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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

> 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?

This was exactly what happened with NESticle.

lamers, thats a throwback

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

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