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Comment by geoah | Hacker News Reader

> Data mining revealed the strings "SNESticle" and "Copyright (c) 1997-2004 Icer Addis" (Addis being Sardu's real name) on the game disc. This raises a lot of questions, perhaps most importantly (and unanswerably): did he really have SNESticle ready to go back in 1997 and then chose to sit on it just to spite the people who were bugging him for it? Or is the 1997 date just a joke, to spite the very same people now? Or is the whole thing a joke? Who knows, ...

Author of this emulator really sounds like a man with an insane amount of skills and an even larger grudge assuming he actually did either of the two things just out of spite. Got to respect his dedication either way.

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The 90s emu scene was full of soap-opera-tier drama. Mr. Foo was mean to Barbazzz one time in IRC, so Barbazzz takes down the beta of his extremely promising Casio Loopy emulator and cancels any future emulation projects. In retaliation, Mr. Foo disbands his emu group, known throughout the web as a great emulation resource, with the stated reason being to avoid well-poisoning by lamers like Barbazzz. That sort of thing. Look up what happened to Damaged Cybernetics and VSMC.

The emu scene still has lots of drama, but it's different and I won't get into why on Hackernews.

EDIT: In fact Damaged Cybernetics, which was indeed the group to go to for emulation news and information back in the day, was disbanded because of the backlash against its leader, who had the friendly nick "MindRape". MindRape stole and released the source code to... NESticle, leading to Sardu's withdrawal from the scene and the lack of a SNESticle we can all enjoy.

lamers, thats a throwback

This was exactly what happened with NESticle.

If there's any program you'd like to see the source to, it's NESticle. I get it that we live in an era now where you can't even trust Norton AV with spare cycles, but in it's heyday we're talking about an emulator for running (I don't think it's a stretch to say) mostly pirated binaries. Which also happened to have dripping bloody menus and a severed hand for a cursor. It didn't exactly look harmless! Would have been nice to see under the hood.

NESticle, as I recall, had plain blue menus (but it did have the severed hand cursor).

It was Genecyst that had the bloody menus.

Back in the day, we didn't really worry about software like this being malicious just because of the author's gruesome sense of humor. It was all part of the fun. Back in the 90s, people were edgy like that. It's not like today where you're suspected of cryptofascism for not properly reciting the right nostrums. If it were malicious, someone would've found out, word would have spread around the scene, and the author would be branded the worst of lamers. People had reputations to uphold and good will to farm out of the community, even when running quasi-legal programs to play pirated ROMs.

This reminds me of any time you'd download a serialz pack, complete with the demoscene loadscreen and just wonder to yourself "am I installing a virus right now? but this midi chiptune shit is pretty great!"

Long live Bloodlust! Time Slaughter was pretty incredible in the mid 90s, I wonder how it holds up

> the author would be branded the worst of lamers. People had reputations to uphold and good will to farm out of the community, even when running quasi-legal programs to play pirated ROMs.

There's a certain irony in the fact this is exactly how it works today.

I guess the difference is back then you were in on "the right nostrums", some people likely weren't and felt just as alienated by that scene as you do by today's...

> Back in the day, we didn't really worry about software like this being malicious

There was a lot less incentive to be malicious. No crypto-mining on compromised devices, no ransomware, and limited Internet banking

Ehhhh, there was a lot of incentive to botnet vulnerable machines.

Source: I made a lot of money between the ages of 12-15 running HijackThis and Spybot Search and Destroy on neighbors' machines.

Other source: circumvented my school's firewall with "anonymous proxies" on lists of what, in hindsight, were absolutely compromised machines.

A cursor which has been immortalized on lauded Detroit producer Omar-S's 'The Best' album... this has been bugging me for some time - thanks!

https://omar-s.bandcamp.com/album/omar-s-the-best

Reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/

In fairness, a big part of the soap-opera tier drama from the 90s emu scene was centered around one very big thing: ROM begging. I mean, you go through all the trouble of writing an emulator, you release it at no cost, and for your trouble you wind up getting an avalanche of people begging for ROMs... yeah, I'd be a little annoyed too.

> The emu scene still has lots of drama

The Android PS2 emulation drama is hilarious (and sad). For the most part a lot of the modern drama is around money, it seems?

Mindrape was a friend of mine. He's since passed away unfortunately.

He didn't make NESticle or Genecyst or Callus for anyone but himself. That much should've been obvious by the UI for each emulator. Obviously, he wanted to write a 65(C)816 and SPC700 emulator in 1997, so he did.

Considering how badly his privacy was violated during the late 90's, it's not even a little surprising that he never released it.

> Considering how badly his privacy was violated during the late 90's, it's not even a little surprising that he never released it.

It seems people never learn: just look at the effort to find who Satoshy or _why_ are. This is not respectful: they gave you something cool and asked to be left alone. Their work is theirs and they generously shared it with you. Why do they believe they are owed anything else? Why can't some people take "please stop" for a response? Why do they keep trying their best to alienate the very people who accomplished miracles way beyond their capabilities?

It seems self destructive in any way I take it, and driven only by spite/jealousy/beggar-chooser spirit.

Satoshi likely became filthy rich off of his invention, so you'll have to excuse me if I'm not particularly sympathetic in that particular case.

> Satoshi likely became filthy rich off of his invention

Should I do like you and exclude from the sympathy due to every human being those who are filthy poor if I don't like the poors? Or will you invoke some special exemption clause making it totally ok, like it's ok to punch up but not down?

If I should not, maybe you should ask yourself if respect should exclude those who you dislike, because other people may dislike those you like... or even yourself.

Perhaps I phrased that poorly. It's not Satoshi's wealth that matters, but rather the source of his income—he became rich from his invention. I believe that should open him up to scrutiny, for the same reason that publishing investment advice should open you up to more scrutiny than publishing sports trivia.

(I don't want to imply that Satoshi did anything untoward, because I don't think he did. However, it's a valid thing to want to investigate.)

What's to investigate? Are you upset about potential tax fraud or something?

No, it's still not a valid reason to investigate someone who's made it very clear they do not want any scrutiny.

Still phrased pretty poorly in my opinion. You've sort of just reworded your original comment with some additional assertions that don't really make any sense. How is the individual(s) in question and their hard work that they've decided to unleash free of charge for anyone to use as they see fit even a little bit close to publishing investment advice? Your argument really comes off as being envious in some way or otherwise bitter.

>Satoshi likely became filthy rich off of his invention, so you'll have to excuse me if I'm not particularly sympathetic in that particular case.

What should his financial state have to do with his want to retain privacy?

I mean: this is how you do it. Better than posioning a popular js library and just being an annoyance.

Totally different motivations and goals, but also, the JS stuff was hilarious too. And more importantly, like with left-pad, if your software delivery pipeline is that fragile for mission-critical systems, you got what you deserved. Better learn your lesson from downtime now than leak a bunch of user data because the developer of is-uppercase.js lost a thumb drive with their github keys and somebody pushed a backdoor in a package update.

The scene of the time hacked his computer to swipe the source code. I'd be pissed too.

AFAIR he ran windows share on public IP with no firewall (default on win95), someone got his IP from IRC? hmm <furious googling> there it is https://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html

"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."

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