Seriously, I've been doing this shit my whole life.
I remember the very first NES emulator that started to become really popular, which was called NESticle. Notice how that rhymes with testicle. The icon to open the emulator was a guy's hairy ballsack. It had a picture they probably drew in MSpaint of a guy with fecal matter around his mouth that they called "fecallord". The developers just did it because they could. But oh my goodness the emulator was incredible. It was one of the first freeware emulators and not only that but it was the only one fast enough that I could play ROMs on my Windows 95 computer at full speed. My cousin even shared a few ROMs with me by putting them onto a 3.5 inch floppy disc. Remember those things? Those were the days......
Grew up on NES. Super Mario Bros. 2 was the first game I beat and The Legend of Zelda was the second game I beat (in 2nd grade).
Parents wouldn't let me get a SNES but my brothers and I were lucky enough to get a N64 in Christmas of 1997, and we played the living hell out of it.
Made my first and only emulation website using Geocities as the provider and hosting the ROM files at Angelfire. This is when Geocities was giving you 15MB of space for free and Angelfire was giving you 5MB of space. This was actually a lot of space, before the days of broadband. What sucked is that Angelfire kept on realizing that I was only creating accounts there to host ROM files and link to them from an external site, so they kept banning the accounts so I had to make new Angelfire accounts periodically and re-upload the ROMs, and then go into the .html pages and manually change all of the links and re-upload the .html pages to Geocities. The entire process was a pain in the ass, but it was worth it. It had maybe 5000 pageviews total. LOL. It was called "Emulation Fiend" and was dedicated mostly to NES, SNES, and Genesis.
Spent LOOOONG time back in the day searching the web for N64 ROMs. The search engines of choice back then were mostly Hotbot, Alta-Vista, Northern Light, and Yahoo. Nobody heard of or knew what Google was. Finally when I did find some N64 roms, it took like 5 hours to download each one, and I had to do it through the night or else somebody in the house would inevitably pick up the phone which as a result would disconnect the Internet (Oh, the glory days of dial-up!). Then came the issue of actually being able to play the ROMs. LOL! An obscure N64 emulator called Corn was the only one fast enough to play games on the Pentium II computer we had back then. Eventually we got a much faster computer with a Pentium 4 processor (I forget the exact speeds) and Windows XP, and I was able to experiment with better emulators. At the time, a N64 emulator called Nemu64 was the best, but Project64 was a close second. Eventually, Project64 took the throne and became the best emulator by far, but it still was far from perfect. I still don't think there exists an extraordinarily great N64 emulator that can emulate all games extremely well... :-/
I discovered eBay in 5th grade and it was awesome. This was when auctions were $.02-$.05 to list, and they didn't nickel-and-dime the living fuck out of every last possible cent that they can get from you. I discovered that older games had value and profit could be made from selling them on the Internet. As a result I would buy old video games from my classmates at school and sell them on eBay for a profit.
This eventually led me into getting super hardcore into the game collecting scene. I decided it would be fun to collect them all, so I began my quest to collect every NES game. First I was a cart-only collector but eventually I needed to have the games complete-in-box. I managed to track down a full complete-in-box Nintendo NES set including all the rare games like Stadium Events, Flintstones 2, and rare competition cartridges like NWC gold and grey. If you aren't familiar with those titles, I would advise looking them up, they are quite fascinating. NES was my collecting love and eventually after I finished that set, I branched off into collecting for systems like N64, Gamecube, Genesis, and several others. To date, I have full USA libraries of the following systems: NES, Virtual Boy, Dreamcast, 32X, and Sega Master System.
Eventually I was thrown out of the game collecting community. I was well liked but known for going after items I would want very aggressively which made a lot of people jealous. I also became very negative as the scene started to shift in a direction that I didn't want it to. Eventually became the victim of libel and was ostracized for good as a result of some people saying completely untrue things about me, and not given the chance to defend myself. I am in the process now of talking with my lawyers about a defamation of character case. It's a long story.
I started getting back into the emulation scene recently because of my Gamecube collection. I have a full set of those store kiosk discs and I thought to myself "huh I wonder if these things are dumped yet". I did some investigating and it turns out that only 7 of the store kiosk discs have been dumped so far. Let me tell you about these damn store kiosk discs. Some of them are fucking ungodly difficult to find. I literally obtained the last one I needed (January 2002) after 5 years of searching. I know of only 2 copies that exist in the world. I am going to take it upon myself to dump and release all of these discs. I just bought a Gamecube Broadband Adapter and am planning to take advantage of the trick where you set up your computer to be a server for a Phantasy Star Online match, and you trick the Gamecube and load your own program onto the Gamecube which you use to extract the iso to your computer via HTTP protocol. I'm waiting for the Broadband Adapter to come in the mail and then I'm gonna start dumping. I have never dumped or released anything before so this will be a new experience.
So that's basically my story in a nutshell. Oh and I'm a computer programmer specializing in web development and my name is skcin7. Nice to meet you!
TL;DR: Been involved in the emulation scene since I was a kid, used to be in the game collecting scene but not anymore, and I have some undumped Gamecube store kiosk discs which I am planning to dump and release.
I remember the very first NES emulator that started to become really popular, which was called NESticle. Notice how that rhymes with testicle. The icon to open the emulator was a guy's hairy ballsack. It had a picture they probably drew in MSpaint of a guy with fecal matter around his mouth that they called "fecallord". The developers just did it because they could. But oh my goodness the emulator was incredible. It was one of the first freeware emulators and not only that but it was the only one fast enough that I could play ROMs on my Windows 95 computer at full speed. My cousin even shared a few ROMs with me by putting them onto a 3.5 inch floppy disc. Remember those things? Those were the days......
Grew up on NES. Super Mario Bros. 2 was the first game I beat and The Legend of Zelda was the second game I beat (in 2nd grade).
Parents wouldn't let me get a SNES but my brothers and I were lucky enough to get a N64 in Christmas of 1997, and we played the living hell out of it.
Made my first and only emulation website using Geocities as the provider and hosting the ROM files at Angelfire. This is when Geocities was giving you 15MB of space for free and Angelfire was giving you 5MB of space. This was actually a lot of space, before the days of broadband. What sucked is that Angelfire kept on realizing that I was only creating accounts there to host ROM files and link to them from an external site, so they kept banning the accounts so I had to make new Angelfire accounts periodically and re-upload the ROMs, and then go into the .html pages and manually change all of the links and re-upload the .html pages to Geocities. The entire process was a pain in the ass, but it was worth it. It had maybe 5000 pageviews total. LOL. It was called "Emulation Fiend" and was dedicated mostly to NES, SNES, and Genesis.
Spent LOOOONG time back in the day searching the web for N64 ROMs. The search engines of choice back then were mostly Hotbot, Alta-Vista, Northern Light, and Yahoo. Nobody heard of or knew what Google was. Finally when I did find some N64 roms, it took like 5 hours to download each one, and I had to do it through the night or else somebody in the house would inevitably pick up the phone which as a result would disconnect the Internet (Oh, the glory days of dial-up!). Then came the issue of actually being able to play the ROMs. LOL! An obscure N64 emulator called Corn was the only one fast enough to play games on the Pentium II computer we had back then. Eventually we got a much faster computer with a Pentium 4 processor (I forget the exact speeds) and Windows XP, and I was able to experiment with better emulators. At the time, a N64 emulator called Nemu64 was the best, but Project64 was a close second. Eventually, Project64 took the throne and became the best emulator by far, but it still was far from perfect. I still don't think there exists an extraordinarily great N64 emulator that can emulate all games extremely well... :-/
I discovered eBay in 5th grade and it was awesome. This was when auctions were $.02-$.05 to list, and they didn't nickel-and-dime the living fuck out of every last possible cent that they can get from you. I discovered that older games had value and profit could be made from selling them on the Internet. As a result I would buy old video games from my classmates at school and sell them on eBay for a profit.
This eventually led me into getting super hardcore into the game collecting scene. I decided it would be fun to collect them all, so I began my quest to collect every NES game. First I was a cart-only collector but eventually I needed to have the games complete-in-box. I managed to track down a full complete-in-box Nintendo NES set including all the rare games like Stadium Events, Flintstones 2, and rare competition cartridges like NWC gold and grey. If you aren't familiar with those titles, I would advise looking them up, they are quite fascinating. NES was my collecting love and eventually after I finished that set, I branched off into collecting for systems like N64, Gamecube, Genesis, and several others. To date, I have full USA libraries of the following systems: NES, Virtual Boy, Dreamcast, 32X, and Sega Master System.
Eventually I was thrown out of the game collecting community. I was well liked but known for going after items I would want very aggressively which made a lot of people jealous. I also became very negative as the scene started to shift in a direction that I didn't want it to. Eventually became the victim of libel and was ostracized for good as a result of some people saying completely untrue things about me, and not given the chance to defend myself. I am in the process now of talking with my lawyers about a defamation of character case. It's a long story.
I started getting back into the emulation scene recently because of my Gamecube collection. I have a full set of those store kiosk discs and I thought to myself "huh I wonder if these things are dumped yet". I did some investigating and it turns out that only 7 of the store kiosk discs have been dumped so far. Let me tell you about these damn store kiosk discs. Some of them are fucking ungodly difficult to find. I literally obtained the last one I needed (January 2002) after 5 years of searching. I know of only 2 copies that exist in the world. I am going to take it upon myself to dump and release all of these discs. I just bought a Gamecube Broadband Adapter and am planning to take advantage of the trick where you set up your computer to be a server for a Phantasy Star Online match, and you trick the Gamecube and load your own program onto the Gamecube which you use to extract the iso to your computer via HTTP protocol. I'm waiting for the Broadband Adapter to come in the mail and then I'm gonna start dumping. I have never dumped or released anything before so this will be a new experience.
So that's basically my story in a nutshell. Oh and I'm a computer programmer specializing in web development and my name is skcin7. Nice to meet you!
TL;DR: Been involved in the emulation scene since I was a kid, used to be in the game collecting scene but not anymore, and I have some undumped Gamecube store kiosk discs which I am planning to dump and release.
like a 250 dollar kit back when DDR4 was Intel only
