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http://www.infiniteneslives.com/kazzo.php

Kazzo is a $20-30 USB device for Windows only (sigh). You get one connector for $20, $5 for each additional connector, and the options are NES, FC, and SNES — but the SNES connector is only for loading their SNES flash cart.

when I wanted to play NES games under linux, the emulators I found in apt-cache search were garbage or unusable. Best one had garbled sound, others were buggy, command-line only, unconfigured etc.

As a developer of homebrew NES games that have been published on cartridge, I'd say the best NES emulators under Ubuntu are probably these:

• FCEUX (SDL version, no debugger): sudo apt-get install fceux
• FCEUX (Windows version, with debugger): sudo apt-get install wine then get the executable from FCEUX.com

Both have a GUI for loading ROMs. Sound in FCEUX (Windows version) was garbled in the version of Wine included in 10.04, but by 12.04 it became usable. (The SDL version always worked fine.) What did you mean by "buggy" and "unconfigured"?

The NES PPU takes shortcuts that produce characteristic artifacts in the composite signal. Some games, such as Blaster Master, rely on these artifacts to create more apparent colors than are actually there. Some emulators, such as Nestopia, have an NTSC filter that emulates these artifacts; others don't. Not emulating the artifacts makes your game look like it's being played on a PlayChoice or an emulator.

It's not an infringement to run homebrew games like Thwaite in an emulator. Nor is it an infringement to back up your own cartridges using a cart reader like this for the purpose of playing them in an emulator, so long as you do not distribute the dumps. (Assuming US law, 17 USC 117(a)(1).) But by the logic of the ruling in UMG v. MP3.com, it is an infringement to download a commercial game's ROM image through the Internet even if you own an authentic cartridge.

I really hope that Valve/Steam puts more pressure on publishers to just ditch their DRM options.

PCs that ship with SteamOS are probably pressure enough, as a lot of these third-party digital restrictions management libraries aren't ported to the Debian GNU/Linux operating system that underlies SteamOS. As far as I can tell, the only StarForce I can get on Linux is an early NES shoot-em-up by Tecmo, dumped from the Game Pak with the INL Retro copier.

However, I don't see this being possible w/o Steam being a monopoly.

Once the iBuyPower Steam Machine comes out, SteamOS will have a (temporary?) monopoly on mass-produced set-top gaming PCs.

as the homebrew guys get a better handle on a system it doesn't take them long to create a good working emulator.

But they don't always bother to add a good 10-foot-capable front-end.

Oh and unlike your Sony and Nintendo products thanks to emulators you can play every game from the NES-Wii on the Nintendo side and PS1-PS2 on the Sony side

Good luck emulating an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, Xbox One, or PlayStation 4 game on a PC. Among games for systems that can be emulated, their graphics are widely perceived to be inferior to current console games, and sport games lack updated rosters.

so you don't have to worry about losing your old games just because you got a new system

Good luck dumping cartridges to a PC. As a PC builder, if you advertise that a machine is useful for playing ROMs downloaded from the Internet, you induce infringement. See MGM v. Grokster and foreign counterparts. Commercial cart dumpers, such as Retrode and Kazzo/INL-Retro, are believed legal to own in many jurisdictions but may prove hard to get and/or hard to get working.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't new NES games being released.

I'm aware of the recent post-patent NES game releases from the homebrew community; I've contributed to one. It's just that, for example, new GameCube releases dried up fairly quickly after the Wii came out, despite the first five years of Wii consoles having GCN back-compat everywhere but Korea.

I know there are still ASM programmers, but seriously

And I'm one of them. Seriously. I learned 6502 assembly on the Apple II, and most of the skills transferred to programming the Nintendo Entertainment System. In addition to my hobby coding for NES, I now have my name in a commercially published NES cartridge, where I wrote the menu and three of the games.

The move to 64-bit CPUs is more akin to the SNES using the 65816 as opposed to the NES' modified 6502

If you know what a "PHK PLB" is,* you'll see how the 65816 is still very, very PAE. The 65816's address space is 24-bit, but a machine register can hold only a 16-bit pointer, so pointers to anything bigger than 64 KiB have to be manipulated in a 3-byte variable in the stack frame.** The 24-bit address space on the 65816 is more like the "segmentation" on an 8086. I'd amend your claim slightly: the move to 64-bit CPUs is more like the move from 65816, Z80, or 6809 class CPUs to the 68000 family.

PAE seems closer in concept to the myriad of NES mappers that still give emulator authors and preservationists headaches.

Call me guilty. I designed a mapper that subsumes NROM, AOROM, BNROM, CNROM, and UNROM in a fairly slick way, and a commercially released homebrew multicart uses it.

* 65816 mnemonics to push the code segment (K) and pop the data segment (B).
** The stack frame or "direct page" replaces 6502's zero page.