loop, infinite

If you wanted to illegally play Super Nintendo games on your computer in 1999, two programs were available to you: ZSNES and Snes9x. These programs were “emulators”: virtual machines that imitated Super Nintendo hardware accurately enough for disembodied games to run.

Games were disembodied by a complex process. The key principle was this: every Super Nintendo cartridge contained a chip that stored all its data. This chip was read-only memory – ROM.

The process of disembodying a game was the process of converting a ROM chip to a ROM file. This is how it worked: Somebody, somewhere would take the game cartridge and plug it into a plastic contraption that had no doubt been purchased from a shady dude in China.

That same somebody, somewhere would then use a serial cable to connect that plastic contraption to a computer. Using the serial cable as a straw, the computer would start sucking information out of the cartridge.

The computer would use this information to build a ROM file – an exact software copy of the physical ROM chip. The ROM file would then be placed on a server on the Internet.

Thanks to this tortured process, it was possible, in 1999, to download just about any ROM file you wanted. If a Super Nintendo game existed, chances were that someone, somewhere had copied the ROM and put it online.

If you wanted to download a ROM file, all you had to do was get on Google (actually, if this was 1999, you could well have been using AltaVista), click in the search field and type in the phrase “snes roms.”

On your results page, you’d see a wonderful, lengthy list of sites with dumb names like “Kool SNES ROMz,” “Free SNES ROMz,” “SNES ROM Nation” and “PURE Emu: SNES ROMz Plus More!” You’d then go to one or all of these sites and download all the games you wanted.

Finding ROM files, that was not hard. What was hard was finding the right emulator. True, there were only two options, ZSNES and Snes9x, but here’s the thing. ZSNES and Snes9x weren’t just emulators. They were religions as well.

There was a real, true Nerd Holy War between the two. You could not just use both. You had to develop a blind, irrational bias for one. You had, in other words, to Make a Choice.

Once you’d made a choice, it became your duty to defend it with all the blind zealotry you could muster. Your choice of Super Nintendo emulator was a serious, serious thing.

I picked ZSNES, myself. In 1999, my machine was a 233 megahertz Pentium. When I used the Windows-based Snes9x, games stuttered and crawled, but when I used the DOS-mode ZSNES, they ran at full speed. The choice wasn’t hard to make.

My friends at school were, almost universally, also ZSNES people. The one exception was a guy who ran Snes9x because he had a Mac.

(Part of the reason ZSNES was so fast was because it was mostly written in x86 assembler, but this meant it couldn’t be cross-platform – there was no way in hell x86 instructions would run on PowerPC architecture. Snes9x, on the other hand, was written in C++ and was hence more portable.)

I ripped on Snes9x-for-Mac guy all the time. He was always talking about glitches he ran into. His Chrono Trigger froze on more than one occasion.

“Man! That game’s never frozen for me,” I used to say. “Nothing ever freezes on ZSNES.”

The most visible difference between ZSNES and Snes9x lay in their interfaces. ZSNES, because it ran under DOS, had its own wonky GUI that featured purple dialog boxes and neon green text in all capital letters. Snes9x just used standard Windows widgets.

When ZSNES for Windows eventually came out, I assumed it would shed its interface weirdness for Snes9x’s native appearance, but this was not the case. The GUI was the same. Like the rest of ZSNES, the GUI had been hard-coded in assembler, and it would have been too difficult to separate it from the emulator’s guts.

I think ZSNES’s weird look bothers some people, but I’ve always liked it. When you start ZSNES, you enter the program’s own little world, isolated from the rest of your system. And it really is isolated – it’s a fake little Super Nintendo environment that tricks a disembodied game into thinking it’s running on real hardware.

The game is a ROM file, but it doesn’t even know that. As far as the game’s concerned, it’s still on a chip in a cartridge somewhere. As far as the game’s concerned, you’re playing it on a genuine Super Nintendo console.

Someone, somewhere, transferred that game’s consciousness from hardware into software. Someone, somewhere, downloaded that game’s brain and replicated it across the Internet.

A Super Nintendo game running on your computer is a brain in a vat. ZSNES is the mad scientist that’s keeping it there, feeding it stimuli and making it think it’s still living in the “real world.”

(That brain in a vat concept – about two years ago, I was reading an article about it on Wikipedia. The article was, for some reason, accompanied by a ridiculous image. It was a cartoon of an electrode-covered brain sitting in a vat of liquid. A thought bubble emerged from this brain. The thought bubble said: “I’m walking outside in the sunshine!!!” The image filename was: “Barin in a vat.jpg.” Yeah, “barin.” Not “brain.” I don’t really understand Wikipedia.)

What was I saying? Yeah, ZSNES. There still isn’t an official Mac version of ZSNES, even though Apple’s been using x86 hardware for three years now.

There’s an unofficial build, though, something someone made by tweaking ZSNES for Linux’s source code. I tried running this unofficial ZSNES for Mac last night. The interface is the same as it’s always been: ugly and clunky. I love it.

I played some Final Fantasy VI. I used to play that game all the time in ZSNES for DOS. Nine years ago it was one of my favorite games.

I’ve never actually played Final Fantasy VI on a real Super Nintendo. On ZSNES, the game has several graphical glitches. I have no way of knowing if those glitches are “real” or if they’re artifacts of ZSNES’s imperfect emulation.

(Neither ZSNES nor Snes9x is all that accurate, strictly speaking. Since they were designed to run on the machines of ten years ago, both emulators take a bunch of shortcuts in their code. They sacrifice accuracy for sheer speed.

The hip new Super Nintendo emulator right now is “bsnes.” I’ve never used it, but from what I understand it has much steeper hardware requirements than ZSNES or Snes9x, and that’s because it tries to be accurate above all else.)

I’d been playing Final Fantasy VI for half an hour when I realized my laptop was getting incredibly warm. I took a look at Activity Monitor: ZSNES, at any given moment, was using up anywhere from eighty to one hundred percent of all available CPU cycles.

What the shit? This is the same emulator that ran at full speed on a Pentium in 1999. This laptop is a Core 2 Duo Whatever.

I don’t know why my laptop can’t deal with ZSNES. I guess the port’s not optimized for the Mac. Maybe there’s a lot of overhead. All that advanced desktop compositing bullshit looks pretty but it probably takes a performance toll somewhere. I don’t know.

All I know is that ZSNES doesn’t work too well on OS X, and that’s why I have done the unthinkable. I have switched to Snes9x.

Snes9x for Mac uses native Mac widgets and goes out of its way to follow Apple’s human interface guideline shit. It’s just like any other program. It doesn’t feel like a wacky alien machine.

Snes9x has no obvious issues. It recognized my ZSNES-made Final Fantasy VI SRM file. At any given moment, it uses up anywhere from zero to twenty percent of all available CPU cycles. My computer doesn’t get warm at all.

When Snes9x is in fullscreen mode, it looks and sounds and plays the same as ZSNES ever did. It’s not better or worse in any regard. It’s only now that I realize how incredibly dumb it was for me to have been a partisan for one side.

Interfaces aside, ZSNES and Snes9x are the same emulator. There’s no effective difference. Maybe there was a difference, once, but the projects are so mature now that they’re both just pretty damn good at emulating the Super Nintendo hardware.

The most recent version of Snes9x came out in April 2007, and the latest ZSNES came out in January of that year.

Rumor has it that Snes9x is now dead. The developers are done with it. They figure the emulator is “feature-complete.” They figure there’s not a whole lot left to add.

ZSNES is still an active project, but progress is slow. The developers are excising the old GUI. They’re writing a new interface in Qt. There are mockups. They look clean, modern, Windows-native. The new version of ZSNES, if and when it comes out, will be version 2.0.

Until then, the latest ZSNES version remains 1.51. And the latest Snes9x? It’s 1.51, too. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

I spent a large part of my childhood trying to learn C, but my efforts were a big waste of time. The problem was my own inherent laziness. While I wanted to learn C, I wanted even more to do as little actual work as possible.

As a result of these conflicting desires, I just kind of screwed around aimlessly, writing a lot of C code but not learning much of anything. At best I was familiar with basic C syntax, but that familiarity never became intimacy. Important aspects of C were a complete mystery to me.

All I had to show for my hours of programming were a few folders of half-finished code. Well, that and a complete lack of a social life: not only could I not program, I also couldn’t talk to girls. Now it is ten years later and I still can’t do either of these things.

If I could go back in time and meet myself at age eleven, I’d say, “Listen, young ignorant dude. If you’re gonna dedicate a significant amount of time to sitting in a dark room writing code, then that’s fine, but make sure you actually get good at it.”

“Otherwise you’d better uninstall your little Visual C++, go talk to girls, and make sure you get good at that instead. The point is this: get good at something.”

I won’t be “good at programming” anytime soon, but I’ve been getting back into C these past few days, trying, with some success, to teach myself the stuff I was too lazy or dumb to understand when I was a kid. Pointers are no longer as incomprehensible as they once seemed. Memory management’s now making a little more sense.

My approach to the language, this time around, is different from what it used to be. When I was a kid, I wanted to learn C so I could write games. That was my goal, and I always had it in mind.

Now, I don’t even want to learn C for any particular purpose. I just want to understand it, understand the way it works and sort of reclaim this territory that should have been mine ten years ago.

There’s no game I want to write. Even if there were one, it would be much simpler than the convoluted role-playing shit I used to be into, and I’d probably implement it in Python or something.

These days, I get the impression that straight C is a terrible choice for anything other than low-level systems programming. C is too close to the machine. It’s not object-oriented. It doesn’t have garbage collection. I like these things about it.

With C, I can work on a small scale. I can write some straightforward code to make sure I understand a concept and I can hold that code, in its entirety, in my head. C code is pleasantly terse.

Even the lack of garbage collection somehow makes a sort of elegant sense. If you allocate memory, then it’s only natural that it would also be your responsibility to let it go. You must, eventually, destroy what you create.

I’ve tried to play with Java and Cocoa and C#, and modern programming environments break my brain. There are huge libraries to deal with and the code I write consists of blind calls to things I don’t understand. I don’t feel like I’m “really programming” – I’m just wrestling with an API.

That stuff would all probably make more sense to me if I had the time to figure it out. I don’t really have that luxury right now, though. The med school thing, as always, gets in the way. It doesn’t seem like learning my way around Eclipse or Xcode or Visual Studio would be a wise use of my spare time.

But it’s easy to open up Vim and write some simplistic shit in C, the language I’ve been sort of familiar with for ten years. I’m not doing anything “real” or “productive,” not developing an actual skill, but writing C makes me feel a little less worthless. At least I’m better at uselessly playing with this language than I was ten years ago.

I’m sitting next to a space heater because it is thirty-four degrees in Springfield, Missouri. I’m thinking about a conversation I had with my sister twenty minutes ago.

She asked me, “So, do you really update your web site thing every day?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Every day.”

“You’ve never missed a day?”

“Never.”

“Never ever? Aren’t there days when you have nothing to say?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “All the time.”

I just – I can’t do this today. Today is not good.

If I had been a teenager in 1991, I would have finished Ultima VI. I probably would have bought the Amiga port. I probably would have put the game’s actual retail box on the desk next to me as I played.

When I played, it would have been without distraction. In 1991, the Internet had yet to become the time-wasting demon it is today.

But I wasn’t a teenager back then. I wasn’t even close: I was three years old. I never had an Amiga, and I never bought Ultima VI.

I didn’t play a computer game until 1996. That was when my dad, who taught urban planning, borrowed the original SimCity from a grad student. We made a copy.

I didn’t buy a computer game until 1998, when I bought Myst. I still have the actual cardboard box that Myst came in. It’s in my closet. Barring a house fire or something, it’ll stay there for a while yet.

What can I say? There are people who can let go of the past, and then there are people like me.

My thirteenth birthday was in 2001. My twentieth birthday was in 2008. I played many, many games in the intervening seven years of teenager-hood. Every game had its time.

Ultima VI‘s time came in the summer of 2002. I downloaded the game in a zip file from some abandonware site and ran it by rebooting my Windows 95 machine into DOS mode.

I played the game a lot, but never finished it. I think I just didn’t have the patience for Ultima VI. I don’t think I’ll ever have the patience for Ultima VI.

Even in 2002, the game felt archaic, obtuse. I never managed to break through its complexity. I never made much progress. I’d walk around Britannia for hours until I was thoroughly and hopelessly lost, and then I’d stop playing.

So I’ve given up on Ultima VI, but I still come back to it every once in a while. The difference is that now I no longer even attempt to play it. I just watch the intro sequence.

Ultima VI‘s intro is great. It starts with the Origin logo, which fades onto the screen just as a loop of music starts playing. The loop is simple, this stripped-back MIDI thing that’s supposed to sound foreboding.

Because it kicks in so early, that music makes the Origin logo seem like part of the game. It doesn’t seem gratuitous, doesn’t seem out of place. It’s there setting the tone.

When the Origin logo fades out, you get another little title card. “A Lord British production.” In fine print near the bottom of the screen: “Copyright 1990 Origin Systems Inc. and Richard Garriott.”

1990. You are now in the past. There’s another fade to black, and then you see the opening scene.

The Avatar – who’s supposed to be you – is watching television. He looks tired, dejected. He’s sitting on one of those padded armchairs, but he isn’t reclining. He’s leaning forward. His back is arched. He wears a sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up.

His right hand holds the remote. His left hand supports his right elbow. The state he’s in, he needs both arms just to change the channel.

The television’s inside of a media cabinet. On the shelf above it is the Avatar’s VCR, which gives the time: 6:07. Next to the TV is a bunch of hi-fi equipment. There is a turntable. Dusty LPs are stacked at an angle, jammed into the cabinet’s bottom shelf.

The Avatar changes the channel again and again. On the TV, a rock singer becomes a politician becomes a news anchor becomes a televangelist. The TV makes no sound. The only thing you can hear is that cold, bare intro music.

That synthetic sound used to seem tacky and lame to me, but I’ve come to like it more as I’ve grown older.

These days, I can’t stand games that bill themselves as having “all orchestral” soundtracks or whatever. I can’t stand that pompous shit. It’s well-composed and complex, maybe, but it’s also soulless, tuneless. I’d much rather have MIDI.

With Ultima VI, that MIDI intro music is a pulse. It gives the visuals weight and credibility.

But the sound and visuals aren’t all. The intro has text, too, down at the bottom of the screen. Like every piece of text in every Ultima game, it’s a little silly and overwritten.

“Upon your world,” it says, “five seasons have passed since your triumphant homecoming from Britannia.”

“You have,” it says, “traded the Avatar’s life of peril and adventure for the lonely serenity of a world at peace. But television supermen cannot take the place of friends who died at your side!”

By the time you’re done reading this, the camera has panned to the right, away from the Avatar and the television and towards a small window.

The text changes. “Outside, a chill wind rises . . . and in moments, the storm is upon you.”

And yeah, outside the window, you see black pine trees against a purple sky. And you see a flash of lightning.

Then a portal opens into Britannia, the Avatar rushes outside, enters it, et cetera, et cetera. By the time all this has happened, I’ve stopped playing. By the time all this has happened, the part of the intro that moves me is over.

But what moves me, exactly? I guess it’s that image of the Avatar sitting there, bored, channel-surfing. How many times have I been in a similar situation? Tired, bored with my life, waiting for some kind of way out?

The Avatar’s sitting there, somewhere, some fictitious, digital house in 1990, in the middle of a storm. Every time I start a new game of Ultima VI, he’s sitting there anew. Wherever “there” is.

It’s amazing to me that I can even run this game. It was written in 1990. It makes all kinds of assumptions about computer hardware that are no longer true. I run it from inside of DOSBox – a virtual “box” that approximates the kind of environment software like Ultima VI is used to seeing.

DOSBox hides the true nature of my computer from Ultima VI, which is a good thing, because if Ultima VI were to try to interface with my modern hardware directly, it would freak out. It would refuse to run. So I have to keep the game in a bubble.

DOSBox is a level of abstraction, a layer over the top of the already-abstract interface I use to communicate with my computer. This is, I guess, how computers work: through interface after interface, through level after level of abstraction. Layer after layer, each bringing you closer and closer to bare silicon.

I think about the staggering complexity of what goes on when I click on a little window and drag it around. That action gets translated and broken down into an instruction the machine can understand. Everything I say has to be translated.

The closer you get to bare silicon, the more baffling those instructions get. The closest I’ve ever gotten has been trying to write in assembly language, and it was a nightmare of bizarre commands with names like PUSH and POP and JMP. I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

As much as I’ve tried to learn to program, I’m only comfortable if I stay far, far away from the inner workings of my computer. I’m only comfortable with clicking on shit and dragging it around.

I wouldn’t even call myself comfortable with a command line. I can work that way if I have no other choice, but that’s all. And yet I always find myself going to the command line and playing with it. I want to get comfortable. There’s a weird intrigue there.

The communication gap goes the other way, too. For a computer to get a message to me, it has to go through the same layers of abstraction. Sometimes the message is fairly intelligible, and sometimes it’s arcane as fuck.

Talking to software can be simple. It can also be frustrating. Usually, though, it’s both at the same time, and that combination is what spurs me on, what keeps me interested. And that’s as it should be. What is a relationship without a little dynamic tension?

And what is a computer game but a piece of software? You can’t understand a computer game. You can’t know it. When I listen to shitty MIDI music, when I hear the crackle of those synthetic instruments, I can’t help but think that my computer, somehow, has something to say.

When I watch Ultima VI‘s intro, I can’t help but think that something in there is trying to talk to me.

Everything a computer says, everything it puts on the screen, everything it spews from its speakers comes from a hollow, dark place. Everything is a careful illusion built on synthetic layer after synthetic layer. Everything is artifice scraping against blackness.

On the lowest level, switches are flipped and circuits are formed, and somehow this adds up to a faux-consciousness that transcends biology. This is the closest we humans have ever gotten to creating life.

The unknowable is right under the surface. There’s that spark of something. This shadowy, evocative, alien thing always pulls me in. I want to understand this thing.

One day in 1998, at the “gifted” school, the teacher showed my class a LaserDisc that showcased computer animation.

That LaserDisc was, even in 1998, pretty old. I wish I could remember what it was called. It contained what were, I guess, CGI tech demos. Short films of 3D-rendered art, tastefully strung together. You know that really early Pixar short, the one with the two table lamps? Stuff like that.

The exact day that I saw that LaserDisc – it was May 5th. I know this not because I remember it, but because I have a file called “Journal.txt” that was last modified on 5 May 1998.

I created this file with the intent of using it as a diary, but I only used it for one day. The file then languished within My Documents until I scraped it into my archive.

According to “Journal.txt,” the LaserDisc was “this cool LaserDisc that was totally devoted to these awesome computer graphic images and things.” (Forgive the terrible prose. I was nine years old.)

According to “Journal.txt,” one of the segments I saw, apparently entitled “Chromosaurus,” was “a really cool movie with these realistic T-Rexes, except they were all shined [sic] like they were made of chrome.”

“Another good one,” I continued, “was with this fantastic flight simulator thing. It was really cool. Then there was one with bubbles merging together. The graphics were awesome.”

“Then,” I wrote, “there was this thing with a dome thing, with water on the bottom, and air on the top. And there are fishes, and birds all over through it [sic], and man! It was so realistic.”

It’s sort of depressing to realize I was such a happy, enthusiastic kid. I really don’t know that kid anymore.

The “thing with a dome thing” that I referred to – I remember that thing. It was a giant sphere that floated in a dark, unrendered void. The sphere had two halves, separated by a sheet of ice.

While the sphere’s upper half was filled with air, the lower half was filled with water. While the upper half was inhabited by birds, the lower half was inhabited by fish.

The birds lived with the birds, and the fish lived with the fish. That was how it worked. That was the social order that the sphere’s physical construction had dictated.

But then one of the birds saw one of the fish through the sheet of ice and fell in love. Because this was a silent film, he expressed that love through various longing looks, et cetera. These looks got the fish’s attention. She, it turned out, felt the same way.

The bird and the fish kind of sadly look at each other for a while, but then one of them gets the bright idea to break the ice or something. So this happens, the ice is broken, and then the birds and fish all intermingle and everyone lives happily ever after.

To be honest, I don’t know if I’m telling this story accurately. It could be that the bird was the female and the fish was the male. It could be that the fish saw the bird before the bird saw the fish. And I really know nothing about the chain of events that led to the ice’s breakage. I just know that it broke.

Those details are, of course, all incidental. The point is, it was a sweet, sappy story. It was Romeo & Juliet simplified and with a happy ending. It was some rad shit, and it was told – successfully – via icy, primitive 3d art. It conveyed something human by embodying something inhuman.

CGI can be pretty alienating, but life, most of the time, manages to push its way through. Under all the the artificial stuff, you can find a pulse.

I watched Ultima VI‘s intro today for the first time in about two years. The last time was in October 2007. I don’t remember the exact day. I could probably figure it out by looking at a calendar and correlating it with Gmail chat logs, but that would be a silly thing to do.

But I remember that it was raining that day, pouring. One of those days where it gets dark by early afternoon. Thick grayness blotted out everything but itself.

There wasn’t a lot to do. I just sat in my apartment and played old computer games. Ultima VI and Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit and Tyrian and Wolfenstein 3D. I ran all these games through DOSBox, filtered through countless abstractions.

I think DOSBox is pretty amazing software, but what I’d like is a DOSBox for humans – a way to run myself in a virtual environment, to abstract the world away, to shield myself from the past several years the way I can shield these games.

It’s probably unhealthy for me to play games at all. Do they have the power of redemption that I want to think they have? Maybe I want to grab ahold of something that can’t be grabbed.