
The Story of NESticle, the Ambitious Emulator That Redefined Retro Gaming - sanimal
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9a48z3/the-story-of-nesticle-the-ambitious-emulator-that-redefined-retro-gaming
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shasheene
It would be really cool to read interview with the authors of other great
emulators of the era too.

My personal favorite was NO$GMB ("nocash gameboy"), which was written in x86
assembly for DOS and allowed a 33MHz 486DX to emulate a Gameboy Color at
multiples of full speed. Just the interface gives me waves of nostalgia :)

The author, Martin Korth is suprisingly still very active in the emulation
scene [1], and still lives the life of a starving artist. Interesting guy and
great programmer/reverse engineer.

[1] [http://problemkaputt.de](http://problemkaputt.de)

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torso
I wrote the Game Lad emulator more than a decade ago. NO$GMB was kind of the
biggest rival in emulation accuracy. Eventually I reached a point where there
were games that worked in Game Lad and not in NO$GMB and vice versa. Great
times.

Edit: Just checked. Last version released on 2001-10-05.

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rlv-dan
The most unique feature of NESticle was probably the menu option "Pentium
Crash". Clicking on it froze your computer. I know that first hand :-)

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

The author of NESticle sure had a weird sense of humor, which is probably why
it is such a loved application!Besides the ability to relive your childhood by
playing pirated roms :-)

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rejschaap
> The author of NESticle sure had a weird sense of humor

The name of the emulator is a good indication of that.

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bringtheaction
And the icon.

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sayhello
NESticle was a fantastic emulator; it really upped the ante as far as user
experience went.

It was _fast_ , had way more capabilities and configurability than others.

The UI was polished and dripping with personality.

At the time, while I had dabbled in making small BASIC programs and hex
editing games to bypass copy protection, I didn’t know it would even be
possible to emulate a whole computer system, and to do it with such aplomb.

It inspired me to delve deeper in the scene and probably played a role in me
to take an interest in software development as a vocation.

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rlv-dan
> The UI was polished and dripping with personality.

Later came Genecyst from the same developer, which dripped with blood.
Literally :-)

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dfxm12
_It focused on usability over accuracy, which turned out to be a bit of a
breakthrough for emulation of the time... His work was eventually superseded
by emulators that took advantage of the fact that the end user was probably
using something better than a 486-processor._

I remember Zophar.net giving a little blurb about an emulator's speed or
accuracy. Having such a bad computer at the time, that was NOT using something
better than a 486, I appreciated this. My computer couldn't run many
contemporary PC games, but it could emulate Mike Tyson's Punch Out just fine.

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OedipusRex
I knew Don "MindRape" Moore personally, he passed away pretty recently but he
was a big influence in my life as I got into computers.

Crazy cool dude, gave himself a "snake tongue" with a pair of scissors by
himself!

~~~
tbyehl
I was weirded out by the Donnie quotes. He'd been gone a year when the article
was published but the way they were presented you'd think they were freshly
sourced.

He was a great guy and brilliant co-worker. Sorely missed.

