[-empyre-] on emulation and ROM hacking

[Rafael Trindade]

Hi all,


I really regret my absence these days, since the debates here were very
exciting to me.

My subject is, opposite to Jerome McDonough's, exactly what Daniel Cook
calls a "static thing": like a "dusty cartridge to be plugged into some
retrofitted emulator". Video game emulation has a lot to do with nostalgia,
will to collect, and preservation. It was (and still is) developed,
certainly, from very dynamic and enthusiastic hacking cultures, but its
primary goal was just enjoy, one by one, a nice, well-dumped, flexible
(i.e., cheatable) ROM, as real as the original game programmed to the *
object* (cartridge/CD).

The objectifiable experience of playing an emulated console relates - and
mostly generates - to gaming traditions that form somewhat of a canon. To
players, these low-bit games ought to be preserved because they *worth* it.
They are even received in different ways, for different purposes (nostalgia;
relationship to other, newer games; novelty(!)-searching; "historical"
curiosity; erudition(!!); modding and hacking), and this is known by gamers
and hackers of all sort. Most of the players I met who frowned upon
retrogaming were hardcore ones, old enough to have been there, playing them
all to death and moving over to the next novelty. Whereas most of the kids
that I know show real respect for games that they have never played before,
or already played in Flash versions on the Web. There's an undisputed
canonical feeling about games, and maybe that was the reason why people
started to debate (pointlessly, I think) whether games are art.

And that was the main drive of the ROM translations communities. Mainly
about Japanese versions of RPG games, directed to players eager to consume
some titles never released in America and Europe, those communities are the
most living byproduct of the history of emulation. Japan were responsible
for the state-of-the-art, censorship-free, most daring titles back then;
translating Japanese games players can bring back to themselves memories of
a past they couldn't live.

But ROM translations made something big happen *in the current state of
affairs*, only by the means of its cult of the past. From the early to the
mid-noughties, it was common among game developers - indies and softhouse
employees - to ask one another "how to make money when everybody can copy PC
games and emulate console ones?". The fastest answers at hand were: a) MMOs!
b) games for mobile devices (*Snakes* for cell phones, and the advent of the
*casual* tag). PC games were still played a lot, but, at least in Brazil,
everybody bought pirate versions; console games were hesitating until the
so-called Seventh Generation.

That was an issue for all kinds of media, from music to books, but what
counts here are the solutions now chosen - almost all of them were related
to the presence of emulation and the culture of ROM translation. I sense I
can divide the current consoles in three kinds: 1) unemulatable powerhouses
(PS3, Xbox 360), which got again the grip of the market and felt safe
against the ROM hacking caught behind the PS2 barrier (these consoles
contain official and successful emulating platforms); 2) retro-friendly
consoles (GBA, DS), who act like emulators themselves, embracing
sprite-and-tile aesthetics and old-titles re-releases; 3) hardware-oriented
consoles (Wii and the Project-Natal-to-be), which are, no doubt, answers to
the ease and maleability of the software copying and hacking. Casual games
are refocused from cell phones to Web apps. Nowadays they include, alongside
FarmVille, some Flash editions of Street Fighter and Mario games[1].

While all of this have happened, the enthusiasm and creativity among ROM
translators were so high that the late 90s-early 00s are now being
remembered as a time when "everything seemed possible" [2]. The threat of
being caught by this *de jure* illegal activity was a component, amongst
others, responsible for the increasingly epic value that this moment has
gained nowadays. Today translators dare to use proper names along their
nicknames, and sometimes are even celebrated by the industry pro - like
Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, professional translator and ROM hacker as a hobby
[3].

Other important themes in videogame emulation are ROM hacking and its
relation to cheating and virtuosisity. I am an unashamed cheater myself;
most of my current game habits were acquired cheating on emulators, buying
me time and avoiding too much attachment to games when I had chores to do
(i. e., my DIY "casual" experience from not-so-casual titles). I see hidden
treasures disabling background layers, I savestate ruthlessly and rewind
even more (there's a buffer to simulate a rewind operation in ZSNES, for
instance), I have just one button to do Zangief's Piledriver and I juke all
kinds of data. However, games have been altered in so many deforming and
grotesque ways that one cannot say that cheating is never a creative
practice. The most appealing case is the gigantic, alexandrinian collection
of Super Mario World hacks [4]. Mostly boosted by Lunar Magic, a utility
made exclusively for SMW hacking, they show hell-like levels that not only
defy the player's skill, but requires *necessarily* the use of emulators'
feats: actually they are impossible to beat by the regular means. One of
them, *Super Mario World Hell Edition* (no video found, sorry), display,
beyond challenges that are savestate-requiring, some false platforms; what
seems to be some solid ground is just an illusion by the back layer.

And there are many other traits one can find just in the SMW case that show
us perversions of the original experience, and subcultures based on them:
levels which play themselves, rube goldberg-like, some of them actually *
sing* [5], and the possibility to play (in this case, NES mario games) with
the keyboard *while *picking every object with the mouse [6]. Or manipulate
bunches of Marios with one's hand recorded by a webcam [7].

All these examples show us how much videogames are, as someone told us here
(I think it was, again, Daniel Cook), different from other games by the
non-human dealing of the rules. ROM hacks are, basically, creations (or just
a mess) based on the devices that deal with the rulesets.

Whoa, I talked way too much. So sorry, and time to abrupt break :)


Best,
Rafael.





[1] I found it very interesting Danc's view of the subject (how consoles can
be now classified, this time by a Nintendo/non-Nintendo criterion) in
http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation-strategy.html(thanks,
Menotti!).
[2] http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3180292
[3] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3891/you_say_tomato_a_pro_on_.php
[4]
http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2009/02/10/ten-of-the-coolest-hacked-super-mario-levels/
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTo-wFfIXKo,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz0PaPpmGa8
[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jbFjhBYCjg (non-Mario example in
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9xZ8b3wg-I)
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uqvwZuXlDo

<http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3180292>
<http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2009/02/10/ten-of-the-coolest-hacked-super-mario-levels/>
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