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How The 1997 'NESticle' Emulator Redefined Retro Gaming (vice.com)
Slashdot reader martiniturbide writes: For those who lived the console emulator and retrogaming boom on the late 90's there is this interesting article about the story of NESticle posted at Motherboard. NESticle was a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console emulator that had a huge success in the early internet era and helped to start the emulation scene. The author of the story, Ernie Smith, also posted an extra second part of the story...
NESticle was "the product of a talented programmer who designed a hit shareware game while he was still in high school," according to the article, which credits the 1997 emulator with popularizing now-standard emulator features like movie recording and save states, as well as user modifications. Programmed in assembly code and C++ and targeting 468 processors, NESticle was followed by emulators for the Sega Genesis and the Capcom arcade platform before Icer Addis moved on to a professional career in the gaming industry, working for Electronic Arts and Zynga. Leave a comment if you're a fan of classic game emulators -- or if you just want to share your own fond memories of that late-'90s emulation scene.
It's 486, not 468. Easy mistake - but that's also one that should have been ridiculously easy with even a casual proofing.
Yeah, I'm not new here, but that's a pretty bad one for a nerd site.
Ryan Fenton
I remember when it came out, and I'm really not surprised that it was written by a teenager. No one else would've chosen such a name.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There was also a PS1 emulator called Bleem in the late 90s (Windows 95/98 era).
They've come a long way since, back in the day I could barely get one to work and required sometimes hardware and software hacks as well as the original disks to make them work and were often slower than the console. Now they're prepackaged and you can download ISOs and ROMs anywhere.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Many games that were fun to play but are no longer available live on because of emulators. Dodging missiles and avoiding getting eaten in Space Invaders, spinning the controller like mad to shoot tube climbers in Tempest or dodging and fighting robots while saving humans in Robotron all were part of teh early gaming experience and cost many millions of quarters to be put into arcade slots. While popular ones get redone and reissued, many others would simply disappear which is a shame from ahistorical sense of how gaming has changed and showing that games can be quite fun and engaging even with simple 8 bit graphics. Games like Moon Cresta, Pipe Dream, Zaxxon, Gauntlet, Tank, Battlezone, and a host of others are as playable and enjoyable today as they were when they were in the arcades. Perhaps game companies will realize the importance of early gaming to the history of gaming and put some effort into making emulators work with them so they can be enjoyed and studied even as VR and other technologies bring new experiences to gaming.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I remember most of those names and some of the drama.
Sardu was a living legend. We were all hooked on his stuff and he was kind of a mystery figure. Most didn't even know his real name.
Glad to learn he is doing well
TIE Fighter was amazing. Absolutely amazing. That game turned me from "kinda liking Star Wars" to a total Star Wars fanboy; I ended up reading several of the novels because of characters introduced in that game that were taken from those novels.
They really need to come up with a new starfighter based combat simulator, and do it right. Unfortunately the only thing I trust EA to do right (they hold the Star Wars license) is abuse and burn out developers.
Bleem! was a really cool PSx emulator, and the graphics actually looked better. Often game textures were higher res in the files, but the PSx couldn't display them. Your PC could, however, and many games looked far better on the PC.
I bough several copies of Bleem! in order to throw money at them, while they would face the inevitable lawsuit from Sony. They did, and they were financially crushed under the legal boot when Sony eventually brought it to bear. Never even went to court.
Programmed in assembly code and C++ and targeting 468 processors, NESticle was followed by emulators for the Sega Genesis and the Capcom arcade platform before Icer Addis moved on to a professional career in the gaming industry, working for Electronic Arts and Zynga.
Zynga? Damn, what a sad end to such a promising career.
I did use UAE, snes9x, MAME, and UltraHLE though.
Story about efficient emulation of old games that produced great results with minimal resources, displayed on a web page that eats CPU and memory with abandon.
I've just now completing sweet ass retro gaming setup intended for one 7 y.o. child and his father and only NES games. I've used Raspberry Pi Zero W +original case (with red accent) +two 8bitdo zero control (also with red accents). Running retropie. The hardest part was finding matching white Mini-HDMI to HDMI cable. :) Everything costing less then $40. I guess this will give somebody lots of fun.
I own it all to NESticle and later zsnes emulator makers. Cheers!
Virtually no NES emulator ever got the "bleep" menu noise in Final Fantasy right. That was literally my yardstick for choosing NES emulators. 90% of them sounded like a robot trying to fart quietly.
Is that a later version of the 6205 CPU?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I think "snotsicle", something a co-worker called oysters back in the 80's. And I have to say, after eating a couple I agree with him.
They may be tasty, but they are gross as hell and I don't eat them.
Sorry, did I just hijack a thread? Should have done this on fark.
Previous to this, the Amiga was the emulator platform of choice -- which I guess sort of limited the audience for emulation in the U.S. Emulators on the Amiga used all sorts of trickery to get performance improvements (and was mostly focused on emulating 8/16-bit micros, rather than consoles).
Still, I remember being amazed at what emulators could do with the brute force of post-Pentium x86 systems. I guess that's what was really needed for an era of pervasive and accurate emulation of such a wide array of platforms.
We used to joke that the Amiga could never be emulated correctly. (UAE's original name was the Unusable Amiga Emulator because no hardware at the time has the power to run it -- like trying to play Crysis on a 3DFX Voodoo Banshee). Of course, time marches on, and it was an amazing day when I saw a machine running Windows able to emulate a 1985 Amiga 1000 without glitches or slowdown. It must have been in 2000 or so.
Emulation of complex platforms like the Amiga has come a long way, but some not so much. It took many years to get a great Amiga emulator, but the problem is mostly solved now. Compare that to the Sega Saturn (with its gajillion coprocessors I consider it to be of the same blood of the Amiga, hardware-design-style, only almost a decade younger.). Saturn emulation has sort of languished. =/
The truly interesting barrier to emulation for future generations though won't be due to arcane hardware reverse engineering though. The x86 arch used for Windows/MacOS/etc. is well documented, so running today's computer software should be fine in future decades (individual programs DRM aside). The PS4 and XBoxOne, however, are generic x86 boxes. It's getting past the massive walls of DRM around their entire software architecture that will determine whether today's console games will be around for our grandchildren to play.
There's some really interesting (non-Star Wars) stuff out now (Eve: Valkyrie, House of the Dying Sun) that are even available on VR. And if you haven't tried VR yet, I'd strongly encourage you to check it out. It is an absolutely incredible experience, one of those things you just cannot describe to someone they have to try it themselves.