Let's Hear It For The SCENE!

Classic Zeroes Material
By: Zartan; circa 3/03/00

The Emulation Scene as I See It
guest starring Kabuki Quantum Fighter and Astro Robo SASA

Oh, please. We all know that it's nice to actually imagine that we have a "scene", as far as that goes, but anyone with any intuitive sense will tell you that's not the case. What we have is, essentially, four million leeches, a couple of hundred glory hounds, and a handful of people who genuinely care about keeping old video games alive.

At this point, I would say "leeches of the world, unite and take over" but the fact is that we already rule. That's right: "we" -- I happily and honestly count myself among the leeches. What do I "give back" to the scene? I can't program, I don't have the equipment to dump my games... I maintain one of about a million "video game humour" sites. Big fucking deal. I have, over the course of my love affair wth emulation (going on over four years now) downloaded over a gigabyte of other people's time, money, and sweat. Do I appreciate it? Hell, yes. Would I do more for "the scene" if I could? Absolutely. This is, however, all academic. Truth be told, what I've done for "the scene" is next to nothing, and I'm not particularly ashamed of that fact. I guarantee you that most people that know about emulation are nothing more than silent leeches. Good for them, I say. Here's the scoop: Zeroes Unlimited is all about the shitty side of gaming. I am fairly confident that I will not run out of things to talk about for a long, long time. And why is that? Because out of every, say, fifty games, thirty-five of them aren't worthy of more than ten minutes' attention. (Being a glutton for the bizarre and shithouse, I usually give a lot more, but let's face it; I am an aberration.) Emulation finally levels the playing field. Instead of paying forty to fifty bucks for a new NES cartridge (am I the only one who remembers the days when a new game would set you back that much bread?) any Joe Sixpack can invest thirty seconds of their time and have that game for as long as they like. In actual practice, this really separates the wheat from the chaff. you've done it, I've done it -- hell, everyone's done it: ennui has stuck hard and fast and the next thing you know you've downloaded almost 100 ROMs. Do you give every one its due? Of course not... you play each of them, eventually, and get a good taste, and decide which ones are worth going back to time and again. This is a luxury that the emulator-users of today have and have every right to abuse. Better to spend a few minutes downloading and playing The Adventures of Dino Riki than to drop a couple months' savings on it and discover that it's a pile of shit. You've got your purists -- and I have total respect for them -- that say that old games can be had for a song nowadays, and there's no excuse for not going out and buying that NES cart and playing it on your home system. I've got that collection obsession myself, and there's a great big box of NES carts gathering dust out in my garage. Time and space constraints dictate that I have all those games on my hard drive, ready to roll with a single click of the mouse. Emulation is everything here.

Yeah, and people happily slag off leeches, like they're so far above it. Chances are that's bullshit. I'd really love to meet the guy that's got a PCB board or cartridge to match every ROM sitting on his hard drive. The simple fact is that leeches are what's keeping the scene alive. Were it not for the thousands upon thousands of people who wanted to get somethin' for nothin' -- no matter what their reason or motivation -- the scene would not be as widespread and accepted as it is today. And but for that, we wouldn't have a lot of the wonderful emulators and dumps that we take for granted. As much as people love to bitch and moan about "the scene" being diluted and, indeed, ruined by newbies... everyone was a newbie once. The boys who keep, say, ZSNES up to date and consistently amazing had to have, at one point, been surfing the net and discovered the limitless potential of emulation. And chances are they got their love of the scene from leeching and loving every minute of it.

I remember well the whole "pay-for-play" series: yeah, I'm looking at you, Marat, and those zany French brothers who cranked out the Magic Engine. Marat's pay-for-play NES emulator was, to be honest, the first NES emulator I ever came across, but by that time I had been spoiled by the likes of KEM and MAME and thought "fuck this, someone will do it better and they'll do it for free". Sure enough, along came NESticle and a host of others. Magic Engine is, as far as I'm concerned, the best PCE emulator, and I proudly admit I never paid a fucking dime for it. I'm sure that there are people who will piss and moan over this, screaming and wailing and tearing their hair and gnashing their teeth over the fact that it's People Like Me who are Killing the Scene, etc etc. Baloney. Let's see if this makes sense: someone wants me to pay them money for a tool to use ROMs I obtained (a) illegally and (b) for free.... oh, yeah. That makes a pantload of sense. Besides, Jamsponge and Mr. Kipling (just for example) have a perfectly fine PCE emulator, and it's free; the only reason I use Magic Engine -- and much older DOS version at that -- is because my computer's too much of an old piece of shit to handle anything with any decent system requirements. And riddle me this, Batman: why can my pile of uselessness run Callus95 with no performance loss worthy of note, while the latest Magic Engine just crawls along running ancient games less than half a meg in size...? The fact is, there's no reason to pay for something inferior to what one can get for free, and even less reason to pay for ANYTHING in the world of emulation. It's about the games, and more accurately, the LOVE of the games, not personal gain.

And here we come to the fucking glory hounds. Everyone wants to be Number One: everyone wants to be Your Favorite ROM Site or The Best Emulation News Site or whatever... this is pure egotism, detached from any semblance of reality. As big as "the scene" has gotten lately, it's still pretty damned insular, and I've yet to come across ANY news site whose content has been markedly different from anyone else's. Is this their fault? No, not necessarily... but the fact is that there are lots and lots of people all reporting the EXACT SAME developments and providing the EXACT SAME links. It's bloody incestuous, and it's not even necessary. With Real News in the Real World, rival sources are a necessity, so that a discriminating reader can filter out the inherent biases of any given source and cut right to the truth and meat of any given situation. This is not the Real World, though, and chances are when you (as a maintainer of any given emu-news site) get "the scoop" on a new development that fifty other people who consider themselves to be just as important are getting the very same information.

And whoopty-shit, isn't anyone that ever ran a ROM site just our Favorite Person in the Whole Wide World. Admittedly, without them there would be no emulation, as much as the news sites would like to kick and scream and swear their indispensability, but come on -- emulation is all about the ROMs, baby. The thing is that there are just so many of the fuckers, and 99% of them use misleading meta-tags to draw in punters who hopefully click on dead or stolen links. What's the point, I ask you? Am I supposed to be impressed by this? Anyone can crank out a Geocities or Xoom page full of video game names linking to reams and reams of 404's... any idiot can intentionally spell words like ghetto trash and hammer indiscriminately on their "Caps Lock" key... and ANY moron can provide us with a link, or, better yet, an involuntary Javascript pop-up that exhorts us to vote for them at the "Top XXX" (where XXX represents any integer between 10 and 500). So why all the fuss? What makes people actually think that anyone gives a shit beyond downloading the ROMs? In all my years of leeching, there's been only one site I've actually thought enough of to "vote for", and even then it was due to (a) the sheer volume of available downloads and (b) the unintentionally hilarious broken-English one sentence reviews that accompanied each screenshot / link. I shouldn't make fun, really, since maintaining such an accessible and extensive archive is more than I'll ever probably do for my fellow gamers; I just thought I'd be honest with you.

Sometimes I look at emulation sites, especially the ones that update on an obscenely regular basis, and I wonder where they find the time to actually play the games. That's what it's all about, you know. That's what you holier-than-thous pay 31 flavors of lip service to: the playing and enjoyment of the games. I remember as a kid, what happened whenever I bought a new NES game. I'd usually get it sometime at night, and play it until bedtime. In the morning, I'd sneak into the TV room and play it a little before my parents woke up; when they did get up I'd put the box and the instruction manual in my "Gremlins" backpack and head to school. I'd read the manual over and over whenever I had free time and show off the box to all of my friends. As soon as I came in the door, it was right off to the NES for hardcore playing until bedtime, again -- downloading mass quantities of ROMs doesn't engender this sort of fanaticism and loyalty, I'll admit. But spending all your time playing a new game, even one you downloaded for free, is much better to my mind than playing it for 10 minutes and then rushing to Dreamweaver or Front Page to tell the world how great or mediocre it is. Think about it -- these silent leeches might have more honest, actual love for the games than the emu-scene (self-proclaimed) bigshots ever had...

And a big thank-you to Finn for the "technical assist". (Heh, heh.)