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On one lonely Valentine's Day in 1996, I set out to create my own Nintendo64
emulator. You see, Nintendo64 was gaining popularity, and at the same time
emulators such as Snes9x were coming to a
point that you could actually play a few games on them. During spare moments,
I'd spend way too much time on IRC with my crew in
#oldwarez as _Norm. Anyhow with the
popularity of emulators and the Nintendo 64, an ever-increasing number of kids
came in begging for an Nintendo64 emulator. During a time when it took all the
CPU power you could muster to emulate a Super Nintendo, they expected to be able
to play Nintendo64 games on their PC. Well I set out to fix that problem.
Back to that Valentine's Day, I spent about twenty minutes learning to use
Delphi, and put together an emulator. The beauty of it all was in its
execution. What happened was after you selected the Run menu entry, a
dialog popped up. On this dialog box was a list of "requirements" to make sure
your computer had the horsepower to emulate the complex Nintendo64 machine.
There was a list of checks for CPU speed, amount of RAM, video card speed, etc.
The secret only I and a couple other folks knew was that it did not check any
of those things. This program merely drew a checkmark next to each item every
one and a half seconds. Then when it got to the last one, an error box popped
up saying something along the lines of, "Your computer does not meet the
requirements." It was very simple and the sort of satire I am known to engage
in. I did this to give a few laughs at the folks that would come back whining
because it did not work. I even went to great lengths in the README text file
to help people see its satircal nature. I suggested they first buy a new computer
or two, then take a hammer and fiercly strike their skull.
After I gave it to three people that night, I was unavailable for about a week.
When I next logged on I was shocked at what I found. There were many, many
email messages waiting for me from losers all around the globe wanting to know
how to get the thing to work. I put too much faith in people, figuring after
two or three tries they'd understand that it was a practical joke. Over the
years since then, I collected the messages. Some were lost in various hard
drive crashes, but a collection remains to this day. During one of those
crashes (damn Western Digital drives) I lost my last remaining copy of the original
program. If anyone happens across it in this vast world wide web, please let
me know. Thousands of people had a copy, maybe there is one who still does.
So here are the raw texts of the emails I received. After about 1500 mails,
usa.net took their free email service private, so I closed the account and
could receive no more laughs. The saddest part of this whole affair, only a
mere handful of the emails were from people that actually got the joke.
Batch #1
Batch #2
Batch #3
Batch #4
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