NESticle, a classic NES emulator for DOS, is 20 years old today

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

I'm certain it did not use JIT or any kind of recompilation, I believe it's speed came from not being very accurate and also written in hand optimised assembly.

Somehow Chrono Trigger was playable on a 486, but only if you disabled transparency (which made a couple of levels really tough to navigate) and had sound disabled. This was with ZSNES on Win95 I think?

https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19981205215037/http://www.e...

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).

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...