a wink. But they're just so fun. And actually, this is kind of where, like, because I had been, you know, I had been kind of dormant from emulation for a number of years. You know, I went and I found my family, got a house and a car and moved, you know, and found the career and all that stuff so the hobby kind of tapered off but i always had that urge like and then when i saw like companies are getting into this whole you know retro console thing i was like

i wonder i wonder if you can mess around and i wonder if they can be jail broken in the answers yes very easily um and you know so here i am playing Sega genesis games on the nes classic and i'm playing you know maim arcade games on the genesis and and when i first started twitch streaming a couple years ago, I used these before I bought my mister to effectively emulate, you know, the games I was playing. But I think that it was short-lived because I think what was happening, Nintendo specifically, with their

NES and S-N-S classic, I think they were retesting the waters again before the switch with their online stuff that they were doing to see like, are we still interested in retro or were people buy it? Yes, they were. I remember, you couldn't find these things for like the first year you couldn't find them every time

a store would get them in they'd sell right out there were websites that would tell you like when it was coming back in stock and then they'd be all you know taken out and so like people really wanted these they're just they're so fun and they look so cool but I think that they were testing the waters again to see and then shortly after they did

decommission these what happened the Nintendo online stuff went back up for the switch so yeah I mean I bought a Super Nintendo Classic New because I thought well I have to get one now because otherwise they're going to be hard to find like the NES classic, still mint in box, still sealed because by the time I got around to thinking about opening it, that's when the Nintendo Switch Online SNES channel opened and I thought, well, I don't need a piece

of plastic to do this because it's already sitting there next to my TV. So maybe it's appreciating in value, let's say. I'm not sure if I'll open it, but I do appreciate the sentiment behind these little things. And, you know, we do have to move on to our final topic. We're going to table the translation topic, and I will invite Wes back on the talk about how video game translations have changed, the fan translation community, what they've brought out in the past decade plus. But, Wes, there's a few more topics that you added to our notes here. Did you want to cover one or two of those before we move on to the Yuzu discussion? Yeah, I mean, I can mention another couple emulators that have improved a lot in recent years,

but I think actually a more important thing to talk about or a more significant thing that Brad just barely mentioned there is streaming, which I think, I mean, streaming would exist, were it not for emulation, but streaming of old games and speed running of old games. I think largely is a culture that exists thanks to emulators existing because it is so much more complicated, or especially was 10 years ago, to try to get footage from a console, pipe it into a computer, stream that versus opening up a piece of software on your computer capturing that window and streaming it, that so much of streaming and speed running culture is built up by emulators existing. And I think that is, I mean, that can be its whole own topic by itself, you know,

but I think that is one of the really important things to keep in mind when you think about the history of emulation and how it kind of weaves into the history of gaming as a whole is like how many other little bits of gaming kind of wouldn't be what they are today if it weren't for emulators that we used to just play, you know, at school or at home. Yeah, like tool-assisted speed runs would not exist without the tools, right?

100% of that. Anything else you wanted to jump into us before we move on to the US? Yeah, I'll just mention a couple modern emulators. There's one called Duck Station for the PlayStation 1 that when I was saying earlier, are like these days, there's kind of usually a go-to emulator for a particular console. Duck Station knows one that comes to mind for me where there have been quite a few PlayStation

one emulators over time, but Duck Station came out a few years ago. 2022 was kind of where it kind of hit its like big release and almost immediately just became the definitive emulator. Like there's practically no reason to use a different one for that console. Really, really, really good UI on it. really easy to use. Great features for dealing with all of the PlayStation 1s, kind of weird graphical quirks, you know,

the sort of shimmering pixels in the way, like the 3D didn't quite line up right. You can keep that stuff if you want, or you can modify it out with the emulator very easily and make games look much better. I'm putting air quotes around better because it all depends on your taste, right? And the author Stenzek, who worked on Duxation,

has also worked on PCSX2 a whole bunch with the team who have been there for years that's the PlayStation 2 emulator and it's taken some real strides in the last like couple years with Stenzx help again like overhauling the UI

to just make it a much like more modern feeling piece of software and it has been great at playing PS2 games for a long time but it just keeps getting better and better there's an emulator for the Atari Jaguar now that's cool not a console that too many people care about but it did not have good representation in the emulation community and now it has a really good one from programmer rich white

house who works with the videogium history foundation rich is up there with randy linden as a programmer who's just incredibly good and just going in low level and just like emulating a super weird piece of hardware and just making it work really really really smoothly on modern systems so yeah that's a great one um if i can just real quick just something that west said earlier i don't I don't want to lose the moment of the thought I had, but you mentioned about when it comes to the retro community on Twitch, you know, how many of them got their start in the emulation days, a giant chunk. I had no idea until I got into Twitch a few years ago. I would say over half of the entire retro community on Twitch have I had a ballpark this, not only was around, you know, for the emulation days, but a lot of them use Zofar's domain. And I found out, like, I would go in these streams

and they'd see my name Zofar 1. Someone took the name Zofar six days before I got it on Twitch. Go figure, yeah. But I would go in there and they'd be like, wait, you didn't, you're not part of like an emulation site, are you? I was like, well, I did found us back in 96 Zofar's the main. No way, that's you. It's like a meme on the channels now, the Zofar.

But I just thought it was funny, like, so many of these streamers now that are in the retro and doing this stuff on Twitch, a lot of the speed runners, the stuff you see on summoning Salt's YouTube videos and all these other YouTubers, like they got their start from the 90s emulation scene, or they got their start from a site from a site that was founded from the 90s. And it's just, it's so cool to see, like, you know, the fruits of the labor during that time.

Yeah, yeah. They couldn't break these games apart like they do without emulation to teach them, like how every little aspect functions. Yep, it just shows that what we did back then. you know, what the, and I say we, I just had a site, like programmers, the designers, the ones who actually put in hours and hours of time making these programs that would emulate the systems, like the fruits of their labor are now realized and it's just awesome to see. So I just want to make sure I touched on that. So, Bob, I think the, the discussion of

software versus hardware emulation and what's going on with the mister, which Brad has talked about and the FPGA stuff, that's probably its own entire discussion that doesn't fit in this podcast. I'm still learning what a Mr. Core is. Uh, Jeremy is more into that hardware based stuff. And whenever he tweets about it or talks about it, I just, uh, my brain shuts down because that's not the emulation world I'm a part of. It's all like, what will run on my PC? Yeah, totally. So that's, that's its own rich future retronauts episode, hopefully. Um, but, but for now, yeah, I think we've, I think we've given a good overview on some of the important steps along the way to the emulation scene today.

There's a lot of stuff going on on Android phones as well. There's a lot of emulators that are also on PC that have versions on Android, and then there are some Android-specific emulators, but like Dolphin, for example, playable on Android. A lot of games will run quite well on there. Just in the last two weeks, we've seen Apple actually change its App Store rules to allow emulators. And at first, it seemed like the rules were worded in some. such a way that the emulator app was going to have to contain, like, all of the games itself,

like, so that it would have, you know, would have to be an official release, like, you wouldn't be able to use the file browser. That's kind of what the rules sounded like, but people have just started uploading emulators to the app store, and they've been approved and let through it. You can just load a file up, basically. So the doors have kind of been blown open for emulation on, on iPhones, I think, and iPads. There are some asterisks there that deal with modern systems and the way compilers work and, like, really complex technical stuff that my understanding is we probably won't see anything more modern than the PSP show up on Apple devices anytime soon. Could be wrong about that, but that's kind of, that's where I think we're drawing the line for like performance requirements.

I saw one called Wario 64 that does all the NES systems through the Nintendo DS so that era so I saw that Warrior 64 like the Twitter on Twitter personality Warrior 64 has an emulator. Apparently he released an emulator on

iOS. I think he's calling it Delta. I think that's called. Yeah, Warrior 64 no joke. Well I'll transition to the final topic by saying the future looks bright for emulation or does it? Dun dun dun dun. What spawned this entire discussion and what got me thinking about emulation again is the recent news about Yuzu and Nintendo.

Wes, you reported a lot about this. I might not be doing it justice, all the details, but basically, developers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, they were sued by Nintendo for, in Nintendo's own words, enabling piracy of Switch games, primarily the newer Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. On March 4th, this suit was settled. The Yuzu devs agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in monetary relief. As a result of this, they had to destroy all the copies of Yuzu, a digital program, and it was discontinued. obviously. If you're looking for it, it's around. And also Citra, the 3DS emulator, was discontinued.

So it dealt a huge blow to these developers. What's going on here, West? The point of contention from what I could read is the fact that this software it basically enabled the use of cryptography, sorry, enabled the use of cryptographic keys

in an unauthorized way. Yeah, thank you. What it all comes down to is the law is really complicated and also shitty. It is bad for people. It is good for corporations most of the time. Copyright in the U.S. is a mess. The DMCA is a bad law that was written 25 years ago and is trying to predict how technology is going to work in the future and has very broad stipulations. that maybe shouldn't apply to the way we use technology today, but do.

So I am certainly not a lawyer. I cannot, like, explain all of the intricacies of these things. But when you read the lawsuit from Nintendo, it will absolutely make you feel like, wow, these guys messed up. Like, they have done this terrible, illegal thing. Clearly, they are in violation of the law and should be punished because it is written by a lawyer who's getting paid very well. to very aggressively go after these developers, right?

So the lawsuit also contains all of these things about how they've like, the emulator developers are responsible for ruining the experiences of all of these Zelda fans because like spoilers leaked out onto the internet, right? And it's like, it's your fault for spoiling whatever, you know, twist in Tears of the Kingdom that fans have been waiting five years to see because your emulator can play these games. I don't think emulator developers are legally responsible for spoilers. But yeah, the kind of thing it comes down to is there's a part of the DMCA that applies,

it's the anti-circumvention bit of the DMCA where cryptographic keys come into play here and modern consoles use types of security that older consoles didn't. So we're now in this territory where if a company wants to sue an emulator developer, they might win or they might not. It really comes down to the interpretation of, does this software exist primarily for the purpose of this circumvention? And how do lawyers and a judge interpret the way the phrasing of this bit of the DMCA applies to the software? And it seems like the thing that really screwed the Yuzu devs and made them need to settle this suit, other than the fact that they're going up against a company with way more money than they have, is that there had been, there was enough kind of dirty laundry in terms of screenshots of the Discord server, of them, like, potentially sharing some games. I don't know how much of that was the developers. I don't know how much of that was just random people that are very hard to control.

but basically what it seemed like is if this had gone to court, they would have looked really, really bad in that discovery phase where Nintendo's lawyers could just trot out a bunch of stuff that makes them look terrible. When it comes down to the law, eventually we're going to have to have a lawsuit if we want any kind of real ruling on this as to exactly what counts for circumvention of cryptographic keys,

what should be allowed, what explicitly isn't allowed. It sort of seems like this style of circumvention is illegal under the strict letter of the law, but then you get into complicated things like, is the Yuzu emulator itself responsible for that? Or is it actually this other tool that they were telling people to use? It's called lockpick to basically get this key from your switch console. They gave very specific instructions exactly how to do it, which again, it's good. I like the thoroughness, but wow, like, you know, it was very specific. And what you just mentioned when it comes to Yuzu, I don't know if you know this about

Dolphin, since we're talking about the Dolphin emulator, they tried to get on the Steam last year, if I remember, and they were stopped. I heard by Nintendo, now I don't know how much of this is hearsay, but I was told that Nintendo made a big deal about them going on Steam, and they specifically pointed to, you guessed that decryption keys this time for the Wii for the Wii discs so right and and what that came down to again is like kind of this this lawyerly bullying stuff right where Nintendo sent a letter to Valve and they're like this emulator is super illegal for this reason and Valve is kind of just like they don't want to deal with this right like they go to the dolphin developers and they're like

you deal with this right and they can't do anything about it right Nintendo has not sued Dolphin in the 20 years that it has existed. That key has been on the internet that entire time. It has been in the software the entire time. They did not just figure this out when Dolphin landed on Steam, right? Like that information has existed for a very long time. Is it anti-circumvention? Is it a circumvention issue if that key was just like on a freaking paste bin for you know, 20 years, right? So like the question is how much of this is really about the law and how much of it is about what your lawyer can say is the law. So yeah, Yuzu definitely did some things as a group that pushed people in the direction of things that were probably illegal under the letter of the law,

whether their software itself was, I think is still up for debate, would have to go to court to really find that out. And then there was a lot of like really confusing fud floating around the internet based on this when this lawsuit came out. People are going, you know, Yusu devs like messed up. They were selling versions of the emulator that let you play Tears of the Kingdom before release. They were not doing that. There's an early access build of Yuzu that you could only get through the Patreon. That was a thing long before Tears of the Kingdom came out. the builds of the pre-release version of the emulator that were available when Tears of the Kingdom leaked did not run the game unmodified. Like if you had that version of the emulator and you downloaded a pirated version of Tears of the Kingdom, it would not just magically work.

The developers were not using that pirated version and putting that in the version of Yuzu that they were then privately distributing to Patreon backers. I don't know if they pirated it and were doing that offline so that as soon as the game came out, they could all of a sudden be like, look, we fixed it, right? They might have been doing that. But they were not actually distributing a version of the software that was built to run Tears of the Kingdom. There were a bunch of hackers out there releasing hacks for Yuzu that would then let them play Tears of the Kingdom. But there's nothing the developers of the emulator could do about that, right? So it became a really messy situation, unfortunately.

And the user developers, because they had a Patreon, also had like an LLC in America. That is number one reason why Nintendo decide to sue them, right? Because there's a difference between let's sue one individual person, how much money is Nintendo going to get out of that? Is that going to shut down a project by suing one of many open source contributors, right? you sue an LLC that exists to support this project and bring funds in and you are like that is a hefty lawsuit right so hence the $2.4 million and them being just way too juicy of a target I think for Nintendo to pass up unfortunately so it has had a chilling effect on on the scene a bit but it doesn't seem like too many other emulator developers are at risk of that same situation happening to them because it was quite a specific confluence of these very explicit directions to how to get your key and having an LLC and tears of the kingdoming a really hot button issue and blah blah blah blah blah blah yeah i mean i was going to ask if this has affected the emulation

community and you know it's a damn shame that this had to happen because uh this is another conversation and we are going to wrap up very soon but preservation is important emulation is not wahu free games that's a tiny part of it but it's also well if I wanted to buy this game I couldn't so this is my only option and you know when planning episodes of podcasts I go to emulation for

my experience because it's like what am I going to do go to a retro gaming punk con pay $800 for a game the creator sees none of that money some guy that has a ton of other games sees a lot of money and that's fine but ultimately it's just the worry that if we don't have a switch emulator

in 20 years if you want to play a switch game an unpopular switch game that's not going to get remade, what do you do? And that's the real question. And that's what I think we all are concerned about, because we're all adults. We can buy as many games as we want. I have too many games.

Take them away from me. De-list more of them. I just want to be able to go back and play games that I like without any trouble. And we should have the right to do that. It shouldn't be when Nintendo or whatever other company decides, okay, this game is available now for a couple of months out.

Now it's gone, and it's gone. No, we should have, we should have the ability to be able to play these games that are part of history you know when i see on on twitter x wherever he's calling it now you know posting uh emulation you know people only do that for piracy that's the only reason i chime in on that i say hey hi i made a website many years you may have heard of it i got in this because my stuff stopped working i bought the games and i couldn't play them after two years now imagine people today my son loves mike tyson's punch out and all these other retro games he's eight i'm so glad that because of emulation not necessarily

necessarily because of Nintendo or any other company, but because of the emulation community, he's able to enjoy these games now. So, no, it's not, piracy is, you're right, there's a small component, right? But that's not, for me, that's never what it was about. It was enjoying these games that are a part of history. Thank you all these companies, Nintendo, for making them.

They're a part of history now, and we should have the right to play them and preserve them. Absolutely. And, you know, I think, I'm sure it has been a scary thing for emulator developers to see this lawsuit go down. There have been a few developers who have decided to either pull their emulators or take emulators that were they were charging money for like on the Google Play Store and move them over to free just because they don't want to be in this blast zone that it feels like

Nintendo has just created. But in general, I don't think it's going to have huge repercussions. As an American, it's very easy for me to have an American-centric point of view on this issue and think about the DMCA and American law, but there are contributors to open source emulators who live all over the world, who are not all bound by the same restrictions that people in the U.S. are, the other switch emulator, Ujinks, which is also quite a good emulator, more focused on accuracy than Uzu was in some ways, is the main developer, I believe, is located in Brazil or somewhere in South America,

I have a feeling that emulator is going to be okay. Nintendo could go after it if they want to, but I don't think they are the same kind of juicy legal target that Yuzu ended up being. So it is kind of a scary time and, you know, makes me disappointed that Nintendo goes after companies like this or groups of people like this as a company and kind of throwing its weight around.

But, you know, at the end of the day, these scenes came up through being very grassroots organizations. It's going to keep that ethos, right? We're going to still see people doing this, whether it's despite the man or because of how much they love the games, and that's never going to change. These people always are going to love the games and want to play them however they want to in whatever time, place, form, et cetera.

So I think it will endure despite some bumps in the Yeah, it's great to see it's still going strong. Well, Wes and Brad, aka Zofar, so much you're joining me. This has been a real grab bag of emulation topics. I'd like to do another one of these. Maybe a little more focused, definitely a fan translation episode at some point down the line. But until then, I want to find out where I can find both of you. Let's start with Wes.

Wes, where can we find you online? Oh, yeah. Well, I would love it if you subscribe to my emulation newsletter. It's called read-only memo. Read-only memo.com. It comes out every couple weeks. And it was basically me looking at all the emulation coverage on YouTube and going, what if I'm a busy adult with many things to do who would just like to read like a roundup of the important happenings

every couple weeks that takes me five minutes to read instead of watching three hours of YouTube videos? So that is what I created. And it's been a lot of fun to write it and report it and talk to a bunch of people in the emulation community. So that's the main place you can find me. I also work at PC Gamer. That's my day job. And you can find me on Blue Sky at west. Dot read-only memo.com, I think, is my Blue Sky handle.

Blue Sky handles are a little confusing. But, yeah. And Brad, how about you? I know you've got a YouTube channel, a Twitch channel. And by the way, I really enjoyed your YouTube channel. The one video about your early video series from 1999, you could have been one of the first classic gaming podcasters to ever exist. Thank you.

Yes. So that was Zofar's Rewind Episode 1. I've shot all the footage for two. I'm just, I'm like George R.R. Martin. Like, it takes me years for like one 20-minute episode of anything. But I will eventually release the next one. But yeah, so I had a lot of fun making that episode. You can find me on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at Zofar 1.

Check out Zofar's Retro Rewind. I know you have, but anyone listening to this. It's a fun little video about my time, you know, in Zofar's domain when we put together a streaming show, which I believe was the first emulation streaming show on the internet. You can also find me on Twitch if you're into live streaming, Twitch.tv.tv.com. I stream five nights a week. Warning, it is an emirated stream. I have a potty mouth.

Just a little disclosure. We have a lot of fun. And then if you want to chat with me, I'm on Discord. You can find me at discord.zofar.tv, and I'm happy to chat with you. And then lastly, although I don't own it these days, Zofar's domain does still exist at Zofar. And I always appreciated all your support. And the current team that's running it and owns that they're doing a heck of a job

all these years later, still keeping it alive. Great. And as for us, we have been Retronauts. We are a fan-supported podcast. You can find us on Twitter as Retronauts. You can find us on Blue Sky's Retronauts. And of course, if you want to support the show and get a bunch of bonus stuff on top of that, head on over to patreon.com slash Retronauts.

You want to sign up for five bucks a month because that gets you early access to podcast. but it also gets you two bonus podcasts every month and those are full-length podcasts and it also gets you a weekly column and podcast by Diamond Fight every week and we've been doing the bonus podcast thing for I believe four complete years now we're in our fifth year of doing it so if you're not on that tier

if you're not on the Patreon you're missing a ton of episodes that you haven't heard and I know if you've listened this far you must like us so please head it over to patreon.com slash retronauts and as for me I've been your host for this one Bob Mackey I'm on Twitter as Bob Serbo. I'm on Blue Sky as Bob Serbo. I also am part of the Talking Simpsons network. A lot of fun podcasts about animation like Talking Simpsons and what a cartoon.

It's all happening at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Bonus shows about Futurama, King of the Hill, Batman, the animated series, and so on. If you like cartoons, if you like history, nerdy history, you'll like the podcast there. But that is it for this episode of Retronauts. We'll see you again next time for another brand new episode. Take care. Thank you. Thank you.