[HN Gopher] The SNESticle Liberation Project ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-17 23:00 UTC)