So I’m at my parents’ house, and at their PC. We came down to visit them after Christmas. It’s kinda interesting since this PC was so much faster than mine when they got it – now it seems to chug away.

My Dad was always the driving force behind my parents not getting a PC. There was always supposedly a long list of things to be bought first – a new lawn mower, debt, etc. – but once Mom sufficently worked in on him to get one he discovered a Texas Aggie Football site – TexAgs.com – and is on the forums every night for a few hours. Hilarious.

Once they got the PC they set up three user accounts on XP Home, one for each of them and one for my sister, who was home visiting at the time. Each of the profiles has its own backgrounds, themes, etc. Each has its own email settings and AIM account. But I’m not sure if my folks pay close attention to which account they use. I often see one, both, or all three accounts online through AIM, and though I send an IM I never get a response. I think at least one or two are set to go to the login screen when the screen saver kicks in.

And something annoying about XP and the way it handles multiple accounts – the screen resolution can’t be set for each user. My folks have it at 800×600 – the lowest. I set it to 1280×1024. It’s a 17″ monitor so I guess running 1600×1200 on my 21″ has turned me into a sadist. In any event if my parents get on the PC before I take off Sunday I’m sure they’ll go blind or crazy.

But it’s funny – the web page history has the same entries from when I was down here last. The files are mostly what I put on the hard drive. It’s kinda like if you had a roomate that was less PC adept so you used their system. Anything I downloaded to my parents hard drive is still on here from Xmas last year, and I’m sure if Travis Arlitt (college roomate)’s old PC is still in existence it still has web pages on it I designed in 1996. Along with my 14.4K modem of course.

And yet my parents (and sister) surprise me with how adept they are. My mom got this USB printer working by herself. I see lots of programs she’s bought and installed and (presumably) got working. And I see a few CD’s my Dad’s burned around here. Now if I could just train them not to send me chain emails, I’d be set.

With latent Xmas money I bought a Game Boy Advance, Platinum colored to match my GameCube, and Metroid Fusion. I guess the biggest signal I’m sending is that I’m perfectly content to fill the coffers of Nintendo so long as they keep bringing the goodness. But the critics are not bullshitting – the screen is really dark and contortionist proportions are required in order to get light onto the thing. Afterburner here I come. Anyone know how to solder?

What I find incredibly amusing about it is that my Wife was baffled at how quickly I could spend $100 of Xmas money, since the GBA cost $70 and Metroid Fusion cost $30. However, she can’t put the thing down – she’s farther than I am in the game and she keeps taunting me to catch up with her. I’m just happy I have a Wife who likes gaming.

Anyone who knows me in person knows about my two cats, Liza and Sandy. But here at home we have my original cat, Jenny. I named her after my girlfriend I had named Jenny. I had that girlfriend in Kindergarten – twenty years ago – and so we have had this cat in our family for twenty years. In case that didn’t sink in this means that Jenny is ancient as far as cats go.

So now she goes a little bit slower. And her voice is incredibly raspy. And she usually doesn’t look like she can open her eyes all the way. But she still recognizes me and purrs. And she still cleans herself. And she still begs for food. We have to be gentle with her because she has the feline equivalent of arthritis, but all things considered she’s still on top of things.

It’s funny how she’s treated around here. She’s kinda like the eccentric Howard Hughes millionaire living forever type. That my parents have an empty nest now save for her helps in this area as well. They feed her shaved turkey, more or less exclusively. They have a heating pad on the couch for her – helps with her arthritis. And we’ve had a fire in the fire place a lot since I’ve been back because she insists on it. It’s like a pointer dog. Jenny has health problems sometimes but trips to the vet, the occasional shot, and antibiotics my parents trick her into swallowing help. It’s comforting and lucky that every time I come visit she’s as close to her old self as possible.

I make fun of my two cats because they hang their head out when they use the litter box. But apparently Jenny got to where she would hang the other end out – defeating the purpose. So they replaced her covered litter box with a big huge pan. But then she couldn’t get into that, so they have a little step into it.

We got two cats twenty years ago, the second of which my sister named Sissy. However Sissy died when we accidentally backed over her, so it’s just been Jenny since middle school or so. It’s really interesting to see here these days – it’s like a miniature model of old age. I go visit my grandmother and see an old human and then come home to an old cat. But they’re still with it (my grandmother had a stroke a decade ago and she still speaks better than Ozzy Osbourne) and still mostly on top of things.

I figure Jenny still has a few more years left in her, especially with her lifestyle. But I’m still going to be pretty sad when she goes. In the meantime it’s still nice to come home and see some things haven’t changed. Dad still takes a nap with her on his lap, and Mom still feeds her her shaved turkey.

Aaaaah…much better.

I’ve owned a PlayStation 2 for about two years now and a Dreamcast for three, which means I only lacked a Nintendo GameCube and a Microsoft Xbox to have my sixth generation collection complete (or is it seventh? I can never remember).

A few times over the last year, since the release of the GameCube and Xbox, my Wife has asked me which one I would want first. I always told her the GameCube. She pointed to Xbox commercials every once in a while and asked “That’s the one, right?” to which I would politely correct.

The reasons I wanted a GameCube include the cheaper price, the games, the franchises (Metroid, Zelda, et al) and the fact that I never miss a Nintendo console. The PS2 has sold 47 million consoles worldwide, the GameCube has sold 10 million, and the Xbox 8.2 million ¹, so the battle is not so much for first place, it’s for second.

At some point my Wife mentioned to me that she had purchased my Christmas gift. This made me nervous, mostly for the aforementioned Xbox confusion, but also because of her ability to drop vague hints. At some point all I had gotten out of her was that it was expensive enough to merit multiple layway payments, that it was available at Wal-Mart, and that I had “dropped enough hints”. When I asked her point blank if it was a GameCube, she responded “No.” in such a way to seem confused that I might think that. That really threw me for a loop.

Finally though it dawned on me she might just be a good bullshitter and she really had gotten me a GameCube. But then I started thinking about how, if I convinced myself (again) that it was a GameCube and it wasn’t, then my reaction would be pretty shitty. So I tried to put it out of my mind. Still, I couldn’t think of anything else that fit the description. I started wondering what in the heck else at Wal-Mart I might have accidentally dropped hints about.

Then last Monday she told me that the gift was wrapped and in the house, and if I could find it. When I did find it I didn’t think it was big enough to be a GameCube. After I found it, I started opening it and the first thing I felt was a DVD-sized case next to the big cardboard box, so that’s when I knew. Wendy had a good laugh since she had successfully fooled me into thinking she hadn’t gotten me one. It was the limited edition Platinum colored one, which surely makes it more interesting than the purple one. The DVD case was Metroid Prime.

The only thing I needed was a memory card, but I still fired up Metroid Prime and got my ass kicked.

Several things I noticed. For starters, although I knew the GameCube was small, I had no idea it was this small. It’s tiny. No wonder I thought the box was too small. It even seems bigger in store displays. It has three serial ports on the bottom, covered by plastic covers and designed in such a way that whatever they wind up connecting can still plug in from the side. I know one of these is used for the Broadband Adapter (or Modem Adapter) but I wonder which one is the forthcoming Game Boy Advance player going to use.

Also the tiny disc thing is odd. I can’t seem to figure out why they did it. The discs are 3″ DVD discs, not the standard sized 4.7″ DVD discs that Xbox and PS2 use. I know one of the problems the Xbox and especially PS2 have is people making “games” that simply use DVD Video authoring techniques (like Dragon’s Lair). This really only becomes a problem with pornographic games. But Nintendo could just have made the GameCube not play DVD Video and solved that problem. But then again perhaps they were concerned that people would naturally expect that anything that takes standard sized DVD Video discs would be required to play movies. Perhaps they wanted to control the manufacturing process – but it’s not like cartridges – anyone can press DVD’s. Perhaps they wanted to thwart piracy. True, few people own DVD burners, and while 3″ DVD-R’s are rare they’re still available. At best Nintendo is buying time, but then again in 1994 when the PSX dropped in Japan, CD burners were hideously expensive, and CD-R’s were $10 a pop.

I popped the Metroid Prime disc into my PC’s DVD drive and it didn’t recognize it (unrecognized format) so there’s that hurdle, too. I think I remember hearing that one of these discs can hold 1.5GB of space, as opposed to the 4.7GB of space a DVD can afford (most of the storage space is in the outside of the disc). However the Metroid Prime disc looks to be a dual-layered disc (it has that telltale 2-layer mirror effect on the front of the disc) so it’s probably 3GB of space. Still, given that Nintendo developers used to have to limit themselves to 64MB tops, this is a huge improvement.

Although my revelations are a year late (since the GameCube dropped in November 2001) it’s still odd to me to see certian things – most importantly this is the first time I’ve ever seen a Nintendo name on a game disc. That’s just wild. The little Nintendo seal of quality, unchanged since they changed in in 1989 or so. Of course the real wild part was the oval-shaped Nintendo logo in red at the opening screen of Metroid Prime – I’ve been seeing that logo on stuff since 1985. I still see the Atari logo on stuff – but it’s not the same company anymore. Nintendo pretty much is.

It still has the hallmarks of a Nintendo game – the warning about seizures, the Nintendo Power brochure, the additional manual about how to use Nintnendo games, everything. I think I’ll start putting my DVD console game cases on the same shelf as my DVD movies – they’ve got the logo of the target system on them, so why not? Of course, whereas Xbox and PS2 games have the logo at the top 1.5″ of the spine, GameCube puts them at the bottom 1.5″. Not sure why that is, but at least the cases aren’t neon green. Blech. Plus the cases (like some PS2 games) have a spot for the memory card, something the giant Xbox memory card can’t do (I presume).

The following weekend I got a memory card. The 251 block card is $19.99 and the 59 block card is $14.99, so coupled with the $5 coupon for Best Buy I finagled (which requires the item be $19.99) it was a no brainer. Makes me wonder why they still have the 59 block cards for sale anymore (leftovers I presume). I have no idea how much tangible space 251 blocks is or how long its supposed to last me, but it still beats the $34.99 that Sony charges for an 8MB PS2 memory card.

Then there’s the actual game Metroid Prime. Retro only had to do three things on this one:

1. Make it a good game
2. Put in all the stuff Metroid fans want
3. Don’t screw it up

And suffice it to say they pulled it off.

Metroid was the product of Gunpei Yokoi (whose name is spelled differently depending on where you read it, since it’s always a rough translation fron non-English characters), who was one of the big guns at Nintendo – in the rank right below Miyamoto (Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong). His most tangible contributions to Nintendo during his tenure were the original Game Boy and the Game-And-Watch series (which predated the NES). He also made the game Kid Icarus, another perennial favorite of Old Army NES gamers.

Metroid told the story of one Samus Aran, who was dispatched to the planet Zebes (also sometimes spelled Zebeth due to the lack of a “th” sound in Japanese) to destoy the Mother Brain in an attempt to keep Space Pirates from using the Metroid for space warfare. Metroids are little jellyfish-like domed creatures that latch onto the user and suck the life out of them. Not exactly high drama, but then again back when this game came out, having a plot for your game was unusual (i.e., no one knew why Pac-Man had to eat the dots and avoid the ghosts – he just did).

It is a testament to the strength of the title that it was one of the first NES games out and still people love to play it. And not for retro’s sake, either – most people don’t think Super Mario Bros. is still a good game, it just reminds them of youth. People still play Metroid for fun, though. Plus it was a long game. I still don’t think I ever completely finished it.

And the other big contribution Metroid made was the fact that (spoilers ahead) when you beat the game Samus Aran took off his helmet to reveal… that he was a woman. While today this is less of a big deal (what with Lara Croft and the proliferation of girl gamers), in 1986 video games were almost entirely “boy’s stuff”. That the majority of male gamers didn’t worry about this ending says something.

In Japan, Metroid was on the Famicom Disk System (FDS) a disk drive for the Famicom (NES in Japan) that allowed saving without need for batteries. It was released to make for cheaper manufacuring costs (since the silicon in ROM chips is expensive) but dropping silicon prices rendered its main feature moot and it died away (more or less the identical fate the 64DD suffered over a decade later). In Japan, Metroid allowed you to save your game like The Legend Of Zelda did on the NES, but in the U.S. they went with a password system to save time and money (versus using a battery since the FDS equivalent never made it over here). The password was pretty much a snapshot of what was in memory, and was annoyingly long.

The only problem with Metroid was that it was only popular in the U.S. In Japan it didn’t sell. This didn’t ring well with the Nintendo brass and they wouldn’t have allowed the creation of Metroid II, but Yokoi pushed it through anyway. Metroid II: The Return of Samus came out for the Game Boy, the system Yokoi pioneered. While seen by many as the weakest in the series, it still holds up much better than most other games. It also had a built-in save system and when the Game Boy Color came out years later, Metroid II was one of the games with a special pallette built into the system to match the NES colors as best as possible. It says something about the sales of Metroid in Japan though that Metroid II came out in the U.S. a year before it came out in Japan.

Super Metroid (also referred to as Metroid 3 in the opening credits) is usually everyone’s favorite in the series. While keeping most if not all of the original gameplay elements of the first two games, it added cutscenes and used the best of the SNES’ abilities to produce a truly immersive experience. The sound design was superb and the graphics are 16-bit at their best. This time, the game came out in Japan first where it enjoyed brisk sales, but in the U.S. it was not only a huge success, but it was a merchandising boom.

At some point, Yokoi started working on his next system. The Game Boy had pretty much peaked (or so everyone thought) with the multicolored units, the Game Boy Pocket, and the multicolored Game Boy Pocket units. At this point in time the buzz word (or term) was Virtual Reality. Everyone wanted to come out with a VR system. Virtuality made expensive helmet/glove/game systems for use in arcades, but every games company started working on their own system – all aiming for what someone decided was the golden price: $299. This is where Yokoi decided to go.

But every company bailed out. Hasbro decided it couldn’t be done. Atari had contracted Virtuality to make a version of their helmet to connect to the Atari Jaguar but bailed on the idea. No one went through with the idea – except Nintendo. Nintendo, fueled on by Yokoi who hadn’t been wrong yet, went forth with their project, the VR-32. However when it was finished it was dubbed the Virtual Boy and had scaled the idea back a bit. Instead of a large helmet to strap on, it was a visor that stayed on a pedestal. Instead of moving it stayed put. Instead of full color, it had four shades of red. Essentially it was a cross between a Game Boy and a View Master.

Yokoi believed it could replace the Game Boy – it was after all basically a better Game Boy (a 32-bit processor to the GB’s 8) with a better gimmick (3-D effects). Plus it had a pricetag of $179 – well below the golden $299. But there were problems. For one thing, it traded off the main selling point of the Game Boy – portability. You weren’t going to play this in a car, nor could you really take it with you anywhere. The gimmick of 3-D games was neat but it wasn’t too impressive or useful. And the system wasn’t powerful enough to do DOOM-style games it seemed – the one 3-D game it had was vector based.

Critical reaction to the Virtual Boy was bad, as well as sales. Word is 500,000 systems were sold in the U.S. in the first weekend, only to have over half returned in the first two weeks. It didn’t help that it was going up against new systems from Sony and Sega while Nintendo’s “real” system – the Nintendo 64 – kept getting delayed. After trying to sell it for a year and a half, Nintendo gave up. Yokoi, facing termination, resigned to form his own company in 1996.

In 1997, Yokoi was hit and killed by a car while changing his tire on the side of a road in Japan.

Yokoi’s death took with it the one person who kept making Metroid games happen. Nintendo of Japan simply wasn’t interested in doing one, and Nintendo of America didn’t bother to try. Gamers in the U.S. tried endlessly in vain to try and get a Metroid game for the Nintendo 64 made, but nothing happened.

A dim glimmer of hope in the form of the fighting game Super Smash Bros. was released in 1999. In this game, several of Nintendo’s franchise characters fought each other, and one of them was Samus Aran. This meant that at least someone at Nintendo thought the Metroid franchise was signigficant. Ultimately, though, it would prove to be the only time Samus was on the Nintendo 64.

Several rumors were floating around that a new Metroid game was under development “for a Nintendo system”, but no one was saying for what system. Miyamoto finally confirmed these rumors, but allowed nothing more. The fear was that the new system was going to be the eventual follow-up to the Game Boy, not quite the N64 or Dolphin (GameCube code name) game everyone was expecting.

Pretty much nothing happened after that, and most people gave up hope. But then at SpaceWorld 1999 (Nintendo’s personal E3) the Nintendo GameCube was unveiled, and the footage they showed off had some footage of… Samus Aran. Finally, Nintendo was working on a home console version of a new Metroid game. However, even then Nintendo wouldn’t let on – claiming that they still hadn’t announced anything.

Eventually though word did leak out – Nintendo formed a studio in Austin, Retro Studios, and one of the games rumored to be there was the next Metroid game. Retro had even wooed away David “Zoid” Kirsch (author of the original CTF for Quake) from his id Software contract.

What this meant was several things – that development of the Metroid sequel was not going to be done in Japan by Nintendo, which was a first. This alone gave many fans pause. Also the hiring of employees with 3D FPS experience meant that in all likelihood the game was going to be 3-D, which was another first. While the trend of consoles was 3-D this wasn’t neccessarily surprising, but still some figured the game should at least be from a side scrolling perspective.

Then word leaked out that the game was going to be from a first person perspective. This is when most people started losing faith. The game Halo was originally a third person game but changed to first person at the last minute – and many think the game suffered because of it. Many people didn’t want Metroid to be a FPS, mostly because FPS games were difficult to pull off on consoles (with notable exceptions).

When the game Metroid Prime was finally formally announced, the term they gave to the gameplay was “First Person Adventure”. Jaded gamers called it “marketing jargon”. For all its interactivity, Half-Life was a FPS. All the gameplay “elements” Quake II added to the mix were really just variations on “get the key, get out of the level”. Texas game developers are good at FPS games, but this isn’t really what Metroid fans wanted.

Another disappointing aspect was that Metroid Prime was to be set between Metroid and Metroid II – not Metroid IV in other words. At this point gamers wanted to know further plotlines (plus The Phantom Menace made everyone leery of prequels for a few years).

And then the shakeups at Retro went down. At one point in time Retro was working on three different games for GameCube’s launch, including what would have essentially been a Nintendo Football franchise. But every time Nintendo came by to pay a visit, the comments were bad, the complaints were plentiful, the layoffs were handed out, and projects got cut. Before it was all over, Metroid Prime was the only game Retro was working on anymore. This did not instill confidence in Metroid fans.

But when gameplay footage finally started to be shown, the results were attractive. And the early word was positive.

Then the reviews started trickling down – and they were across the board good. Finally when the game dropped on November 18, 2002 most people were indeed satisfied – Retro had done the impossible: make a good Metroid game that didn’t ruin the legacy. They delivered a good game but more imporantly – they delivered a system seller to Nintendo. I won’t be the only person to get a GameCube for Metroid Prime.

But if Retro Studios was an American game developer what was that Japanese developer working on? In all likelihood, Miyamoto’s comments were about Metroid Fusion – a Game Boy Advance game which also came out on November 18. Metroid Fusion starts out by declaring itself Metroid 4 so it is the sequel to the SNES game Super Metroid, both in timeline and graphics.

Metroid Fusion even links up with Metroid Prime via the GBA->NGC link cable to unlock… Metroid (1) for the NES on the GC game when you beat Prime first (and the password is optional – now you can save to your memory card). Also when you beat Fusion first you get to use the different suit Samus Aran has in Prime.

So a gaming legacy isn’t squandered, two great games are produced, and if you made it to the end of this long fan rant, go catch up on your history: Download Metroid and a NES emulator and check it out.

Schnapple’s Free Music Tip of the Day: I was at an ICP site and they pointed to a website wherein you could download the new album from a group called Rehab. For some reason, despite knowing absolutely nothing about this group, I went to the site, downloaded and listened to it. Holy crap! This stuff kicks ass! It’s a very effective mix of metal/rap/southern rock/mellow. Hard to describe really.

Apparently Rehab was a group that released an album, Southern Discomfort back in 2000. The songs I downloaded constitute what would have been their second album (under the working title of Here Come The Demons) but fighting in the group (which is more of a duo), coupled with some other drama, got them dropped from their record label, Epic. On their way out they put out the songs for free in MP3 format, along with some tunes from a ditched solo effort by one of the members. The 26 songs the album consists of run over an hour and a half, so I think they just released everything finished – the final CD would have been shorter.

The same rules apply – if you don’t like metal and/or rap and the occasional swear words (though nowhere near the typical rap album) then don’t bother, but for the price it’s worth the download. Heck, if these guys pull it out and get back together I’d definitely buy this album.

Perhaps this is what the legacy of MP3 is – it lets people discover new artists, reimburse the ones that deserve it, and spells the doom of the prefab artists.

Anywho, give it a listen.

You know your workplace is geeky when: They have a Christmas Tree connected to a UPS. Our Internet Gateway and our A/C go up and down but those lights will never go out. Or at least for fifteen minutes they won’t.

Viva le Vinyl!

EDIT: I had the wrong link in there. Try it again.

Here is an interesting article about the trials and tribulations of Disney Animation, and why although there is a special edition of Lilo & Stitch in some stage of development, few people are talking about it and when they do they’re inconsistent. Also explains why the most successful Disney animated movie since The Lion King didn’t get the two disc treatment initially.

I recently tried out Nintendo 64 emulation again. Back when I had a PIII 500 and a Voodoo3, I fiddled with UltraHLE, which was of course the first N64 emulator. Since it was Glide-only, it ran pretty much perfectly on my Voodoo3, but it only ran like 12 games and most of those I either owned or wouldn’t play exclusively on my PC. Other emulators, like Nemu64, 1964 or Project64, ran more games but were slow on my system. When I upgraded my video card I tried some of them again but while their performance had improved, they still were unplayable.

Then the other day I realized that I should probably tinker with it again seeing as how my CPU is so much better now. I was pleased to discover that not only do most games now play at full speed, but that most games play perfectly in one or more emulators. I’m now on a mission/quest to get all the Nintendo 64 ROMS, or at least “good” copies of all the US and Japanese ones.

By that logic it’s weird to download and play games for a system not gone for very long. We’ve only ended the first year of the official death of the Nintendo 64, which I count as the day the GameCube dropped (since there were a few games released in the last months of the N64). Many of the games are fairly recent, which is interesting. I’m used to old systems and old games but some of these games date back to only 2001.

Several other things I find interesting. For example, Daikatana on the PC consists of a 550MB+ installation, but the N64 version fit in 16MB. Compression, shorter levels and different developer aside, that’s still impressive. Several games used sprites to keep the polygon count and draw in distance low but it’s not really all that noticable until the resolution gets bumped up as a result of the emulator and the sprites stay the same. Interesting that at the same time that Electronic Arts was doing their best to kill off the Sega Dreamcast, they continued to come out with sports titles on the N64 – even Madden 2002 came out on the N64 (though Madden 2003 even came out on the PSX).

The bit with the rental-only titles is odd to me. I can’t help but wonder how Blues Brothers 2000 ever even made it to a rental cart. I also wonder what was up with certian ports – like DOOM 64 and Mega Man 64, which was only a port of the PSX title Mega Man Legends, which wasn’t too good to begin with. Another odd thing that tended to happen with N64 titles – lots of hype led up to little fanfare. Jet Force Gemini was hyped up alongside Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark, but JFG sucked, DK64 was merely passable, and Perfect Dark got delayed past its relevancy. This was probably the reason Nintendo dropped Rare.

Then there was the oddball PC ports. Command & Conquer was ported, and was even “in 3-D”, something the original franchise hasn’t even done. I guess it wasn’t too successful a marriage, since I never hear people speak of it. Same thing goes for the N64 port of Starcraft, though that may have more to do with the uneasy marriage between consoles and RTS games. Then there were the seemingly quite good games like Glover, Izzy’s Reckin Balls and Penny Racers that got completely ignored. Contrast those with the one-off games that didn’t seem at home anywhere, like Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, which was to be the first in a series of Mortal Kombat side-scrollers. Baffling.

In the category of “quick and forgettable” ports there’s Virtual Pool 3D and Virtual Chess. Not sure why these got made. Then there are the games that decided two tries were neccessary – Castlevania 64 got re-released as the marginally better Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, angering those expecting a sequel, and ClayFighter 63 1/3 was re-released as Clay Fighter: The Director’s Cut. Madness. Not to mention the three indistinguishable RUSH games.

Apparently the reign of the N64 came none too soon for the game publishers – while the trickle of N64 title died off a few months before the GameCube shipped, there are still PSX titles shipping to this day, like the aforementioned Madden 2003 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – in theory if even a small number of the PSX owners buy it, you’ll still sell better than a decently popular XBox or GameCube game. Sure, part of it is that people didn’t neccessarily get rid of their PSX abilities with the PS2, but why would you come out with two versions of a game for one console, one of which is graphically poor? Lowest common denominator only goes so far. Interestingly the Harry Potter 2 game is one of the very few Game Boy Color games released since the Game Boy Advance game out, which hurts the “lowest common denominator” idea that fuels the idea as to why the PSX still has so many games made.

A short while back I lamented the lull emulation seems to be in, but now it seems to be even worse. Emulation of consoles wasn’t viable until 1997 or so when NESticle, the first viable NES emulator, was released. Suddenly the rush was on to emulate every old console ever. At the same time there were a few wackos trying to emulate “current” consoles, like the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Emulation was always in a gray area, and for as long as the only emulators around were slow unviable ones using ancient disk images from companies long since dead. Despite still being illegal, no one complained or cared.

Once NESticle came around things changed a little – suddenly a lot of people became interested in emulation (like me), and ROM images were less for studying processor architectures and more for actually playing games. More attention came to emulation, which was seen as a bad thing, since some of the attention came from the copyright holders themselves. Few if any companies complained, but Nintendo was one of them and they shut down many websites posting ROM images. Still, no one died and no one denied the fact that, at the most, some very old games not for sale anymore were being traded online.

Then in 1999 two things happened – UltraHLE, the first viable Nintendo 64 emulator, was released, and Bleem!, the first viable PSX emulator, was released – commercially no less. Sony promptly sued Bleem, LLC, and though they never won a court battle against them they did eventually run them out of business through legal fees. Nintendo would have sued the authors of UltraHLE if they could have found them, but the Internet afforded them sufficient anonymity, not that it would have mattered – the program wasn’t written for profit and didn’t use or do anything illegal.

Nintendo even went so far at one point as to declare any and all emulation illegal, likening emulator authors to theives. They eventually retracted this position, but their disdain is understandable. They lost no money on NES games being free all of a sudden, but a company has to defend their copyrights or they will lose them. What if they had decided the NES was sufficiently old (in 1997-8) to not worry with (Nintendo cut off NES support in 1994)? Fine, what about the SNES? In 1998 Nintendo had even re-issued the SNES in a new sleeker case, so they probably didn’t want people to emulate the SNES or games. Fine, give it some time. So say you’re writing a Nintendo 64 game in 1998 – how would you like to know that the company you were publishing for wasn’t going to fight for the copyright you were depending on? Remember that console developers have to pay the console makers royalties – for this they expect the console maker to defend certian things.

But now it’s 2002. The NES has been emulated, more or less perfectly. Same as the SNES. Same as the Atari 2600. In fact, most consoles prior to 1994 have been emulated, so that left the consoles from the N64/PSX/Saturn generation. The N64 and PSX have been emulated, but the Saturn has still proven elusive, though at least one emulator is showing promise. There are a handful of consoles left to be properly emulated, but as a general rule, most of the popular consoles have been.

Which leaves the current crop of consoles. The Sega Dreamcast is going to be tricky, namely since it uses a proprietary disc format, the GD-ROM, so the only playable games would be pirated ones which kills the one advantage PSX games had – that in theory you still had to have the original CD. I suppose if the format of the mini-DVD’s the GameCube uses is readable by DVD drives then GameCube emulation is possible at some point, but both DC and GC emulation, as well as PS2 emulation, will all suffer from the same problem as early (~1997) emulators for the PSX did – getting enough processing power. Which is why I find the lack of XBox emulation intriguing – it is PC architecture, unified memory or not. What I’ve heard is that the DVD’s the Xbox use have their data on backwards, so they’re more difficult to read somehow. Perhaps its really that Microsoft kills off efforts too quickly.

One of the things that made emulation interesting for me again, for a time anyway, was the movement to the Sega Dreamcast. As soon as hackers reverse engineered the MIL-CD format and were able to get code to boot on Dreamcasts using CD-R sessions, it opened the door for amateur development. Of course, the first thing to be ported were any open source emulators. NesterDC 7.1 is nearly flawless NES emulation, a port of Stella brings the Atari 2600 to the DC, and even Bleem was able to bring some PSX games to the little white console. Of course, Bleem’s promise of 100 PSX games proved impossible, and they went out of business after three single game releases. SNES emulation has proved elusive, with the one serious effort – DreamSNES – apparently reaching a stall in its efforts to achieve 100% speed. So now Dreamcast emulation is at a lull – most goals are either too elusive or have already been attained.

And then there’s the beast that is Game Boy Advance emulation. Emulator authors had working GBA emus before the system even shipped to stores, and since that system isn’t very technically advanced then pretty much everyone can run the emulators – and therefore the newest GBA games. This brings emulation back into the piracy arena. The only thing that hurts this argument is the apparent redundancy of playing a GBA game on a PC.

So we have a basically stale emulation scene, whose goals are either attained, impossible (at the moment), or obscure. Perhaps this is what it needs to be – the retro thing was cool for a while and it still has its charm and its place, but now we can move on and actually enjoy new consoles and content. Or perhaps the next big emulation thing is right around the corner, and I’m just impatient.

This morning I got a call for a job offer in Washington (state). I of course politely declined but that’s strangely motivating.