First, no one died and made me the "ruler" of any "scene" (note the quotes). I don't do console development anymore, for numerous reasons. I just jump on these forums to pass the time and chat, and learn new things from time to time.

On emulators: I consider emulators nice "toys-o-fun," not development tools. Maybe they can be used for testing something very very minor, but not for actual development. Emulators are becoming "tuned" to work with specific games, which pretty much defeats the point of emulation in my eyes -- such tuning results in other things breaking. The only emulator I've seen which comes even close to being an actual _EMULATOR_ is Nintendulator, simply because it's goal is to emulate things properly, and not add "tweaks" per game. I like it's "emulate the system, not the games" attitude, especially regarding the PPU. I'm still thanked by the ZSNES team for providing them my docs, as well as real-time support via IRC for questions they had and what not -- a lot of which I had no answers for, because I myself didn't know. I never cared for DSP games, and I never cared for games >32mbit. In fact, my SNES interest stopped peaking at about the same time Chrono Trigger was put on store shelves -- that game was technically a masterpiece, yet I hated the game itself so much... I have respect for Demo and zsKnight on a personal level, as they both know that the SNES development scene died many years before either of them were around. The last SNES demo (a Christmas demo) to come out was in 1998 sometime, by a friend of mine named VegaC, who I sent my SNES developers manual to solely to help out with the project.

Between 1994 and 1998, I had seen not a single demo released, nor any sort-of amateur code. All I'd seen were little kiddies wanting emulators and r0mz, d00d!!! THAT is why I state it's pathetic. Emulators have done nothing but increase the desire to be kr4d-3l33t, pirating games like there's no tomorrow. Do any of these nitwits actually care about the game developers, the artists, the project designers? No, they don't. They just have the NEED TO PLAY THE GAME, and give back *NOTHING* -- literally absolutely _nothing_.

Emulation itself has also become a focus-point for marketing. Every "emulation" site you'll find has some sort-of banner on it, or has something to do with money. ZD now has pop-ups and banners, which bring money into Swampgas's pocket, rather than the money going back to the site itself. Sure, once in awhile you'll find a site on Geocities -- gotta love those pop-ups and unsolicited ads! Then there was Swapoo (anyone remember that piece of crap?) -- which later turned "commercial" because of all the negative voodoo surrounding it. Gotta make money off of piracy, d00d!

I "left" the "emulation scene" (ha) because I saw it going downhill, and I didn't want to be part of the downward spiral -- similar reasons as to why I no longer do console development. I'm glad I made both decisions.

When the famidev mailing list was around, people like Charles Doty kept my spirit going, and everyone on the list discussed issues and code and whatever else they had come up with. Tools were regularly distributed, and ideas were tossed out. Gau provided schematics and information on how to properly interface with the 4-port controller adapter; others posted SPC-700 information, including step-by-step layouts of how to interface with it via it's memory-mapped regs. Everyone was running off of the "you gotta give to get" mentality -- whatever it was someone shared with you, you could easily return the favour by sharing what you knew with them. It wasn't about who "had the information," and there was absolutely ***NO*** judgement of the information presented (if something was found to be incorrect, people said "Hey, I think this might be wrong, check this out" rather than saying "Your shit is incorrect, broken, and lame. It cost me hours of work. Fuck you.").

Today, you find **NONE** of this in any sort-of NES or SNES (R.I.P.) development scene. All you find are kids who want to be l33t, or make themselves known. They should be focusing on enjoying the games, not dismantling them.

All in all, I do not give a flying fuck about how games work, or how consoles work any longer. I realised that I spent nearly 7 years of my life focusing on the wrong part of consoles and gaming -- I spent too much time trying to figure out "how things work" rather than simply enjoying them for what they were intended to be used as -- entertainment. I still find myself sitting in front of my NES, playing a game I enjoy, and becoming sad solely because I know how the game accomplished something technically. It takes away from the true joy and nostalgia -- the stigma that was once part of my childhood. Of course, this is just for me personally, but you did ask a personal question (re: "who died and made you...").

This isn't an issue of seniority, or anyone trying to shit down your throat. It's simply me telling you that you haven't been around long enough to know how to respect what's available to you -- you don't know the hardships that not having *ANY* information induced. The first time I figured out how to get graphics to work on the SNES was a night where I spent _FIVE HOURS_ in front of a TV, SNES, and MGH (Multi-Game Hunter -- a copier no longer sold due to them catching fire), starting at about 22:00... writing 65816, assembling it, copying it to floppy, booting the disk... finding the graphics didn't work, changing some DCB statements, assembling, copying to floppy, repeat. FIVE HOURS OF IT, simply because there wasn't any documentation on how things worked. We didn't have the WWW back then (only BBSes), so resources were scarce. It was about trial-and-error. Nowdays, you can spend 15 seconds on a search engine and have the entire memory-mapper register list in front of you simply by 2 or 3 clicks of a mouse. So don't tell me you "can't find any information."

That is why I said you're crying over spilt milk. Have some respect for what has taken others (as well as myself) many years to build. The information is out there, as it was many years ago.

-- jdc