
NESticle, a classic NES emulator for DOS, is 20 years old today - ericzawo
https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/849093769718792193
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corysama
For context: prior to Nesticle you needed a very beefy machine (for the time)
to emulate NES games at a half-decent frame rate. All of the existing
emulators were basically unplayable on my Pentium60.

Nesticle came out of nowhere and was a huge improvement. Totally playable. I
think it was the first jitting nes emulator.

~~~
pikzen
I very much doubt that Nesticle used dynarec. With games of the era requiring
precise timings, a JIT would have been more trouble than it's worth. I can't
find any source for Nesticle having a JIT compiler either. It was however very
inaccurate, which may have contributed to it running faster than most of the
emulators of the time.

Dynarec has mostly been used from the N64/PS1/Dreamcast generation and
onwards.

~~~
jeffrom
Vague memory hanging out with these folks while they were working on this that
a lot of speedup was due to well placed inline assembly

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pikzen
Mhm. That's been the general solution to make emulators of the time fast.
ZSNES was mostly assembly too.

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rangibaby
Ahh, Bloodlust Software. Noggin Knockers 2 and Timeslaughter. The pic in the
tweet is of "Buddy" from those games. The character was hidden and was
accessed by pressing the down arrow repeatedly on the character select screen
until his "down syndrome" caused him to be selected. I'm sure the games suck
but I LOVED them when I was 10.

~~~
dualogy
> and was accessed by pressing the down arrow repeatedly on the character
> select screen until his "down syndrome" caused him to be selected

Haha. There was so much crazy humor very widespread everywhere before "PC
landed" (as a wave) over the last ~decade (by which I mean the herd moved from
"let's make the odd joke of any one group at times but not seriously harm
anyone in reality" to "anything could be offensive to _someone_ so let's not
come up with much to cultivate uber-tolerance for the sake of it"). Even
freaking Donald Duck euro-comics from the 70s til mid-90s are quite awash
reading them as an adult today (with a broader horizon of reference points).

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voltagex_
With emulation, comes emulation scene drama:
[http://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html](http://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html)

~~~
amyjess
It's just absolutely fantastic how much the world has changed since this
article was written. Let's see...

In one paragraph, we have:

> Damaged Cybernetics was a general grey-area information group. Their main
> goal, so they said, was to free as much information as possible, for, as the
> saying goes, information wants to be free. They had sections on their
> website dedicated to such things as Audio Piracy information (the ripping of
> CD-DA Audio Tracks and compression to the MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio format),

followed in the next paragraph by:

> What exactly is grey area information, you may ask? It is information that
> many people would rather not touch with a ten foot pole. It lies somewhere
> between the realm of legal and illegal.

It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was
considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a ten
foot pole". The '90s was a _very_ different place.

And then there's this:

> How did he steal the source code? Sardu was running Windows 95 at the time.
> He made the mistake of leaving drive sharing on (which should not have been
> on by default, but for some reason, it was on). MindRape was then able to
> mount Sardu's hard drive (since drive sharing was enabled) with Samba.
> Pretty clever, right? Regardless, he did this and not only was he able to
> retrieve the NESticle source code, he was able to look through all of his
> drives. His Zip drive. His hard drive. His CD-ROM drive. Whatever he wanted.
> Such an invasion of privacy is ridiculous, but this is what transpired.

Mounting somebody's hard drive through Samba over the open Internet! Of
course, this was back in the days of dialup, when everyone's desktop computer
had a public IP address. You'd dial in to your ISP, and the IP would be
directly assigned to your PC. And, of course, IRC networks back then had no
concept of shrouds, so you could just find somebody on IRC, get their IP, and
start hitting their open ports! A lot of people will vehemently say that a NAT
router isn't a proper substitute for a real firewall... but in this case, it
_would_ have prevented this attack. Even the most dirt simple of NAT routers
would prevent some rando from over the Internet mounting your HDD via Samba.
At the very _least_ they'd have to spear-phish you into running a trojan now.
But, of course, home NAT routers weren't a thing until people started using
cable and DSL and having multiple computers sharing the same Internet
connection. Back in the days of dialup, if you had multiple machines, you paid
out the nose for multiple phone lines and then you paid your ISP an extra
$5-10/month to allow you to have multiple simultaneous connections on the same
account (or you had multiple ISPs; hey, they were only $20 a month and there
were dozens to choose from in every major metro area).

The mention of the Zip drive dates it, too. Man, remember when every major PC
manufacturer was putting internal Zip drives in their computers? That was a
looooooooooooong time ago...

~~~
captainmuon
> It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was
> considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a
> ten foot pole". The '90s was a _very_ different place.

Yes, but you could also argue it was a much freer place, as in wild west free.
On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents,
DMCA, export controls, etc., and a few people actually got into trouble. On
the other hand, you could run a illegal Warez or music download site for years
with impunity. Everything was in flow. We as a society haven't determined what
goes and what doesn't yet. Good times :-).

~~~
dualogy
> On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents,
> DMCA, export controls

As with any "scares", it took place largely in the media (even there not that
much, maybe the odd op-ed and tech/talkshow) while in on-the-ground reality
nobody cared and everyone either directly got eagerly and excitedly "into it"
or asked their "tech-savvy neighborhood youth" to hook them up with warez or
music or in any event back up /digitize their existing collections. (Apart
from your typical cautious disposable-income-middle-classer who actually
enjoyed regularly investing some of their funds into their ever-growing legal
collection of CDs/DVDs/etc) The "scares" initiative really only began in
earnest as movies became a feasible target and the music industry must have
been much more focused on not sharing the music industry's fate (ie "almost
die, then be 'rescued' on breadcrumb terms by Apple")

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67726e
Holy hell. I got my start in software hacking on NES ROMs many years ago.
NESticle definitely played a part in me being who I am today. It's strange to
see things getting old, but I guess so am I.

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Ascetik
Good ole' Nesticle. I remember I was so pumped because I could play the
Japanese Final Fantasy's that never got released here. Then I was part of the
Destiny of An Emperor 2 translation beta into English, that was fun.

I was in... 6th grade I think when I found out about Nesticle, it changed my
life.

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rlv-dan
Ah, the memories. I especially remember the "Pentium Bug" menu option that I
clicked out of curiosity. Nothing happened. Literary :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug)

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smaili
Slightly off topic but does anyone happen to know the state of NESBox? Their
repo hasn't had any real updates since June of 2015 -
[https://github.com/nesbox/emulator](https://github.com/nesbox/emulator)

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mikejmoffitt
NESticle got me into modification and reverse-engineering. Specifically, it
allowed the user to not only view the graphics ROM data all at once, but also
modify the tiles and see the effect in real-time!

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aphextron
I can still picture that icon in my head 20 years later...

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_Codemonkeyism
What was the first console/arcade emulator?

~~~
jhbadger
In terms of arcade, I think the first usable arcade emulator (as opposed to
things that could just boot up and get to the attraction screen) was "Dave
Spicer's Arcade emulator" circa 1995 for DOS. It only supported a tiny handful
of games (Pac-Man, Galaxian, and an obscure game called Amidar)

~~~
to3m
Neil Bradley did a vector arcade one as well around that time:
[http://www.emuviews.com/cgi-
local/show.cgi?SERIAL=99](http://www.emuviews.com/cgi-
local/show.cgi?SERIAL=99)

For consoles the earliest ones might have been Virtual Gameboy? Or one of the
Atari 2600 ones? I'm sure they came along in early 1996.

~~~
stuaxo
Emulators for 8 bit computers like the ZX Spectrum and CPC were around for a
while, but I remember people saying that emulating games consoles would be
impossible, then suddenly they started making leaps and bounds.

~~~
jhbadger
Yeah, I remember that ZX Spectrum emulators seemed to be early (before C64 and
Apple ][ emulators). Being an American, I never used a Spectrum back in the
day, but I used the early Spectrum emulators to play 8-bit games as many of
them were the same games as I remember playing on the Apple ][.

