Who do you consider to be the snesdev/scene gurus?

1. Yoshi/Koitsu
2. Blargg
3. Byuu
4. No$Cash (???)

Who am I missing?

Who is/was Qwertie?

When you say "snesdev/scene", I need to know what timeframe you're talking about. I tend to think of 3 separate scenes that had very limited social overlap (there was some, but it was greatly limited; NES/nesdev was different):

* Pre-emulation (1991-1995)
* Emulation pioneering (1996-2001)
* Post-emulation (2001-present)

Very few in the first scene were in either of the latter, and folks from the latter often don't know anything about the first. I'm one of those oddballs that technically spanned all 3 due to being involved in multiple communities, but I honestly know very little of the post-emulation scene. For example, byuu's name I'd never heard of until probably 2010 or something like that (really!). This kind of thing I think also happened with nesdev too, but with a lot more social overlap; the SNES scenes are kinda unique in that way.

Were you wanting details covering all of the time periods as a lump sum, or just certain timeframes? I have a short write-up covering the former two scenes, specifically mentioning names of people who were important/critical during those times. Some are still around, and I would urge you to try to contact them to get additional names of people that they remember. There's one particular person who spanned both the first two scenes that is often forgotten/overlooked, and that saddens me greatly because he was incredibly pivotal in the same way Blargg has been.

I don't think of myself as a "guru", as there is better information and more in-the-know people today than myself by far. At this point I sincerely feel nobody cares about all of that history, they just want to play "those old pixel games on that old Nuhtendo their dad had!" etc..

bazz wrote some tutorials and documents. I'd consider him a "guru"

As for Qwertie (David Piepgrass): he's the author of his own SNES documentation, which came out in roughly 1998 and continued I think until the very early 2000s. He was not part of the first scene I mentioned. His docs came out during the emulation peak, and the first example I encountered of someone adamantly chastising my documentation for inaccuracies etc (something that's continued to this day, always by people who weren't around during the first scene -- funny that). He was also the author of some test ROMs, and the author of a DOS SNES emulator called SNEqr. His home page was here, and his SNES emulators' documentation was here (bottom of the document contains names/etc. of folks, and more chastising of my docs, haha).

I would say his efforts were important, simply because his docs were the "next step" in evolution that brought emulation up several notches. When he describes them as a kind of "drop-in replacement" for mine, he's mostly right. I can't definitively say his documentation helped with homebrew itsef, but that's not his fault -- by the early 2000s people weren't really doing SNES homebrew any more (people stopped roughly after the release of the Sony PlayStation): everyone was interested in newer consoles. But that doesn't change the fact that his efforts on several fronts were important. He deserves big kudos.

Anomie

I was thinking in general.
But now that you give that timetable outline, I would love to hear/read about the "Pre-emulation" days and "Emulation pioneering" days specifically.

Can't believe no journalist have written any book or significant article about this.


Thank you for the info/link. Even the download links work in there!

I never have followed SNESdev stuff all that closely. But I would add for consideration (post-emulation period):
- d4s
- neviksti

I would love to hear move about the timeframe for nesdev an gbdev in general too In another thread if this become very detailed. I'm surprised we never had (?) threads on this subject. I love those things!

In general, these would be the folks of the pre-emulation days who I would consider key/critical, in no particular order:

Corsair and Kari -- for their "famitech" doc: this was all we had until my docs
Dax -- for his graphics doc: this was (also) all we had until my docs
Carl Mueller -- responsible for the early 90s famidev mailing list (what I usually call the "snesdev mailing list") at Wayne State University (Michigan) in early 1993. Here's the FAQ, which leads me to...
Charles Doty -- one of the original homebrewers and reverse-engineers I ever interacted with, both directly and on famidev
Christopher Jack (a.k.a. Gau) -- for all sorts of stuff, but mainly his SPC700 docs and Multitap docs, but he also provided some register reverse-engineering details. More on him later...
John Pappas (a.k.a. DiskDude) -- for SNES Kart and other whatnots. (Yes, this is the same DiskDude of the infamous NES file format !DiskDude! header ordeal)
Jeremy Gordon -- for all sorts of things (including his 65816 cross-assembler for PC), but mainly his SPRITE.DOC, which is included in my SNES documentation
Antitrack -- for all sorts of things, but mainly his SOUND.DOC and SID-SPC.SRC (C64 SID emulator for SPC700), both which is included in my SNES documentation
Vic Ricker -- for all sorts of useful info posted to the mailing list (example) over the years
Geggin of Censor -- for the initial SNES mode 20 memory map I used in my docs
JackRippr -- for all sorts of miscellaneous info, as well as giving people little hints/tips along the way. He would be like "you should try setting bit N of $21xx to 1 and then do this. Have fun!"
Pan (and several other members) of Anthrox -- for all sorts of info, mainly about different graphics modes. His vertical split-screen multi-mode demo (MODE7.SMC) still gives emulators problems today
Donald Moore (a.k.a. MindRape) -- for always pushing the boundaries of everything. He was there in the IRC #snes days, and was always a source of inspiration and support. May he rest in peace

I'm 100% sure I'm forgetting other names of folks who were equally as pivotal, and for that I apologise. Refer to my SNES.8 document for other names of people, although who was responsible for what (in detail) and part of the original pioneering effort is hard to say. If I dig through very early SNES emulator READMEs, or random SNES docs (not my own) I find, I'll see a name I recognise here and there (ex. SirJinx, etc.).

As for Gau: four years ago I tweeted pictures of some printouts of personal Emails from him to me back in the day. He was also a guy who had a project which he called, if I remember correctly, the "Romulator" -- which was basically a homebrew development board (hardware) with tons of RAM chips that went into the SNES cart slot, but was also hooked up to a PC, allowing you to load a ROM onto the board and run it that way. I don't know if he ever completed it, but he had worked out all the MMIO control registers and general hardware to do it. I guess today you would liken it to an EPROM emulator. He and I also worked on a SNES homebrew effort -- this was in 1995 I believe (almost 99% certain of the year) -- called Super Kid Icarus (I do not know the person who made this video but I did comment on it in YT), which was intended to be a revamped version of Kid Icarus for the NES but with improved graphics (but would also let you play the original game). A lot of what you see in that demo is his work -- maybe ~25% is mine. It's not much to show, but at least we did something. And no, our Super Kid Icarus had no relation to the Flash game that someone made many years later.

---

For the "emulation pioneering" days (starting roughly mid-1996?), almost all the people during the earlier snesdev days were gone (that I know of), excluding a few (ex. DiskDude, MindRape), but there were equally just as many important people but for different reasons: these were people who help pioneer SNES emulation (thus at the same time, homebrew) -- but as I said, at that time, nobody was really doing homebrew, everyone just wanted emulation of dumped games. Most of the hot stuff going on was in IRC channel #emu on EFNet.

There were 2 key things about the 1996-2001 time period that are easily overlooked (particularly #1):

1. This was when the Web in general was taking off. HTML, websites, etc. was the hot thing. This revolutionised how people got, and shared, information. Why this matters will become clear in a moment,

2. There was a lot of SNES reverse-engineering was going on. My docs simply weren't enough for emulation of a system, as anyone can tell you. But nobody doing the RE was really documenting anything publicly -- it was all effectively tribal knowledge. Emulator authors would hit me up to ask if I happened to have insights into what was busted in their emulators, but that was it. I believe Gary Henderson and Jeremy Koot did a lot of independent reverse-engineering; SNES96/97 was very popular until ZSNES came along. I interacted with Koot several times but don't ever remember talking to Gary.

Anyway, again in no particular order:

SiMKiN -- for his SNES memory map, for both modes 20 and 21. He maintained this for years. I believe he got a lot of crap by younger/later-generation emulator authors citing "mistakes" and other whatnots (sound familiar?)
Chad Kitching (a.k.a. Trepalium) -- for practically everything under the sun. I really can't summarise Trep's contributions to everything, including his own DOS SNES emulator in 1996/1997, but he also did DOS ports of SNES97. He did a lot of 65816 and RE'ing of his own, as well as x86 assembly optimisations in pretty much everything
Chris George (a.k.a. TheBrain) -- for his SNES emulator VSMC that never truly came to fruition (it was commercial), but he did a lot of reverse-engineering on his own, and did chat with me quite a bit
Jeremy Koot (a.k.a. The Teacher) -- original author of SNES96 (now known as SNES9x)
Gary Henderson -- original author of SNES97 (now known as SNES9x). Pretty sure Gary did boatloads of reverse-engineering work, as I said
_Demo_ and zsKnight -- for ZSNES. AFAIK, my docs got them started, the rest they figured it out on their own or talking to other emulator devs
Nobuaki ANDOU -- for Super Pasofami / SPW, a Japanese SNES emulator that became infamous in the US because pirated versions would recursively delete C:\WINDOWS at a random time/moment. AFAIK, most of his reverse-engineering efforts were done by himself or with other members of the Japanese community, at which time nobody in North America even knew was happening. The author passed away last year

Like before -- I'm 100% sure I'm forgetting other names of folks who were equally as pivotal, and for that I apologise. SiMKiN may actually have spanned both pre-emulation and emulation pioneering time frames -- I just can't remember. His doc went through a lot of revisions, so he may have been around in 1994 or so.

I also want to mention several others during this period that deserve mention, given what sites they ran and what they did. As I covered earlier, with the introduction of the Web becoming a huge thing, there were now ways to keep up to date on stuff (for the masses, not just dev-folk):

Sean Whalen (a.k.a. AvatarZ) -- founded Node99, which came *before* Zophar's Domain and Archaic Ruins. This was literally the first emulation news site, but also served as a tech hub for docs/info. I dug pretty hard to find that Node99 link, by the way -- it's an archive *of* an archive, and looks very different than the original Node99 site (I asked others, too)
Jim Pragit -- founded the "EMU News Service", which was a website dedicated to emulation news (releases, etc.)
Brad Levicoff (a.k.a. Zophar) -- founded/ran Zophar's Domain, which was literally *the* place to go for emulation or similarly-related stuff in the late 90s, and remained that way for quite some time (I was a staff member at one point)
Chris Hickman (a.k.a. Typhoon_Z) -- founded Archaic Ruins, a kind of tech/emulation-esque news site, which also did interviews etc. (yeah, there's several with me on there)

---

After all of this came the "post-emulation" time period, which I wasn't really around for outside of the NES. I had other things going on (personal, professional, hosting Parodius, blah blah blah). What kept tied in to both the NES and SNES (generally-speaking) during this time period was also my involvement in romhacking (freelance game translation). I won't go into all of that as it's off-topic.

Edit: folks like byuu and Anomie fall into this time period, I believe. I'm not sure when nocash began working on all of his stuff (it's so vast that I cannot even begin to comprehend how long it took). An important aspect of *this* time period is that I believe this is when real hardware-savvy folks began helping with reverse-engineering and actual answers began to come forth (vs. what others had reverse-engineered, or gotten from, say, official documentation). There was little to none of that in the early-to-late 90s (spanning the first two time periods). Thus, now what people have is substantially more accurate and vast. That's what you get from people who are hardware-savvy -- of which I am not. :-)


How funny... there's a reason this is my pinned tweet! :-) I've talked with peers who were part of several scenes (incl. ones I was part of). One of the problem is the sheer vastness of it all -- SNES scene was completely separate from MD/Genesis, separate from NES/Famicom, separate from PC Engine/TG16, etc.. Every scene was different (per console/system) and unique. It's almost like you'd have to have documentaries on each console scene for it to be accurate. It'd turn out to be like an 8-hour documentary, hahaha.

I teared up several times while writing this post. Just remembering and recalling the names of many of the people above, plus looking them up and their old sites/docs/programs... a lot of memories came flooding back to me. Old situations; good, bad, shameful/embarrassing, amazing. I'm a nostalgic, always have been, so this stuff hits me hard. Those were incredible times for snesdev, and later for emulation. Literally revolutionary, but none of us in the early days knew what was to come (re: emulation).

Nobody thought to document those times -- no film, no tape recordings, no diaries. We just lived it... and now 25 years later, try to recall it.

I'll leave you with this: I started my SNES docs sometime in 1993. The final release, v2.30, was a few days after Christmas 1994. I was 17 then. I'll be 42 early next year.

Encyclopedia Koitsu-nica!

I have a blast reading all that information, it's true!

Me too! Thanks for summarizing your memories from this time!
It is a poorly documented part of gaming history, so these recollections means a lot.

I remember when I found that Super Kid Icarus in a ROM collection when SNES-emulation was young. I was all over it, it was so beautiful that I first thought it was an official sequel that I somehow didn't know about. Or that was at least what I wanted to believe. When I noticed it wasn't a playable game or even a demo, I was so disappointed and realized that it must have been homemade somehow.

Wasn't that Alfatech? Or were they both involved with that in some way?

Either way, thanks for writing up such a comprehensive post about some of the pioneers of the scene. I think I've mentioned this here before, but I'd totally love to see a "where are they now" sort of thing about a lot of the early scene figures who almost seem more like mythological heroes of the past or something like that at this point.

Wow. Thank you so much for this

There's a lot to digest here, but here are some of my initial questions, if you don't mind answering:

1. At the very beginning, where there any concerns about the legality of what you were doing?

2. At the beginning, what was the goal for the group?

3. At the beginning, what was the process progress made on other popular retro systems like the NES and/or the 2600?
Did you took inspiration from those scenes?

4. You say your not hardware guy, yet you were one of the first to produce documentation for the SNES. Can you explain?

5. Besides Nobuaki, you don't mention the Japanese scene. Is this because the scene was non-existent, because of cultural or other reasons? Or simply there was a language barrier?
Do you know if Nobuaki's work was a commercial success?

6. When you made Super Kid Icarus game/demo, did you ever made a physical cart? If so, did you ever show to stores / trade show, etc? What were your expectations and goals for this project?

7. What was the first emulator that could boot a commercial game (let's say that could run a complete level of SMW)?

8. Could it be said that for the second half of the 90's there was a race to make a competent working emulator. This race was won by snes9x and zsnes. After those came out, many dropped out. Would you say this is correct?

Thank you.

As I understand it, koitsu's role in compiling NES and Super NES docs largely involved using technical writing skills to organize the results of others' reverse engineering into coherent documentation.

It was Antitrack, but I believe the two may have had some history (possibly *after* my docs). I don't know the history there, would have to track down one of them and ask. I'm sure it was Antitrack because in my READ.ME circa 1994, there was this:


...and in SID-SPC.SRC we have this:


As would I! I'm sure many of them are still around, just an issue of finding them and talking to them -- if they would even want to talk. It may come as a surprise, but sometimes old sceners don't like to talk about those times due to "stuff" that was going on in those scenes (e.g. warez distribution, etc.). Literally every person has their own story to tell; another aspect of the era that made it feel almost magical.

No problem. That post took me about 4 hours to write, which included digging up names, links to old things, proofreading, etc.. Now I know how (decent) journalists feel. :-)

There's a lot to digest here, but here are some of my initial questions, if you don't mind answering:


If you're asking about the general snesdev scene in general: no, not really. There were only 2 "legality" aspects I ever saw come up during the early years, and this is from my limited view (the folks in Europe may have had other concerns, or maybe less so):

1) Getting and owning a SNES copier, since they were grey-market devices and Nintendo began putting pressure on US Customs to confiscate them (which they did start doing). It was more about getting than owning -- nobody was worried (once they had one) that, say, cops would show up at their door. We saw them as VCRs -- yes, you could use them for copying/pirating commercial games (films), but you could also use them for homebrew (home movies),

2) If one was to get a copy of the actual SNES developers manual -- you would technically be holding intellectual property, which if discovered could certainly get you fined and/or jail time. People wanted it (and badly), but nobody had it. Sure, people got it eventually, but in the early days it was considered something akin to the Holy Grail or Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, haha. :-)

If you're asking about doing my SNES docs in particular:

Sort of, but not really. I always had a "gut feeling" that it might tick off Nintendo, and I didn't want to upset a company I had loved as a kid (we're talking Howard Phillips NES era time frame). But at the same time, everyone I spoke to (incl. actual engineers) said as long as the work was being done through RE, it should technically be fine. There is one story though:

After what would be the last release of my SNES docs (v2.30), I did receive contact from Nintendo. I don't remember when exactly, but I do remember I was living in California at the time, so that would've been sometime between 1995 and 1996 (probably very late 1995). I've talked about his before on several rare occasions and the story is pretty short: I received a letter via postal mail from Nintendo and the legal firm they used at the time (I don't remember) which was not a template letter. It basically said something to the effect of "we're aware of your SNES documentation, and if you keep releasing this type of stuff, there could be legal repercussions". What was weird (to me) was that large corps, then just as now, tend to just sue you, not issue you a kind of "knock it off or else" warning in advance. It meant on some level Nintendo was concerned about it, but was probably still seen as reverse-engineering rather than, say, distribution of IP or "company secrets", so a legal case may have been tricky for them -- but at the same time, they knew they could flex their power/size/control to get what they wanted.

If it's not obvious: I complied. I've been through legal battles before and I wouldn't wish them on anyone. I valued my stress, time, and money more than SNES docs. It didn't matter much in the long run anyway, because within next few years the official developers manual started making its rounds to people, people started getting more interested in the Sony PlayStation, and so on.


Not sure I understand the question -- what group? Do you mean the #snes channel on IRC? If so:

The goal was pretty simple: to act as a communications hub for anyone who wanted to participate in SNES homebrew or reverse-engineering. We shared MMIO details, we shared code, we chatted about whatever. Very "IRC" for the time :-)

But unlike today, I think, there was a deeper sense of comradery -- people then spent a lot more time getting to know others in the channel on a 1:1 basis. There were some who were just "names in a channel" and we didn't know much about them (and it seemed by choice that they wanted to remain that way; maybe they had their reasons), but many actually would talk personally and privately over time. I got to know several people pretty well (Donald Moore/MindRape in particular) -- enough that one of the members whose name I forget (I keep thinking Archimede?) I went and stayed with for a couple weeks at his home in Sacramento (he was married and quite a bit older than me).

All of this was very late 80s/early 90s "scene"-ish. People really got to know one another. It's not like how it is today, where despite social media and all these other communication methods at your fingertips, people in communities/scenes/etc. don't seem to get to know one another. Everyone feels temporary. Real friendships were made back then; nowadays it doesn't seem that way. Look up documentaries or write-ups on groups like Fairlight, you'll see the same kind of comradery I speak of.

As for the later 90s during the start of emulation: it was similar, though it was harder to get that true "small scene" feel due to the sheer number of people involved. #emu on IRC was, at its peak, massive -- I believe 60-plus people? It also covered pretty much every emulator and system being worked on, so it was chaos. There were other channels dedicated to specific consoles/systems, but at that point I was only interested in the SNES and NES (and PC Engine a little bit), so I really only hung out in a few channels. People would talk about whatever they wanted, but if tech chat started happening, people calmed down a little bit to kind of watch/see how it transpired. As time went on a lot of the stuff I got asked about (SNES-wise anyway) went into private messaging rather than in the channel.

Plus, for that era, you need to keep something in mind: for that time period, most of us were in our late teens or early 20s, so the mindset and overall feel/attitudes/etc. of everyone was... well... crazy! :-) Lots of adrenaline (and testosterone), lot of drama (esp. in the later years), that kinda thing. I guess the way to phrase it would be "young kids/adults being young kids/adults".

But despite all that, I got to know people from that era personally as well. I made some very good friendships that lasted for many years after the emulation heyday died down. Even those I haven't talked to in years if I reach out to will say "omg it's Y0SHi! hey man!" and things feel like how they used to. It depends on who I talk to of course (I didn't get along with everyone, and I certainly pissed off a lot of people over the years, especially in the later 90s), but of those who I made friendships with, it for the most part lasted, even if we didn't keep in contact.


There was no NES/Famicom scene at all in the early 90s. I went looking at several points during my SNES days and it just didn't exist. I think the reason is that there were no copiers available for the NES/FC. The SNES came out, Chinese companies made copiers, and that opened tons of avenues.

WRT the NES/Famicom: that's a whole other conversation and subject, and it gets crazy when you find out that while folks in Russia (where I feel the real/true NES/Famicom/Dendy reverse-engineering efforts started) were doing their thing, folks in North America were doing theirs, and folks in Japan were doing theirs -- all without realising the other even existed. (You ask about this later, actually.) I think a better resource for this sort of thing is Nathan Altice's book titled "I Am Error", which does go over early pioneering efforts.

There may have been an Atari 2600 scene during those days, but I'm not sure. I did start with the Atari 2600 (loved it!), but it didn't hold the "technical interest" to me like the SNES and NES did.

I also want to mention something here: the term "2600", for that era (late 80s/early 90s), can actually refer to two different things: the Atari 2600 video game system, as well as 2600 magazine. So when you ask me if the 2600 console scene was an inspiration in the early days, the answer is no -- but the 2600 magazine certainly was! :-)

So if there was any "scene inspiration", it probably would've been from demo scenes, hacking/cracking/warez scenes, the phreaking scene, and similar types of things. It's all very early 90s in every way/shape/form.


It means I'm not an electrical engineer. I have no formal or informal training with hardware -- everything has been self-taught or self-discovered over the years.

To be clear: I can't truly understand a circuit diagram or EE schematic just by looking at one. I can't take a PCB and start following traces to map things out to create a schematic. I can't tell you when you should use a 15k ohm resistor instead of a 330 ohm resistor. I can't use a logical analyser to figure out how some circuit or IC works. And while I understand what a capacitor does/is for and how it works, what resistors are for, etc., I can't tell you "you should use one of those here", or even know *why* you should. Sure, I own a multimetre and know how to use it for the most part (particularly for continuity tests), I can solder and desolder (properly), and I can build some electronic thing (PCB + soldering + etc., or via a breadboard) if you give me a schematic that properly outlines what parts are needed and clearly label everything (and in that sense, "step me through it")... but that just means I know how to use some tools and how to follow some instructions. It doesn't mean I have the knowledge to reverse-engineer something at the hardware level.

The software level is a whole other situation. :-) The only formal "training" I have software-wise was an Applesoft BASIC class in junior high, and taking a Pascal class in my high school. Everything else has been self-taught. I didn't graduate high school, nor did I go to college or university. That's not me bragging either; if anything I feel shame, because had I done that (for example, take an EE course), maybe the hardware level of things would make more sense to me. Not understanding the hardware was actually less of a problem for me with the SNES than it was the NES (this will be the end of me! :-) ).

Thus, my SNES docs were an amalgamation of info from the following 4 sources:

i) The original Corsair and Dax documents I linked earlier. Those were all we had at the time. They acted as a kind of "jumping off" point to get something started on the SNES, but that was it. If you read them, you'll see how barren they are information-wise. Lots to be discovered. But better than going in completely blind.

ii) Pure software-based experimentation -- programs I wrote that let me poke at MMIO registers or ranges, fiddling with bits until I could make some conclusions on what they did (anything that induced visual feedback was a lot easier). In other words: writing 65816 code, assembling it, running it on the SNES (using a copier), seeing what happened, taking notes, repeating the process over and over,

iii) Disassembly and reverse-engineering of commercial games -- this gave you some idea of where to go poking. "Hmm... why is this game writing 1 to $420D? What does $420D do? Why does this game write some data to $4204/4205, then do 16 nops, then read from $4214/4216? What purpose do those nops serve? They look pointless (hint: they're not)". I had literally hundreds of pages of print outs of commercial games all over the place in my bedroom at one point (I think of Capcom's Magic Sword?) trying to figure out the purpose behind some piece of code. Remember: there were no emulators, and nobody had a hardware ICE/debugger, so this was pure software reverse-engineering going on. Lot of time spent in front of print outs, lot of scribbled notes everywhere.

iv) Social interaction and sharing of information with other people doing (ii) and (iii) above. This played a huge role. I was just one kid doing what small piece I could... but other people -- many of which were/are smarter than me -- were doing their fair share too. When we shared our discoveries, I started organising it into a document (which then became separate files within an lzh archive), and thus said SNES docs were born.

The above is unlike my later NES documentation, which was mainly just (iii) and (iv). That's why the thank-you list is so much longer. #nesdev on IRC was critical to making all of that happen.


There were several barriers. This is a sensitive subject for some, but I'm going to speak about it anyway:

i) Nobody in the US knew stuff like this was going on in Japan. There was not a lot of US <--> Japan "information" flowing of that sort. None of us even knew about Famitsu (the magazine), for example. The only stuff we knew about Japan was from things like US-published magazines: Nintendo Power, GamePro, etc.. Once in a while they'd show something Japanese, but it was very rare, and it was always about a game, not about homebrew obviously.

ii) Even if we did, there would have been a huge language barrier. I knew of virtually no one in the early 90s that knew Japanese (and certainly no one in the snesdev scene). And especially at that time, Japanese did not tend to know English (and due to humility and cultural norms, they would feel embarrassed if they were to speak it badly). What's often not discussed is the fact that there are several "sub-scenes" or groups/things within Japan that actually stay within Japan only -- file sharing services, chat services, etc. that only allow connections from Japanese IP addresses. Yes, really. There is still very much cases of "foreigner disapproval". When I was younger, I thought this bizarre and weird, almost offensive, but as I've gotten older I've started to understand better why it is. Not worth going into here; my point is that the likelihood of information sharing, even if we had known of one another's efforts, would have been virtually nil.

Even during the emulation craze of the late 90s and NES/Famicom stuff this remained true. We didn't get a lot of information from Japanese sources. Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, etc. were different, as several people were working on figuring out mappers, so we'd get some documents written by someone in Asia and have to try and decipher it (bad English, etc.). When romhacking started becoming a thing, that's when several doors started opening that hadn't before. But that leads me to...

iii) Actual communication capability. If you weren't online in the very early 90s, then you probably would take for granted that the Internet has always been as "open and available" as it is today. It wasn't. In the early 90s, the only places that had Internet access were pretty much educational facilities, governments, some commercial companies, and certain non-profits (more rare). People were still using dial-up BBSes, and long distance charges were expensive (don't get me started on international rates!).

When I found out there were several European colleges that had Internet access, I was stunned (amazed/excited). Email was very important, but people often used UUCP for that, i.e. you'd write an Email and the college or company or NPO would only connect to the Internet (to transmit/receive) the Email via UUCP once a day (maybe more) because of cost. Real-time chat across the world was really not a "huge reality" quite yet; talk/ntalk existed, ICB existed, but that was about it until IRC (IRC did revolutionise the world, IMO).

I have very vivid recollections of my first time talking to Europeans via IRC. There was a guy from Germany who was into snesdev; I was fascinated seeing someone join the channel from whatever.de rather than .edu/.com/.net/.org. Around the same time (again, very early 90s), I actually became penpals with a Finnish gal named Maija in Oulu, Finland.

Japan, at least at that point (to me), wasn't anywhere even on the map until the mid-90s. They had their own stuff, I'm sure. I do remember the first time I saw a Japanese IRC channel though -- you could tell because the channel names would usually have tons of $ symbols in them. I can't remember if that was EUC or JIS encoding. Unicode didn't exist back then, so unless you had a PC able to decode the encoding, *and* you knew the language, there was no point in joining the channel.

So in short: you really have to consider the time frame (year) and where technology was when thinking about the question. :-)

As for Mr. ANDOU's success: yes, I would say he was quite successful. His software was extremely well-known throughout Japan during those times, as nobody else had even considered doing such a thing. Before he passed away, he appeared to also be doing contract work -- so most likely (gut feeling here), probably people hired him to add his NES and SNES emulation cores to some commercial products of sorts. So yes, I would certainly say he was successful. The one thing that made it different, though, was that his stuff cost money -- North Americans did not particularly like emulators and the like costing money. People wanted it for free, and piracy was rampant (good? bad? It's in the eye of the beholder...).


No, there wasn't a cartridge, only a ROM. Nobody was really interested in making homebrew carts at that time -- if you'd proposed it, people would have said "Haha, why? We have SNES copiers. A ROM file is just as good, and easier to maintain/transfer around!"

In the early 90s nobody was really doing hardware development (or reverse-engineering at that level). Gau was one exception, but I never knew how deep his skill set went. When I heard about his Romulator project, I then got the impression he was also a hardware guy, which (I felt) was unique for the time period. Most people doing snesdev and RE were software-oriented folks, I think.

Super Kid Icarus was never intended to be a commercial thing -- ever. Gau and I both knew we would've been sued off the face of the planet by Nintendo. It would've contained original assets (graphics, music, etc.) from Kid Icarus, plus had the Kid Icarus name in it. We were taking a chance even having "Kid Icarus" in the title, but I don't think either of us really cared at that point. So no, no trade shows or anything like that.

As for expectations/goals: our goal/hope was to make exactly what I said: basically "port" Kid Icarus to the SNES, but with improved graphics/sound/etc., as well as offer a "classic" mode that used the original graphics/music, so that you could play whichever version you liked. Oh, we did have one goal, IIRC: get rid of the password system and simply have a save game feature via battery-backed SRAM, where things would save at the end of each stage. I always hated the password systems in Metroid, Kid Icarus, etc. -- tedious, error-prone, and annoying. Back then it was done to save money when manufacturing carts (expensive!)... but with SNES copiers, battery-backed SRAM was basically just a .SRM file on a floppy disk.


That's a very good question. To be completely honest, I can't remember which emulator I saw run a commercial SNES game first. I keep thinking SNES96, but I'm not entirely sure. You'd think I would remember something like that, but sadly I don't. I think the reason has to do with the fact that emulation was happening so rapidly, while simultaneously I had my feet in multiple things at once, that it's hard for me to recall exactly what emulator "came first" in some particular accomplishment. I *definitely* remember the first time I saw ZSNES running a commercial game though, and it was quite amazing. I also remember trying out the VSMC demo, which did run SMW, IIRC, but was infamous for having a yellow palette (from that day forward lots of people referred to it as the "piss yellow emulator"). So maybe SNES96, VSMC, or ZSNES -- not sure.

You might try digging up some old interviews with me during the emulation heyday of the late 90s and see if I said anything along those lines.

Super Mario World was indeed one of the main test games people used. It's one of those games that really made the SNES look incredible and has stood the test of time. Nintendo did an amazing job! It's a pretty complex game that uses a lot of SNES features, though. Easier as a test bed was to try some homebrew demos.


I would definitely agree with this assessment.

TRAC, anomie, Overload, neviksti, Talarubi, the mysterious DSP hacker (Feather/Lancer/Dreamer Nom/z80gaiden/30 other aliases), AWJ, Jonas Quinn, Andreas Naive. Yeah, most of us these days prefer aliases to real names.



Author of SNEqr, self-professed nudist :3



=(

I've been around since 1998, too. I have even contributed code to ZSNES back in 2000. I regret that we had that argument in 2010. I've mellowed out since.

I asked you for web hosting around 2002-2005 or so, and was ignored. Not that I'm one to hold a grudge or anything ... ;)



I spent so much time implementing Felon's banana register, too! :P /s



I get the feeling you based it off the leaked SNES dev manual, given you seem to have the official names of various MMIO registers (INIDISP, etc.)

I kind of wish those names didn't get so popularized, it presents challenges for claiming cleanroom implementations (plus they're lousy names), but we simply can't get away from those names now. It's what everyone knows the registers by.

Silly anyway, no way those official programmer docs were even a fraction as detailed as modern SNES emulation knowledge.

Regardless, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. There may come a day when my own emulation is considered old-hat, inaccurate, and holding the scene back.

It's fine to say we shouldn't be using your docs anymore (obviously), but it's not okay to dismiss them as having no value: they were pivotal for the evolution of SNES emulation.

@byuu: Hey. Maybe you can fill the gaps koitsu is missing? Like, when did you decided zsnes emulation was not good enough?

@koitsu: I got more questions for you later, if you don't mind?

BTW: With all due respect, what is no$cash standing in snes emu history?
I know he is very important for the GB/GBA scene. Was his emulator the one that came before the official US release of the GBA, or is that an urban legend?

I know his DS emulator variant is very popular also.

@byuu -- Hmm, I don't remember the hosting request, actually. I sadly don't have any Emails etc. going back further than 2009 (maybe 2007 if I really dig hard) due to fat-fingering a ZFS-related operation around then, otherwise I'd check! I very likely would've hosted you. :/ Did you always go by byuu or did you have another moniker?

As for my docs: they weren't based off the dev manual, but I can absolutely see how one could think that. The shorthand MMIO reg mnemonics (if they can be called that?) were actually used by others in the snesdev community first (someone certainly had a copy of the developers manual, or maybe a big list of equates? Not sure). I'm going off of memory here, but I'm fairly sure in earlier versions of my docs there were no register mnemonics; they were added later at the request of other devvers saying I should add them. I never particularly liked the naming convention either. I've always tried to remember the literal addresses. I'll have to see if I can find a very old version -- I doubt it exists anymore though.

It's safe to say that near the tail end (late 1994) select snesdev community members had access to the dev manual. I had little bits of pieces of information about MMIO regs fed to me from several different individuals. I'm fairly certain of this because I remember asking some of those folks if, you know, cough cough, I could get a copy. The answers were always the same: either avoiding the subject, or saying something vague like "isn't that thing a few hundred pages? How would someone even get it?" I'm pretty sure I asked MindRape if he had it and he didn't (besides: if he had, he would've distributed it, that was just his nature).

There were several versions Nintendo made over the years (there are dates on every other page, IIRC) and what was circling was a mish-mash of multiple versions with a lot of missing pages/sections. It wasn't until sometime in... 1997 maybe?... that I actually saw a full copy of the thing (and it was a very old version at that, circa 1991 or 1992), and there were references to sections/etc. that didn't exist or were wrong.

I appreciate your kind words. :-) We do indeed all stand on the shoulders of giants. In my case, there is no way by myself I would've ever been able to do my documentation without the rest of the snesdev community's efforts during those early days. I figured several things out myself through the methods I covered, but really all the collaboration is what got it to what it was in its final form.

Wow, TRAC, that's one I barely remember too. And AWJ of course, but I knew him from much earlier days in romhacking. :-)

@olddb -- sure, any time.

nocash's role in SNES emulator history will have to be answered by others more familiar with the "later" time frames (e.g. 2001 onward). I will say, though, that overall Martin's efforts are astounding. He didn't just do SNES, GB/GBA as mentioned, but NES/Famicom too (including foreign peripherals). Still to this day my brain can't fathom the amount of effort involved. Just goes to prove my point about hardware-oriented folks: once you get them involved with REing something, things really start taking off.

1998 when it first came out. I started as a ROM hacker in '97, using ESNES. I've never been happy with SNES emulation, and continue to not be very impressed by it :P (there's a whole bunch of known-unknowns in bsnes, the PPU timings are especially imprecise.) I think today it's more a "knowing how the sausage is made" thing. If I didn't know all the internals of bsnes, I'd probably be happy with it.

I first tried to write an emulator in... I want to say... 2001-2002? It was called StarSNES, but didn't get much further than RSRSNES. I started on bsnes on October 14th, 2004.



He came out of center field with no$sns. He'd apparently been working on it for years in secret. Very impressive to keep something to oneself that long. I can hardly wait a day or two before revealing something new I'm working on.



Aww rats, that would have been fun. I bounced around so many servers instead, and web.archive.org didn't do the best job of capturing it all.

Anyway, you dodged a bullet there ^-^



In '97, I went by Shadow4275, but it ended up being confusing with Derrick Sobodash (Shadow of RPGe), so then I went by Nall. I started going by byuu in 1998.

Fun tangent: I tried to work with Atani on a Sega CD emulator as Shadow4275 back then. Neither of us had a clue how to write an emulator, so of course we failed. Later, Atani went on to write an actual Sega Genesis emulator, but never got to implementing Sega CD support. And now, I've written a Sega Genesis emulator, and so far haven't gotten to Sega CD support. Gotta keep the dream alive though, right?



Excellent to have confirmation of that, thank you!



TRAC was one of my favorite people. He took Savoury Snax's emulator (SNEeSe), and did some really cutting edge things before anyone else (no VRAM writes during active display!) I remember him just flat out intuiting exactly how the SNES PPU fetches would have to work, based on the available bandwidth, and it was just amazing to listen to him explain things, but unfortunately I wasn't nearly at the point of a cycle-based PPU to try and work on that info. The only person like him I know now is Talarubi.

It's depressing to think about how much further along SNES emulation would be if TRAC, anomie, and blargg were still active.



He really popped out of nowhere recently, but he helped improve hires color math, improved SuperFX timing a little bit, completed the final missing piece of the infamous SMP TEST register, and seems to have disappeared before his highly anticipated mosaic improvements.

It's kind of funny, reading it today.


We really need people who can apply this to that...

what about Gideon Zhi?

I don't recall Gideon doing SNES reverse engineering or actual homebrew efforts in the mid-to-late 90s, just very extensive/thorough romhacking resulting in quality projects. I can ask him on Twitter though! :-)

One person that hasn't been mentioned, who also falls into multiple categories, is Neill Corlett. I don't recall him doing SNES (console) RE, though his romhacking and game reverse engineering efforts (ex. Bahamut Lagoon, SD3 are of epic and unmatched proportions. I think he did do some RE of newer-than-SNES (i.e. 3D) consoles though. But I could easily be mistaken -- it's been a long time and sometimes hard to remember all the projects/things every single person was doing. Regardless, he was around in several communities and a tremendous benefit to pretty much every single one.

Well the topic is snesdev/scene gurus not "who worked out how the SNES works" To which my main argument is after doing all the hacks he has, he must know his way around a SNES pretty well even if just through osmosis. Also I would think he is/was a large part of the scene, I remember talking to him back when I first go into SNES dev in 96?7?8?

Also there was a group that were looking to make a SNES RPG engine, this was way after everybody else had left Gok, Gork, Gorg something like that maybe. They made a really nice doc about the DMA timings, they used a logic analyzer to work out some of the quirky nature of things..

Grog.

@koitsu:

Thank you for your previous posts and thank you for responding in great detail.
You answered most of my questions.

Nonetheless, If you don't mind:

1. So it could be said that the most important event for the snes scene to get going was the release of the copiers?

2. If I understood you correctly, the snes dev/emulation scene came before the nes. So snes emulators where ahead of nes emulators at some point? Is this correct?

3. To your knowing, what was the state of the emulation scene for the Sega consoles in the early 90's?

4. Where there any interaction between the community and any official certified snes programmer(s)? Did any ever contribute to the documentation?
On the other hand, did any member of the scene ever communicated his aspiration to use the documentation to somehow become an official Nintendo developer.

5. In the 90's, did any other game/demo surface that did something similar to what you did with Super Kid Icarus?

Thank you.

Each new technological change had its own consequences. Copiers allowed sharing ROMs and reverse-engineering the software/hardware. More powerful PCs made emulation feasible, so you didn't even need a SNES to be in the SNES scene. With emulation, speedruns and TASes were created. The internet enabled fast communication, sharing (info, ROMs, other files) and collaboration. Every new game that got a level editor allowed more people to become creative.


Well, there were pirate games...

There's a bit of discussion about scene/industry overlap (both confirmed and speculated) in this thread. (Sadly, I still haven't found out if my theory about "The Doctor"'s identity was actually correct or not...)


Ah yeah, I thought you were talking about the original driver rather than Antitrack's disassembled/documented version, I'd forgotten about that.

Charles MacDonald also published some hardware notes.

Absolutely. There was no other way at the time for homebrew to be done. Nobody in the scene at that time was making devboards (EPROM/EEPROM-based, etc.) probably due to what I discussed before (re: not a lot of hardware people involved). All you needed was US$350+ for a copier, some floppies (or a parallel cable w/ transfer software (the latter usually came with the copier)), and a 65816 cross-assembler.


Not quite. I would say the time frames was something like this:

1991-1995: SNES homebrew/demo scene through use of copiers; emulation really wasn't being considered
1995-1996: Beginning of emulation consideration -- primarily fuelled by great increases in CPU power (high-end 486s, Pentiums)
1996-1997: Four (4) things began happening simultaneously: SNES emulation, NES emulation, NES homebrew (mainly due to NES emulation), and romhacking (for pretty much any system)

I could be off by a year or so on the time frames. It's hard to be precise because everything was happening so rapidly during the mid-to-late 90s. Tons of things were happening within short periods of time. SNES and NES (for emulation) were getting equal amounts of focus.

Emulation and ROM dumps of games is what basically spawned the following things:

* NES homebrew (through use of emulators, since only people familiar with hardware were able to make their own devboards, and most of those were only NROM (32KB PRG / 8KB CHR))
* NES romhacking efforts (through use of emulators, tools, and cart dumps, since reverse-engineering a game became easier)
* SNES romhacking efforts (through use of emulators, since reverse-engineering a game became easier -- though to be clear, not a lot of SNES emulators had debuggers in those days (I was quite vocal about that being a problem), so disassembly-based reverse engineering was key)

I'm trying to avoid talking about the nesdev scene aspects because this is the SNESdev sub-board, but I'll try to keep it brief:

The nesdev scene was absolutely crazy. There was so much happening non-stop that you practically had to be part of it daily to keep up on it all. One thing that isn't often discussed is how we ended up getting ROM files of NES carts to begin with and who was involved in all of that. Marat Fayzullin's .nes file format wasn't the first file format, believe it or not. This is where folks in Asia come into play -- they were already dumping games somehow, and Japanese emulators like PasoFami used a different model consisting of 2 files: (.prg (PRG mask ROM) and .chr (CHR mask ROM)), and I think .sav or .srm if the game had battery-backed SRAM (I forget). Marat Fayzullin's .nes file format consolidated those into a single file, and added the 16-byte header that was key for handling more than just NROM (mapper 0) cartridges. I'm still not sure who pioneered NES cart dumping, but I know for a fact that DiskDude and MindRape were both involved in the very early days, then Kevtris and some others shortly later. The cart dumping "scene" was something I wasn't part of, so I know very little about it; there are much better people to ask (on the nesdev sub-boards). Once people had ROM files of games, reverse-engineering sometimes became easier, and it (of course) also spawned the romhacking scene.

Like I said before: a LOT of stuff started happening very quickly, all within maybe 1-2 years. It was a crazy time.


I have little to no idea. Sega-based systems (Master System, Genesis/MD, etc.) weren't systems I owned (I didn't get a Genesis until maybe 1995, and only had a couple games for it -- Super Hydlide and Herzog Zwei, the only 2 games I've cared about). There *was* some Genesis/MD reverse engineering going on in the early-to-mid 90s, because I remember seeing some docs floating around, but they made no sense to me). Any time I see the Genesis/MD discussed somewhere, my brain turns to mush; VDP, PSG, FM with PCM, an integrated Z80, blah blah. To me, it seems like the perfect console to have ports of arcade games. It probably doesn't help that I don't know 68K. :-) Genesis/MD ROMs were available as early as 1993, mainly due to multi-console copiers like the Multi Game Hunter (which did both SNES and Genesis).

For emulation, you'd need to talk to folks like Icer Addis, Steve Snake, the folks who did Genem, KGen, etc. for some history. I simply don't know it.

I've split the next questions into sub-questions (4a, 4b, 4c) to make them easier to answer:


In the very early 90s: maybe? Kinda? Sort of? Not really? It's hard to put into words. This is a question you'd have to ask of every single person in that scene at the time, because I don't know who knew who outside of IRC and the famidev mailing list. So, my below answer is my own:

I personally had interaction with people who *became* official SNES developers (read: working for companies that released official/approved SNES games on cart). I knew them as Apple IIGS folks, who around 1993-1994 or thereabouts got jobs at companies that were producing SNES games (and in one case, also Genesis/MD games, but that fellow is particularly incredible because he's worked on compilers and all sorts of other stuff -- remarkably intelligent). Once they started working at those companies, their interaction with me became virtually nil, probably because of time (work sucks up most people's energy/time) and maybe a little bit had to do with me doing my SNES docs (the less interaction with me the better, re: job safety). This gets into personal matters etc. that I should cover in separate thread/post.

Outside of my own experiences, I would say that yes, there must have been some degree of interaction between select/certain members of the snesdev community and professional SNES programmers in the early 90s. It's been suspected for some time that someone in the scene knew someone who had access to the SNES developers manual, i.e. they knew someone who worked at a game studio. I'm being honest here: I have no idea who those persons were/are. But I also mentioned that I knew some people in the scene who would drop me little "tips" once in a while, like "for register $21xx, try setting bit 4 to 1 and then play with this other register. Good luck!" It was stuff like that which made me wonder if some people had additional knowledge through official documentation or through other people they knew. I never asked them because I felt that would've put them into a difficult position. I hope this makes sense.


All of those who contributed to my SNES docs, to my knowledge, *were not* "certified SNES programmers" as you call them. None that I know of worked for any gaming companies. If they did, I didn't know about it. Remember: a lot of people went by monikers, so who they were behind the scenes would always remain a mystery. Some folks were a bit more open once you got to know them, others remained very anonymous. I don't think there's anything odd about that either -- people online today are still this way.

So to answer the question directly: to the best of my knowledge, no.


Yes, absolutely! I would even put myself into that same category (hoping that by learning how the SNES worked, it might land me a job at a company doing commercial SNES games). I had several people over the years tell me that they hoped that they could use my docs to (effectively) do some homebrew, and that might get their foot in the door at a company. Most comments like this came from folks in their teens or early 20s.

Did anyone *successfully* do that? Not that I know of. If they did, they never told me. :-)


Not in the same fashion (doing a "port" or "upgrade" of an existing/old Nintendo game). Most snesdev folks were doing demos (there are tons of those), some did picture slideshows (often of porn), others were just fooling around learning the system for fun. But there *were* some actual homebrew games that came out. Her'es some I have laying around:

- Nuke Your Mom by Paradox, 1994. A Minesweeper clone
- Pacman by RTS, Dizzy, and The Doctor, 1993. A Pacman clone
- Rape Games by Romkids, 1993. This one is... uh, yeah, best just skip it. It was made as a joke at the time (got some laughs/chuckles), but if something like this was made today people would be throwing a fit
- Shoot Your Load by Anthrox, 1994. An Asteroids-like clone that was multiplayer (up to 4 people using the Multitap) -- quite well done
- Tic-Tac-Toe by Tinysoft, 1993. Self-explanatory
- Tic-Tac-Toe by Timsoft, 1994. Nearly identical to the aforementioned game, but a bit more refined, different music, etc..
- What a Chess by CrazyBee, 1994. A 2-player Chinese board game done by a fellow out of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kind of like Go/weiqi, but kind of not. May be the authors own invention

The two tic-tac-toe games are incredibly similar, to the point where it almost looks like the latter might be an early 90s romhack (and improvement) on the former. Or maybe they were done by the same person/group and they changed names, had a falling out, etc.. Don't know. Still homebrew either way.

One thing you'll notice about a lot of these homebrews, aside from ones done by high-end groups, is that they tend to use ripped music from commercial games or other groups, else no audio at all. This is because pretty much nobody really understood the SPC700 at the time. I would go as far as to say understanding the SPC700 was almost a "coveted" thing, i.e. you held a kind of elite status if you do anything with the SPC700. A lot of demos/things would usually include a note like "Looking for musicians!" -- now you know why.

Yeah the SPC700 was a black box.

I've seen "demos" that have everything in the first 32K or maybe 64K and then 5 empty banks, and then the music code they ripped..

I tried emailing him asking about it, but he didn't reply (some people probably don't want to be connected with "the scene", even after 20 years).



I was looking at textfiles.com for example code when I was getting started (didn't find too much besides Pan's edgelord text demo, found a bit more looking through old "tons of shit downloaded off of BBSes" CD archives), but these guys had a SNES dev manual and seemed pretty open to sharing it (could've been bragging thought, idk).

We're back to "let's talk about the time frame" aspect of things again:

That file, which is a BBS forum post, came out in early 1993. The bulk of the reply is written, best I can tell, by Corsair. He's chastising what appears to be another group that released a "how-to" document on starting to code on the SNES, adding that he has a full copy of the SNES developers manual (incl. the portion which includes 65816 CPU documentation (I've seen it)). I think I may have seen this "how-to" document at some point in maybe 1994 or so (I'll try to find it later), because I distinctly recall chuckling that someone else had basically done the same thing I had (re: start with mode 0, text, etc.). Said group had a member (The White Knight) that met "some guy at CEBIT in Germany" and got the manual from that person. The latter part is written by Ram Raider, pushing the fact that (at the time) there was a BBS called The Graveyard where Corsair and Dax both hung out, with a BBS forum dedicated to SNES coding. (Side note: multi-human posts in a single post isn't uncommon even today.)

What's important to know, I think:

- Corsair was from the UK, and was a member of the group Digital (DTL); may have also been in the group named Elite
- Dax was from the UK, and was a member of DTL; may have been in several other groups
- Ram Raider was from Germany, and was a member of DTL; he was what was known as a "modem trader", which means he usually distributed the group's content/files to BBSes all over the place (sometimes "modem trader" can also refer to a person who literally mailed actual modems to group members or colleagues ("hey man i've only got some old 2400bps crap" "wtf! let me send you a USR Courier HST!")
- DTL was a *huge* group (probably 100+ members) with people all over the world
- The Graveyard BBS was in the UK (and shut down in early 1996 due to unrelated scene drama)

Note the commonality: no, not the group -- it's that all of them were in Europe.

Long distance charges, especially internationally, are what induced essentially "social segregation". Some BBSes in the US would dial up boards in the UK or elsewhere, snag/copy stuff from other boards (that text file is one such example), and present them on their own board -- that document/post is one such thing (read: original post was on The Graveyard, but a US BBS called The Hole snagged a copy). But it was expensive. Folks that ran BBSes and did this tended to limit the regularity and duration (ex. once every 3 months, 30 minutes tops). I can't speak for others, but I personally was only able to dial up to some European boards *twice* during the late 80s/very early 90s due to the costs -- and I had to ask my parents in advance. ;-) I racked up more than enough in bills calling people in Canada...

There were some Europeans on the famidev list, but I don't recall too many (if any?) being on #snes back in the early 90s. Most everyone was North American, if I recall correctly.

In other words: we're back to what I discussed about there being all sorts of "independent" efforts going on simultaneously because the Internet wasn't then how it is today (read: commonplace). So Europeans had their own thing going on, just as Japan did, just as we did. There's tons of little "sub-scenes" like that which never overlapped because of communication limitations. The Internet literally revolutionised all of that -- but the BBS-to-Internet transitioning that began in the mid-90s was not done as cleanly as one would like (read: not every BBS started putting their files/etc. up on FTP sites), so a lot of stuff got lost. That's one of many reasons why Jason Scott's textfiles.com exists today -- to try and get all that stuff that's still on floppies or QIC tapes or old MFM hard drives into some place where it can be archived.

Basically sum of it is: early 90s snesdev, any time you'd see a document or file similar to like what you posted here, you'd hold on to it. Speaking personally, if others who knew me saw such a thing on some random BBS etc., they'd usually grab it and say "hey Yoshi check this out". When I was doing stuff, the fact that the colour format of data for $2122 was in BGR rather than RGB was something I had to figure out on my own, for example (doesn't take a genius to figure it out; once you see the visuals it's sorta obvious).

For sake of demonstration: here are some very old SNES docs (and some famidev posts!) that I remember coming across back in the day. But look at the ones with dates of 9X.XX.XX. Those are usually files from BBS era stuff, since very rarely did anyone put dates inside docs (myself included). Note how terse the information is. You'll find the earliest version (that I know of) of the official manual in the file called "SNES Mapping Information", which best I can tell wasn't scanned/OCR'd -- it was done by someone literally typing it in. I imagine this is where some folks got the official register labels/names from (this might address byuu's earlier comment too, re: the labels being crummy).

Then we can get into this whole discussion about BBSes etc... I hope folks are starting to see just how "complex" all of this is/was when you actually sit down and look at what was going on at the time. The demo scenes did a lot more than some people realise. I think some folks (not picking on anyone here!) forget that the Internet then as a technology (and commonplace availability) was not really "there" yet in the very early 90s.

Edit: forgot to finish some of my sentences!

I don't know, that sounds pretty weird to me. If you don't have anything to hide ...

If you want some individuals who have made substantial, recent contributions of a tangible nature who have not been previously mentioned, I would point to the following people :

1. ikari_01 for designing the sd2snes,
2. RedGuy for implementing SuperFX and SA-1 cores on the sd2snes, and
3. Kevtris for designing the Super Nt.

Both the how to code tutorial and accompanying example code are on Textfiles (what I was referring to as "Pan's edgelord text demo" for reasons that become evident if you look at the code).

Well you get cases where the founder of Fairlight is now a a Republican senator in the US.. who would mostly like to keep the past hidden

The Euro scene was very Party based, so lots of info etc could be shared at the parities, seem American's never really had Demo Parties?
I knew a few people who where in the scene, who were also game devs, so they had the manuals, tools etc to make stuff. But I can't give any names. However magazine reviewers where the "enemy" as they were the ones that leaked the games before launch.

Oh, boy... I had forgotten exactly how despicable Pan was/is. But it serves as proof that the "SFX" documentation were in the hands of the scene at least as early as spring 1993.

On a related note, I just noticed this clip from the recent Datastorm 2018 demo party. At the embedded time stamp I'm discussing how SID Mania came to be with Alfatech (sitting to the right). I've been wanting to make a more official interview with him about the early SNES scene for some time. Maybe next time!

@koitsu: Thank you for your time.

Oh, please do! SIDMania was a big part of how I became interested in both the SNES and C64 scenes, so it would be cool to hear more about both that and the scene in general.

Ah yes, Pan's text demo... It got discussed back in the day. I haven't seen that source code in 25 years! The best way to summarise it: it is what it is, just take the technical details out of it (for learning/etc) and ignore the racial/political part. I think most of us ignored that aspect of Pan and just focused on the stuff he did on the SNES. It's about all you can do with folks like that.

So yeah, it seems were folks in Europe in 1993 who had copies of the manual -- and it seems that even then, those that had it all seemed to have different versions (or Frankenstein's monster version, i.e. an amalgamation of multiple versions).

As for demo parties etc. -- no, in the US we didn't really have these. There were certainly small get-togethers amongst friends/peers to watch demos of sorts, but nothing like huge venues and what not. I've technically never been to an "official" demo party. The closest I've gotten was 1) back in 1993 or 1994 (I'm thinking late 1993 or very early 1994) I chatted with someone from Future Crew (I forget how, but Email, Usenet, or IRC would be the main methods) and they invited me to Assembly 94 saying something like "well you can hang out with us!" (they didn't know who I was, it was more of just a polite thing to offer someone), and 2) a party in San Francisco in 1999 with my roommate who was friends with some folks that worked at H2O Entertainment (see: Tetrisphere), where we all discovered we were all old demo nuts, so the last few hours of the party we watched all sorts of old PC demos.

I too would love to hear more about Alfatech, how SIDMania came to be, any information about Geggin, and just generally how Censor got involved doing SNES stuff at all. It might sound trite or silly, but just the fact you got to sit down with someone who did such cool SNES work in the 90s is already incredible to me. People like that always seemed untouchable (think: unreachable), like mysterious individuals in the woodwork doing incredible things.

Edit: typo/clarification.

I know Alfatech in particular has been active in the C64 scene again lately (I remember he had a compo entry at Datastorm last year also), so it's probably not hard to get in touch with him. I remember he also commented on one of my YouTube uploads some years ago (a video of a Censor intro, naturally)...

Do any of the names you remember/have in demos match any of the ones listed here https://csdb.dk/group/?id=2310 Censor is a very active group, so while members might be "inactive" people will probably still be able to contact them etc if not Zyron will probably know them still.

Alfatech is a member of Offence now https://csdb.dk/group/?id=387

Geggin is also an active member of Censor, he stopped going to parties in 2013 but it seems he turned up again to a 2018 party https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=551

If you have any specific questions or info about something, drop it here and I will PM them on CSDB, not everybody logs in though, but I can always bounce through another member of the Group.

Jeroen Tel would also be an interesting person to talk about it. Rumors are that he will be coming to a demo party near me next year, so I might be able to grab him in person.

Semi-related, semi-off-topic -- if the links don't work, let me know:

A Japanese guy on Twitter recently posted a picture of old printed SNES development documentation he had, which happened to include an old version of my SNES docs (both v2.30 (the last/final public release) and v2.0).

My Twitter account is intentionally marked private, so people can't see what I say, but some of my replies prompted a different fellow to dig up even older versions: v2.17 and miraculously the original v1.0 release from 1993 (which IIRC was the first public release; I remember giving out some pre-1.0 versions to people I knew well, but those are almost certainly gone). I was 16 years old then.

The v2.17 archive is literally filled with so many BBS ads/NFO files that it's crazy. Apparently my docs made it all the way to German BBSes. I had no idea of this until today. The only files in the LZH archive which were part of the release were SNES.[0-6], READ.ME, SPRITE.DOC, and SOUND.DOC; everything else is BBS distribution injections. Also, the very top of READ.ME was modified by whoever Yog Sothoth of SoBeR was (I don't recall knowing this person, but appreciate the Lovecraft reference). The v1.0 document has some erroneous bytes at the start, specifically 102D,, but the rest is intact, including the {@8~r~x_{>a|%$}x + NO CARRIER at the bottom (fake line noise/line drop).

It's very nostalgic for me to read the original v1.0 version. I'd forgotten how much effort I put into it all, as well as all my spelling and grammatical mistakes. Seeing the version differences brings back memories of how much time I spent testing things, asking other people for ideas/their own discoveries, and trying to incorporate that info. And all but one of the people in the v1.0 Greetz section I still remember vividly to this day (some were IRL friends). It also acted as a funny reminder of how I was "forced" into using chiefly American spelling due to peer pressure from those I knew, insisting I spell that way solely for documentation sake. I sure had a lot of energy then and seemed genuinely excited/happy to be doing it. A lot happened in my life between 1993 and 1994 and it hasn't been the same since.

Anyway, it might give others some perspective of how passionate and dedicated I was to it all, even if we have substantially better information today. Maybe for some it'll also provide historical and "evolutionary" perspective (re: people talking about how my docs were trash, etc. -- always from people who weren't around in those times). Thought I'd share all this with folks here.