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Open Letter to the Emulation Community
This is an open letter to the emulation scene, and to the authors of UltraHLE.
I have been an emulation fan for years, ever since I downloaded the first version of VSMC years ago. That version of VSMC did not run a single game, in fact I don't even think that it displayed graphics. But, it still fascinated me, and many others like me. I remember reading hundreds of technical documents relating to emulation, specifically of the SNES, a brand new system at the time. The emulation world was exciting, even though commercial games were not the focus. In the past few years, hordes of people have hit the emulation scene and have equated it with the warez scene. A few days ago, with the release and discontinuation of UltraHLE, this reality has come to a head.
I repect the authors of UltraHLE, but I would like to address this open letter to them and to any other true members of the emulation scene, who are simply amazed by the technical prowess of UltraHLE. At the release of UltraHLE, I was extremely excited for the community. With bleem, Connentix's Virtual Game Station, and UltraHLE all ready for release, the scene finds itself at a defining point. The events that occur now will shape the future of emulation.
Then it hit. Many outsiders, mostly "31337 warez h4x0rs", discovered UltraHLE and the frenzy began. No matter where I went, I saw requests for ROMs. At one point, I had to leave EFNet's #emu out of disgust. What ever happened to the true emulation scene and the days of Archaic Ruins, Node 99, VSMC, and technical interest in emulation? Simply put, with the world watching, we all ran and hid.
The first people to hide were the true members of the emulation scene. We easily could have prevented this from the very start by not giving away our own personal ROMs, not posting ROM sites, and kicking every person from our IRC channels that we could. The maintainers of popular emulation sites could have removed all links to ROMs, and posted the true point of emulation. But, instead we just bitched. That's all, we just complained about how lame the warezers were, and otherwise kept quiet. What is the result of this? The rest of the world looked at the scene and didn't see us, didn't hear us, and saw one thing and one thing only: piracy. I am very disappointed in myself and the scene.
Following this, the authors of emulators began to get scared. At a pivotal point in the history of emulation, the very founders got scared! With Sony suing Connectix, the potential for legal action, and the explosion of warez foolishness, the authors got frustrated. But, what did they do? Several of them just quit, further tarnishing the public view of the emulation scene, at the most important time in emulation history. To those authors that discontinued their emulators: I am ashamed.
Now, this is specifically to the authors of UltraHLE. Congratulations, you have created the best emulator of all time. Oh, and by the way, thank you for destroying the scene. Don't get me wrong, I hold the highest respect for your technical abilities, and as a coder myself, I am aware of the daunting task that you had ahead of you. But, please, your arguments for discontinuing your emulator are weaker than any that I have ever heard. Let us analyze your argument:
"The UltraHLE project was a technical demo, an experiment to see if N64 emulation really is possible and an attempt to advance the state of the art in emulation. It was not designed to be a tool for piracy."
No emulator is designed as a tool for piracy! In fact, nearly every emulation author gives their emulator away for free, simply because they are only interested in the technical side of emulation. If you had stated this days in advance before releasing your emulator, then maybe some of this could have been avoided.
"Once it was released, things moved at an unforeseen pace. In a matter of hours, the main interest for people became acquiring illegal copies of game ROMs. This was why the pages were put down in a matter of hours."
If you did not expect this hysteria, then I doubt that you thought over what you were doing when you were writing the emulator. In fact, if you thought that there would not be warez pups fighting and pleading for ROMs, then you must be naïve. This is not an excuse! On top of this, you only kept the site up for a matter of 4 hours. I can guarantee that the hysteria would die down in under a month. If you would have stood up for the emulator, and for the scene, then you may have actually helped the community, instead, you have damaged it nearly irreparably.
"We do not condone this use of illegal ROMs in any form and do not allow our emulator to be used in this way. As we cannot effectively stop people from using this product in wrong and illegal ways, we have no choice but to discontinue the project.
This is the crescendo of your argument, and it is essentially like a software engineer saying the following: "I am going to stop coding anything at all, because people are going to pirate it." OF COURSE THEY ARE. There are millions of idiots in this world, it is unavoidable, but that does not mean that you can use them as a crutch, and it does not mean that any idiots are a part of the scene. With this statement, all you have done is admitted publicly to the rest of the world that noone in the emulation scene cares about the technical element, which is simply not true. As an ambassador to the world for the emulation scene, you pointed at us and made us look like fools. Thanks a bunch. Now the world thinks that we are warezing anarchist teenagers and that emulation is illegal. Evidence of this is Nintendo's comment on UltraHLE.
In conclusion, I would like to reinstate that I have the utmost respect for the technical abilities of the UltraHLE authors, and I am not trying to attack them. I understand that it all happened so quickly, but that does not mean that there were not 3 months to prepare before you released the emulator. At this point, I wish you hadn't released it at all.
There is only one way to mend the damage that has been done. And it is twofold. First, the emulation scene needs to gather together to get rid of the warez pups. Simply put: don't give out ROMs, don't post ROMs, don't post links to ROMs, deny that UltraHLE ever existed, and explain the technical beauty of emulation. Secondly, the authors of UltraHLE must release the source code of their emulator, release technical papers on how they did it, how it works, and why it was created. This would be for the benefit of the community, and would show the world what we are really about.
With hope,
Jonathan LaCour
Panix on EFNet
panix@resnet.gatech.edu
I can remember back when P2s and K6s where still vaporware, and all these kids clamoring for N64 emulators/roms. Even when 486 DX2/66s were hot, they demanded SNES emulators/roms. They have no sense of what it takes to emulate systems specialized to play games on a generic all-purpose computer.
I used to hang out on #emu too when the N64 had just come out, and they started flooding in demanding emulators for it. I gave in and, as a joke, made a little program. It did nothing more than say your CPU didn't meet the requirements. And well, back then nothing could do it. Next month is the three year anniversary of that day, and I still get emails, "It says my CPU isn't good enough, I have a P2/450 or something". Fifteen minutes in Delphi, a 100K zip, and people expect it to work...
It was a cute joke for me, and a couple other people I gave it to. Give it to dolts begging for N64 warez, and laugh at them for falling for it (and not seeing the obvious joke in it). But it got spread like wildfire all over the warez scene, and still is today. One guy on AOL even made a web page saying he made it. Of maybe 1100 emails I've received, only maybe 5 or so realized it's true meaning.
What's my point in all this? I don't know. But if you think emulators are about technical abilities of programmers and all, you're only kidding yourself. 99.99% of the people who show interest in emulators only want to be able to play the games for free.
They're fun too, I've got a few hundred apple II games on disk that I love to play and they're probably illegal and I've played some SNES ROMs. It's wonderful, you are playing real video games on linux... but to use the argument that RMS or ESR would use, emulators are just symptonms of the problem with commercialized software. N64 and PSX games cost $40 or even more, you buy a few and you've spent more on software than you have on the hardware. That is a lot of money. Open it up, let people port games to various platforms and then form distribution companies that copy them onto cartridges or CDs for a fee. As it is now, the N64 and PSX are close enough that it's the software that decides which machine most people get not which machine is better. If they really want to sell hardware then why don't they sell PC and Mac products that give them the features they need to program those games while allowing programmers to opensource games?
When you think about it, piracy is more often not because of cost. The people who do the most pirating usually can't buy the software they are stealing. The industry sees this as a loss of money but it's a loss of money that they would never get in the first place because these people can't afford their software. What do they expect to happen? They market these machines at teenagers and young-adults who can't afford them, then some of them have the technical savvy to figure out how they work and copy it so they can play for free.
I've finally achieved the position in life where I can actually afford to buy that kind of stuff and it doesn't seem worth it to me, that's not to say that I don't think Zelda is an awesome game and I would love to play it through but by the time I buy and N64 and a few games I've spent enough to buy a cheap computer that can do so much more, including emulate those games if I was a pirate, there isn't any decision.