7 ms·

NESticle, a classic NES emulator for DOS, is 20 years old today

120 points by ericzawo 10y ago

67726e 10y ago
Holy hell. I got my start in software hacking on NES ROMs many years ago. NESticle definitely played a part in me being who I am today. It's strange to see things getting old, but I guess so am I.
rlv-dan 10y ago
Ah, the memories. I especially remember the "Pentium Bug" menu option that I clicked out of curiosity. Nothing happened. Literary :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug
voltagex_ 10y ago
With emulation, comes emulation scene drama: http://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html http://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html
- amyjess 10y ago
  It's just absolutely fantastic how much the world has changed since this article was written. Let's see... In one paragraph, we have: > Damaged Cybernetics was a general grey-area information group. Their main goal, so they said, was to free as much information as possible, for, as the saying goes, information wants to be free. They had sections on their website dedicated to such things as Audio Piracy information (the ripping of CD-DA Audio Tracks and compression to the MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio format), followed in the next paragraph by: > What exactly is grey area information, you may ask? It is information that many people would rather not touch with a ten foot pole. It lies somewhere between the realm of legal and illegal. It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a ten foot pole". The '90s was a very different place. And then there's this: > How did he steal the source code? Sardu was running Windows 95 at the time. He made the mistake of leaving drive sharing on (which should not have been on by default, but for some reason, it was on). MindRape was then able to mount Sardu's hard drive (since drive sharing was enabled) with Samba. Pretty clever, right? Regardless, he did this and not only was he able to retrieve the NESticle source code, he was able to look through all of his drives. His Zip drive. His hard drive. His CD-ROM drive. Whatever he wanted. Such an invasion of privacy is ridiculous, but this is what transpired. Mounting somebody's hard drive through Samba over the open Internet! Of course, this was back in the days of dialup, when everyone's desktop computer had a public IP address. You'd dial in to your ISP, and the IP would be directly assigned to your PC. And, of course, IRC networks back then had no concept of shrouds, so you could just find somebody on IRC, get their IP, and start hitting their open ports! A lot of people will vehemently say that a NAT router isn't a proper substitute for a real firewall... but in this case, it would have prevented this attack. Even the most dirt simple of NAT routers would prevent some rando from over the Internet mounting your HDD via Samba. At the very least they'd have to spear-phish you into running a trojan now. But, of course, home NAT routers weren't a thing until people started using cable and DSL and having multiple computers sharing the same Internet connection. Back in the days of dialup, if you had multiple machines, you paid out the nose for multiple phone lines and then you paid your ISP an extra $5-10/month to allow you to have multiple simultaneous connections on the same account (or you had multiple ISPs; hey, they were only $20 a month and there were dozens to choose from in every major metro area). The mention of the Zip drive dates it, too. Man, remember when every major PC manufacturer was putting internal Zip drives in their computers? That was a looooooooooooong time ago...
  - captainmuon 10y ago
    > It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a ten foot pole". The '90s was a very different place. Yes, but you could also argue it was a much freer place, as in wild west free. On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents, DMCA, export controls, etc., and a few people actually got into trouble. On the other hand, you could run a illegal Warez or music download site for years with impunity. Everything was in flow. We as a society haven't determined what goes and what doesn't yet. Good times :-).
    - dualogy 10y ago
      > On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents, DMCA, export controls As with any "scares", it took place largely in the media (even there not that much, maybe the odd op-ed and tech/talkshow) while in on-the-ground reality nobody cared and everyone either directly got eagerly and excitedly "into it" or asked their "tech-savvy neighborhood youth" to hook them up with warez or music or in any event back up /digitize their existing collections. (Apart from your typical cautious disposable-income-middle-classer who actually enjoyed regularly investing some of their funds into their ever-growing legal collection of CDs/DVDs/etc) The "scares" initiative really only began in earnest as movies became a feasible target and the music industry must have been much more focused on not sharing the music industry's fate (ie "almost die, then be 'rescued' on breadcrumb terms by Apple")
  - shortformblog 10y ago
    This was an era where everything really technical was being done via IRC, FTP, and Usenet. WinAmp had yet to be released—let alone Napster. Nesticle was important because it turned something that was once very hard into something quite easy, which is why it moved emulation away from a purely gray area. The same thing happened even more dramatically with MP3s just a couple of years later. Soon enough, the gray couldn't stay gray anymore, because too many people were doing it.
  - tbyehl 10y ago
    > MindRape Sigh. Donnie succumbed to cancer last May. He was one of my favorite co-workers, a fantastic friend, and a world-class hacker.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
What was the first console/arcade emulator?
- bantunes 10y ago
  Not sure which came first, but I remember trying out a SNES emulator, VSWC (Virtual Super Wild Card) on my 486 before Nesticle. It was discontinued in April 1997 https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19990223191448/http://internetter.com/titan/software#vswc https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19990223191448/http://inter...
- jhbadger 10y ago
  In terms of arcade, I think the first usable arcade emulator (as opposed to things that could just boot up and get to the attraction screen) was "Dave Spicer's Arcade emulator" circa 1995 for DOS. It only supported a tiny handful of games (Pac-Man, Galaxian, and an obscure game called Amidar)
  - to3m 10y ago
    Neil Bradley did a vector arcade one as well around that time: http://www.emuviews.com/cgi-local/show.cgi?SERIAL=99 http://www.emuviews.com/cgi-local/show.cgi?SERIAL=99 For consoles the earliest ones might have been Virtual Gameboy? Or one of the Atari 2600 ones? I'm sure they came along in early 1996.
    - stuaxo 10y ago
      Emulators for 8 bit computers like the ZX Spectrum and CPC were around for a while, but I remember people saying that emulating games consoles would be impossible, then suddenly they started making leaps and bounds.
      - jhbadger 10y ago
        Yeah, I remember that ZX Spectrum emulators seemed to be early (before C64 and Apple ][ emulators). Being an American, I never used a Spectrum back in the day, but I used the early Spectrum emulators to play 8-bit games as many of them were the same games as I remember playing on the Apple ][.
rangibaby 10y ago
Ahh, Bloodlust Software. Noggin Knockers 2 and Timeslaughter. The pic in the tweet is of "Buddy" from those games. The character was hidden and was accessed by pressing the down arrow repeatedly on the character select screen until his "down syndrome" caused him to be selected. I'm sure the games suck but I LOVED them when I was 10.
- dualogy 10y ago
  > and was accessed by pressing the down arrow repeatedly on the character select screen until his "down syndrome" caused him to be selected Haha. There was so much crazy humor very widespread everywhere before "PC landed" (as a wave) over the last ~decade (by which I mean the herd moved from "let's make the odd joke of any one group at times but not seriously harm anyone in reality" to "anything could be offensive to someone so let's not come up with much to cultivate uber-tolerance for the sake of it"). Even freaking Donald Duck euro-comics from the 70s til mid-90s are quite awash reading them as an adult today (with a broader horizon of reference points).
aphextron 10y ago
I can still picture that icon in my head 20 years later...
corysama 10y ago
For context: prior to Nesticle you needed a very beefy machine (for the time) to emulate NES games at a half-decent frame rate. All of the existing emulators were basically unplayable on my Pentium60. Nesticle came out of nowhere and was a huge improvement. Totally playable. I think it was the first jitting nes emulator.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  Heh. Yeah the crap one had to go through just to get emulated games running on old hardware... Somehow Chrono Trigger was playable on a 486, but only if you disabled transparency (which made a couple of levels really tough to navigate) and had sound disabled. This was with ZSNES on Win95 I think?
  - Kurtz79 10y ago
    I remember that in Chrono Trigger there is a part in the future where you need to input a specific button sequence, and in one of the early version of ZNES it wasn't working, it was maddening at the time :).
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      It wasn't ZSNES, it was your keyboard not accepting input from three keys at once !!! I know because I remember this exact thing.
      - Kurtz79 10y ago
        It was actually neither ZSNES or my keyboard, but SNES9X :) from: https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes.txt https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes... 0.72 released ... - This time really fixed Allegro library keyboard handling (DOS port); it was missing key some presses/releases (was stopping Chrono Trigger Left + Right + A button combo from working).
        10y ago
smaili 10y ago
Slightly off topic but does anyone happen to know the state of NESBox? Their repo hasn't had any real updates since June of 2015 - https://github.com/nesbox/emulator https://github.com/nesbox/emulator
mikejmoffitt 10y ago
NESticle got me into modification and reverse-engineering. Specifically, it allowed the user to not only view the graphics ROM data all at once, but also modify the tiles and see the effect in real-time!
Ascetik 10y ago
Good ole' Nesticle. I remember I was so pumped because I could play the Japanese Final Fantasy's that never got released here. Then I was part of the Destiny of An Emperor 2 translation beta into English, that was fun. I was in... 6th grade I think when I found out about Nesticle, it changed my life.

120 points by ericzawo 10y ago

Holy hell. I got my start in software hacking on NES ROMs many years ago. NESticle definitely played a part in me being who I am today. It's strange to see things getting old, but I guess so am I.

rlv-dan 10y ago

Ah, the memories. I especially remember the "Pentium Bug" menu option that I clicked out of curiosity. Nothing happened. Literary :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug

voltagex_ 10y ago

With emulation, comes emulation scene drama: http://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html http://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html

amyjess 10y ago
It's just absolutely fantastic how much the world has changed since this article was written. Let's see... In one paragraph, we have: > Damaged Cybernetics was a general grey-area information group. Their main goal, so they said, was to free as much information as possible, for, as the saying goes, information wants to be free. They had sections on their website dedicated to such things as Audio Piracy information (the ripping of CD-DA Audio Tracks and compression to the MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio format), followed in the next paragraph by: > What exactly is grey area information, you may ask? It is information that many people would rather not touch with a ten foot pole. It lies somewhere between the realm of legal and illegal. It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a ten foot pole". The '90s was a very different place. And then there's this: > How did he steal the source code? Sardu was running Windows 95 at the time. He made the mistake of leaving drive sharing on (which should not have been on by default, but for some reason, it was on). MindRape was then able to mount Sardu's hard drive (since drive sharing was enabled) with Samba. Pretty clever, right? Regardless, he did this and not only was he able to retrieve the NESticle source code, he was able to look through all of his drives. His Zip drive. His hard drive. His CD-ROM drive. Whatever he wanted. Such an invasion of privacy is ridiculous, but this is what transpired. Mounting somebody's hard drive through Samba over the open Internet! Of course, this was back in the days of dialup, when everyone's desktop computer had a public IP address. You'd dial in to your ISP, and the IP would be directly assigned to your PC. And, of course, IRC networks back then had no concept of shrouds, so you could just find somebody on IRC, get their IP, and start hitting their open ports! A lot of people will vehemently say that a NAT router isn't a proper substitute for a real firewall... but in this case, it would have prevented this attack. Even the most dirt simple of NAT routers would prevent some rando from over the Internet mounting your HDD via Samba. At the very least they'd have to spear-phish you into running a trojan now. But, of course, home NAT routers weren't a thing until people started using cable and DSL and having multiple computers sharing the same Internet connection. Back in the days of dialup, if you had multiple machines, you paid out the nose for multiple phone lines and then you paid your ISP an extra $5-10/month to allow you to have multiple simultaneous connections on the same account (or you had multiple ISPs; hey, they were only $20 a month and there were dozens to choose from in every major metro area). The mention of the Zip drive dates it, too. Man, remember when every major PC manufacturer was putting internal Zip drives in their computers? That was a looooooooooooong time ago...
- captainmuon 10y ago
  > It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a ten foot pole". The '90s was a very different place. Yes, but you could also argue it was a much freer place, as in wild west free. On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents, DMCA, export controls, etc., and a few people actually got into trouble. On the other hand, you could run a illegal Warez or music download site for years with impunity. Everything was in flow. We as a society haven't determined what goes and what doesn't yet. Good times :-).
  - dualogy 10y ago
    > On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents, DMCA, export controls As with any "scares", it took place largely in the media (even there not that much, maybe the odd op-ed and tech/talkshow) while in on-the-ground reality nobody cared and everyone either directly got eagerly and excitedly "into it" or asked their "tech-savvy neighborhood youth" to hook them up with warez or music or in any event back up /digitize their existing collections. (Apart from your typical cautious disposable-income-middle-classer who actually enjoyed regularly investing some of their funds into their ever-growing legal collection of CDs/DVDs/etc) The "scares" initiative really only began in earnest as movies became a feasible target and the music industry must have been much more focused on not sharing the music industry's fate (ie "almost die, then be 'rescued' on breadcrumb terms by Apple")
- shortformblog 10y ago
  This was an era where everything really technical was being done via IRC, FTP, and Usenet. WinAmp had yet to be released—let alone Napster. Nesticle was important because it turned something that was once very hard into something quite easy, which is why it moved emulation away from a purely gray area. The same thing happened even more dramatically with MP3s just a couple of years later. Soon enough, the gray couldn't stay gray anymore, because too many people were doing it.
- tbyehl 10y ago
  > MindRape Sigh. Donnie succumbed to cancer last May. He was one of my favorite co-workers, a fantastic friend, and a world-class hacker.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

What was the first console/arcade emulator?

bantunes 10y ago
Not sure which came first, but I remember trying out a SNES emulator, VSWC (Virtual Super Wild Card) on my 486 before Nesticle. It was discontinued in April 1997 https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19990223191448/http://internetter.com/titan/software#vswc https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19990223191448/http://inter...
jhbadger 10y ago
In terms of arcade, I think the first usable arcade emulator (as opposed to things that could just boot up and get to the attraction screen) was "Dave Spicer's Arcade emulator" circa 1995 for DOS. It only supported a tiny handful of games (Pac-Man, Galaxian, and an obscure game called Amidar)
- to3m 10y ago
  Neil Bradley did a vector arcade one as well around that time: http://www.emuviews.com/cgi-local/show.cgi?SERIAL=99 http://www.emuviews.com/cgi-local/show.cgi?SERIAL=99 For consoles the earliest ones might have been Virtual Gameboy? Or one of the Atari 2600 ones? I'm sure they came along in early 1996.
  - stuaxo 10y ago
    Emulators for 8 bit computers like the ZX Spectrum and CPC were around for a while, but I remember people saying that emulating games consoles would be impossible, then suddenly they started making leaps and bounds.
    - jhbadger 10y ago
      Yeah, I remember that ZX Spectrum emulators seemed to be early (before C64 and Apple ][ emulators). Being an American, I never used a Spectrum back in the day, but I used the early Spectrum emulators to play 8-bit games as many of them were the same games as I remember playing on the Apple ][.

rangibaby 10y ago

Ahh, Bloodlust Software. Noggin Knockers 2 and Timeslaughter. The pic in the tweet is of "Buddy" from those games. The character was hidden and was accessed by pressing the down arrow repeatedly on the character select screen until his "down syndrome" caused him to be selected. I'm sure the games suck but I LOVED them when I was 10.

dualogy 10y ago
> and was accessed by pressing the down arrow repeatedly on the character select screen until his "down syndrome" caused him to be selected Haha. There was so much crazy humor very widespread everywhere before "PC landed" (as a wave) over the last ~decade (by which I mean the herd moved from "let's make the odd joke of any one group at times but not seriously harm anyone in reality" to "anything could be offensive to someone so let's not come up with much to cultivate uber-tolerance for the sake of it"). Even freaking Donald Duck euro-comics from the 70s til mid-90s are quite awash reading them as an adult today (with a broader horizon of reference points).

aphextron 10y ago

I can still picture that icon in my head 20 years later...

corysama 10y ago

For context: prior to Nesticle you needed a very beefy machine (for the time) to emulate NES games at a half-decent frame rate. All of the existing emulators were basically unplayable on my Pentium60. Nesticle came out of nowhere and was a huge improvement. Totally playable. I think it was the first jitting nes emulator.

tomc1985 10y ago
Heh. Yeah the crap one had to go through just to get emulated games running on old hardware... Somehow Chrono Trigger was playable on a 486, but only if you disabled transparency (which made a couple of levels really tough to navigate) and had sound disabled. This was with ZSNES on Win95 I think?
- Kurtz79 10y ago
  I remember that in Chrono Trigger there is a part in the future where you need to input a specific button sequence, and in one of the early version of ZNES it wasn't working, it was maddening at the time :).
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    It wasn't ZSNES, it was your keyboard not accepting input from three keys at once !!! I know because I remember this exact thing.
    - Kurtz79 10y ago
      It was actually neither ZSNES or my keyboard, but SNES9X :) from: https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes.txt https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/changes... 0.72 released ... - This time really fixed Allegro library keyboard handling (DOS port); it was missing key some presses/releases (was stopping Chrono Trigger Left + Right + A button combo from working).
      - 10y ago

smaili 10y ago

Slightly off topic but does anyone happen to know the state of NESBox? Their repo hasn't had any real updates since June of 2015 - https://github.com/nesbox/emulator https://github.com/nesbox/emulator

mikejmoffitt 10y ago

NESticle got me into modification and reverse-engineering. Specifically, it allowed the user to not only view the graphics ROM data all at once, but also modify the tiles and see the effect in real-time!

Ascetik 10y ago

Good ole' Nesticle. I remember I was so pumped because I could play the Japanese Final Fantasy's that never got released here. Then I was part of the Destiny of An Emperor 2 translation beta into English, that was fun. I was in... 6th grade I think when I found out about Nesticle, it changed my life.