[HN Gopher] The SNESticle Liberation Project
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The SNESticle Liberation Project
Author : farmerbb
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-01-17 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dataswamp.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dataswamp.org)
| shortformblog wrote:
| This project was based on a discovery from a piece I wrote back
| in 2017, a backstory on the NESticle era of emulation. I
| essentially dug into a rumor about SNESticle appearing in an EA
| boxing game for the GameCube, and once I did, there it was.
|
| I wrote something about this reverse-engineering effort,
| including an interview with the developer who created this page:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvkyb/programmer-uses-nsa-t...
|
| For those curious about how it runs, this video does a good job
| highlighting how it works in a variety of games:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fXQbWm2iMg
| vmception wrote:
| The real question is whether EA has a big ole target on it over
| this, depending on how the emulator works, or did legal
| coordinate with Nintendo over this for proper license
|
| Possible that it doesn't matter, but it is interesting and
| we'll never know
| shortformblog wrote:
| The Super Punch Out!! unlockable game was a promoted feature
| on the box of the GameCube version of Fight Night Round 2 and
| Little Mac was actually a character in the game, so that much
| isn't a surprise.
|
| How the game was emulated, however, definitely was.
| geoah wrote:
| > 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.
| justinator wrote:
| I mean: this is how you do it. Better than posioning a popular
| js library and just being an annoyance.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| lamers, thats a throwback
| shortformblog wrote:
| This was exactly what happened with NESticle.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| anonbanker wrote:
| 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.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| 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.
| YellowStuDregg wrote:
| Looks like the original author uploaded the source recently:
|
| https://github.com/iaddis/SNESticle
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Love his comment in the github repo
| shortformblog wrote:
| As someone who has spent a lot of time researching all this:
| That is wild.
| jolmberg wrote:
| Wow. Did not expect!
| tasha0663 wrote:
| > You guys have way too much free time.
|
| I guess that's his response to the liberation project :)
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I played nesticle/snesitle/genecyst on my earlier Windows PCs and
| absolutely loved the emulation. The UI wasn't the greatest but
| IIRC they were DOS 4g based and ran well under Windows.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I went a little ways down the rabbit hole with some of the links
| in this article and ended up looking at the trailer for "The
| Knobbly Crook", a very peculiar point-and-click game by the art
| half of Bloodlust Software. Who, after drifting away from the
| programming half, apparently ended up at a Canadian game team
| called "Strategy First", then as a level designer and writer at
| Ubisoft.
|
| It's free but Windows-only so I can't check it out. Looks pretty
| crazy.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/378300/The_Knobbly_Crook/
| mewse-hn wrote:
| The author of this page doesn't seem aware that the nesticle
| author's PC was hacked way back then, and the source code
| released against his will which led him to never release
| SNESticle.
| shanselman wrote:
| https://github.com/iaddis/SNESticle
| jolmberg wrote:
| What makes you say that? I think I'm pretty aware of what went
| on back then. More than any healthy person should be really.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| The first sentence describes SNESticle as "much requested,
| much anticipated, much rumoured" but never released, and
| there's no mention of why.
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(page generated 2022-01-17 23:00 UTC)