Tell us a little about yourself Jeff.I did the interview for then existing Emulation/Gaming site Exposure2k.com that I ran. Which has since become a porn site I think (Well, last I checked the domain anyway). I think most of the Emulation community actually went "WTF!? How the hell is This Jeff dude?!" Seems I was the only one a member on this site back then. :P
OK, well, I'm 23. I have never broken a bone. The left side of my jaw hurts quite a bit right now, and I play and review videogames for a living. Oh, and I'm 6'2" tall.
Do you think of emulators as a negative thing?
No, personally, I think emulators are pretty amazing, especially from a technical standpoint. The fact that people can reverse engineer so many different types of hardware is really pretty amazing. Being able to play old games is just a really nice side bonus.
When you hear the word Emulator, do you then think of Piracy?
No, not really. It's not an immediate connection to me, though there is obviously quite a bit of piracy involved with the actual playing of games on emulators. I mean, like it or not, the copyright laws (at least here in the U.S.) are pretty clear, and no one owns original copies of all 1100+ games that MAME supports. And most people don't own most of the SNES games they're loading up in ZSNES and SNES9X every day.
Like it or not, that's piracy, plain and simple.And then there's stuff like UltraHLE. I mean, I think UltraHLE is a tremendous technological leap for emulators, but the element that it brings to the emulation world (warez kids, IDSA crackdowns, rom begging idiots that can only manage to type "NE1 GOT ZELDA?????????!!!!!!!!!!!!111") is where the real problem lies.But again, the emulator itself isn't piracy. It's perfectly legal. It's the copying and transferring of the ROMs that are illegal.
Do you play emulators yourself?
I have been known to mess around with an emulator or two from time to time. (MAME is, by far, the most impressive emulator out there.)
Where do you see the emulation scene in a year?
That's hard to say. I don't really see any emulator authors getting into legal trouble. The big companies may try to scare authors with the threat of a lawsuit, but I don't think any such suit would stand up in court. The various authors, for the most part, are careful to not break any laws. I see some more commercialization happening, similar to the Sega Smash Pack and the rumors of MAME arcade consoles popping up with licensed ROMs. Maybe we'll see some more commercial emulators, like Bleem and Virtual Game Station.What game companies need to be doing is stopping piracy. Not emulation. People really need to get it through their heads that emulation and piracy are two different things.
The console piracy scene has been around a lot longer than software-based emulation, and with all the high-speed bandwidth going around these days, it's just going to get worse. Companies like Nintendo need to step up and create carts that can't be copied. And CD-based emulators should, obviously, only work with original discs. As for the older, discontinued stuff, it'd be nice if companies would release some of these ROMs into the public domain, but don't count on it. Instead, they'll probably just keep pumping out half-assed poorly done collections of older games for the newer consoles and feel all good inside because they're "catering to the retrogaming community. "In short, companies will try to make money off of the popularity of emulation, and the leeching warez kids (you know, the kind that send out an e-mail to as many different MAMEDEV members as they can find with the text "U SUX!!!!11 MK2 IS SLOW!!!!!!!1111") will unknowingly try their hardest to destroy emulation from within.
Thank you for answering my questions.
No problem, but where exactly are you going to post this interview?
Anyway, good times.