Emulation Names - Part 2

Richard Bannister

Richard Bannister is known for two main achievements: the conversion of the main console and portable emulators of the last decades to the MacOS system and the creation of the multi-system emulator MESS. Richard was born in 1980, in Dublin, Ireland, and from an early age he was interested in programming. His interest in Mac started when he saw an article in MacFormat magazine, which showed screenshots of the first Spectrum computer emulator for Mac, MacSpeccy. Some time later, when he got access to the internet, he searched for information on the subject and found the website Emulation On The Macintosh by John Stiles, the first major provider of emulators for Macintosh, and from then on he began to fall in love with the subject.

1990s 2020

Website

His work began in 1994, creating applications and games independently and in partnership with third parties for Mac. In his early years, half of his software was shareware and the other half was free. In 1996, he was responsible for writing the code for Virtual Super Wild Card for SNES, released exclusively for MacOS by Ernesto Corvi. It was one of the first SNES emulators in history and the first for the Macintosh system. In 1997, he began to port operating system and computer emulators to Mac, such as Frodo for Commodore 64, Joyce for Amstrad PCW, vMac for the 1986 computer, Macintosh Plus, among others. At that time, he was a member of ClubMac, a group of Irish Macintosh users. Video game ports most likely began at this stage.

MacSNES97

The first work with this was helping in the port released by Jeremy Shear and John Stiles of Snes97 from SNES to MacOS in 1997. From 1998, it began to port several of these emulators, such as xNes from NES, Hu6280 from PCE, Boycott from GB and GBC and Handy from Atari Lynx. In 1999, it ported Generator and DGen from MD, Arnold from Amstrad CPC/CPC+, MO5 from Thomson MO5, Oric from Oric and SimCoupe from SAM Coupe. In 1999, it also promised to release the port of Retrocade from Classic Arcade, promising to do so on the same date as version 1.2 from DOS, but the project was never completed. In 2000, MESS was ported to multi-videogame consoles (which at the time ran on 10 different systems), RockNES to NES, SMS Plus to SMS and GG, Neopocott to NG Pocket and ViBE to Nintendo Virtual Boy.

Joyce and vMac

VSWC, xNES and MESS

Boycott and DGen

In 2001, Modeler port from Sega Model 1 arcade, JUM52 from Atari 5200, TGemu from PCE, Boycott Advance from GBA, fMSX from MSX, O2Em from Odyssey 2 and TEO from Thomson TO8. In 2002, Genesis Plus port from MD and Oswan from WonderSwan. In 2003, Nestopia port from NES, KiGB from GB, Rainbow from Atari 800, Thom from Thomson TO7 and Horizon from BBC Model B. In 2004, Vecx port from GCE Vectrex. And in 2005 BSNES port from SNES. Fun fact. Genesis Plus by Charles MacDonald was released first by Bannister and then by its creator. It was perhaps the first emulation project that the port was released before the original version lol. He also contributed to several other third-party Mac emulator ports, such as the Mac version of PC Engine's VPCE, called PowerPCEngine, where he contributed the sound code.

fMSX, BSNES and Nestopia

O2Em, Mugrat and Generator

Genesis Plus, Arnold and Frodo

Handy, Boycott Advance and Oswan

MO5 and ViBE

Neopocott and KiGB

In 2003, he created the Emulator Enhancer, a module that added several features and options to his emulators. Regarding utilities, he became known for ROM Info, for the Coleco, Atari Lynx, PCE, SMS/GG, SNES, NES and GB consoles in 1998 and MD, Atari 2600/5200, N64, Bally Astrocade and the PC MSX in 1999, which facilitated the renaming of ROMs by also informing their original name imported in the file itself to facilitate this renaming, as well as joining these ROMs if they were segmented. It supported 14 systems, reading the most diverse formats, and in some cases also compressed ROMs to the g-zip format, used in some emulators for Mac, as was the case with the GB emulators. He also ported Richter Belmont's M1 (Arcade Music Player) to MacOS in 2002.

Jum52, Fuzzbug and SMS Plus

TEO, Thom and Rainbow

TGEmu, Vecx and Oric

Horizon and SimCoupe

RockNES and Modeler

In 1998, at the age of 18, he began working as a support worker for a local internet provider. In June 2002, he graduated in Computer Science, then completed a postgraduate degree. In 2005, he left the provider where he worked and began working as a network engineer for another local company. After 2005, he did not create any new ports, with the exception of Fuzzbug for Spectrum ZX in 2008, most likely due to his current job. Of the emulators ported by Bannister mentioned above, the following remain to this day: Jum52, Nestopia, SMS Plus, TGEmu, Generator, Genesis Plus, O2Em, Oswan, NeoPocott, Boycott Advance, Frodo, Handy, BSNES, Rainbow and Fuzzbug. With the exception of BSNES, all of the original projects no longer exist, and are all continued to this day by Bannister. Nowadays, he also supports these emulators via iPad and iPhone.

Retro Game Bundles

MESS

Nowadays, he no longer charges for his emulators, only earning money with Retro Game Bundles, which are three packages of remakes of famous games created by Bannister. Regarding the emulators he created, we have mainly MESS in 1998, which he created alongside a team of seven people, leaving the project in the same year and taking his place as coordinator, Brad Oliver. And Mugrat in 2003 for ColecoVision, which he maintains to this day.

Emulators:

1996: Virtual Super Wild Card

1997: Frodo, Joyce, vMac, MacSnes97, MO5, SimCoupe

1998: xNes, Hu6280, Boycott, Handy

1999: Generator, DGen, Arnold, Oric,

2000: MESS, RockNES, SMS Plus, Neopocott, ViBE

2001: Modeler, JUM52, TGemu, Boycott Advance, fMSX, O2Em, TEO

2002: Genesis Plus, Oswan

2003: Nestopia, KiGB, Rainbow, Thom, Horizon

2004: Vecx

2005: BSNES

Games:

1997: Space Debris, Star Chaos, Zap'T'Balls, Smashing Windows

1999: Zap'T'Balls II, Smashing Windows II

2004: Brain Box

2020: Atomic Linking, Dangerous Maggots, Fascinating Fruit, Ice Squishing, Little Green Balls, Magnificent Ball, Meteor Field, Paddy the Plumber, Pompom Invaders, Ranger Jim, Shaded Bricks, Space Diamonds, Enigmatic Blocks, Fox and Pigs, ICBMs Inbound, Leaky Nuts, Triple Tint, Vampire Riches, Wacky Snake, Western Galaxy

2021: Ancient Tails, Bright Stones, Burning Turkey, Chicken Rocks, Galactic Dodgems, Hedgehog Happening, Nostalgic Maze, Retro Air Hockey, Shining Gold, Traffic Prince, Superior Solitaire

Applications/Utilities:

1997: ZapResForks, MacBean

1998: ROM Info

2001: Audio Overload

2002: M1, Cacophony

2003: Emulator Enhancer

2021: Anagram Master

Daniel Boris

Daniel L. Boris, or simply Dan Boris, was an important emulator developer and contributor to the second and third generation Atari scene for home consoles. Dan was born in 1968, and in the 1980s, he graduated as an electronics technician. His first contact with emulation was in the late 1980s, with the Atari Xformer emulator. In the 1990s, Dan lived in New Jersey, USA, where he still lives today. In 1996, he discovered Marat Fayzullin's Virtual Gameboy and began to tinker with its source code. That was when his first project was born, working alongside Alex Horby, the Virtual 2600 for Atari 2600 for Linux. He ended up porting the emulator to MS-DOS as Virtual VCS before Alex's version was even released, being the first non-commercial Atari 2600 emulator.

O2EM

Cloak and Dag-ulator

Virtual 7800

Virtual Super System

Virtual VCS

This was his first emulator. He then released, also in 1996, the Virtual Super System for the Atari 5200. In early 1997, he created a simulator for the 6502 microprocessor, called 6502sim. Until then, only emulators for the microprocessor in question had been released, and Dan innovated the scene with his simulator. He then released the Cloak And Dag-ulator emulator, an emulator for the Atari arcade game Clock And Dagger, later incorporated into MAME, a project in which he also began participating in 1997. In the same year, he created the 8048 sound emulator, which emulated the Intel 8048 chip (used in the Odyssey 2) and its variants 8049, 8035, 8039, 8748 and 8749. At the end of 1997, he released the O2EM emulator for the Odyssey 2 console.

Dan Boris's Homepage and AtariAge Websites

6502yes

Intel 8048

In 1999, it released its last emulator, the V7800 for the Atari 7800. At that time, it also participated in the multi-system emulator, MESS. And speaking of the MAME and MESS projects, in MAME, its main milestones were adding the 8039 sound emulator for the Konami 6809 and Irem M63 arcades and classic Nintendo games, such as Donkey Kong, Mario Bros and Donkey Kong Jr. and sound support for the Exidy arcades, both in 1998. In addition, it also supported several specific games from Exidy and other companies, as well as adding several games to the project. He stayed on the project until 2000. In MESS, he added his V7800 emulator in 1999 and several other additions in 2000, sound support for the Arcadia 2001 console in 2005, as well as changes to the drivers for the A7800 and Odyssey 2 consoles in 2012. Dan also helped in the Atari scene, such as the Jum52 projects in 1999 and Kat 5200 in 2005, both for the Atari 5200 and Emu7800 in 2003 for the Atari 7800.

Discrete Logic Simulator

In 2007, he created the Discrete Logic Simulator (DiscreteSIM), a Pong simulator as a way to learn and understand this system, which lacked a CPU and ROM memory, making it difficult to emulate. There was still the simulation, but at the component level, which was the formation of this hardware, it consumed a lot of processing power from the CPU that emulated it, reproducing it slowly. In addition to his personal website, Dan maintains several blogs: Dan's .NET, which talks about programming in general, mainly Microsoft .NET programming; Dan's Starlog, where he posts articles and images from Starlog magazine about science fiction and series and movies; Dan's Digital Archaeology, where he posts various researches of his about old hardware and software; I-295/I-76/Route 42 Direct Connect, where he posts photos and information about the construction of roads and viaducts in the region where he lives, New Jersey; Dan's Astromech Build, a site dedicated to building an astromech like in the Star Wars movies, which Dan has always been a fan of; and WDW From The Air, dedicated to details about Walt Disney World and curiosities about Walt and Disney in general; in addition to the AtariAge Forum, where he posts about classic games.

Emulators:

Virtual 2600 (1996), Virtual Super System (1996), 6502sim (1997), Cloak And Dag-ulator (1997), 8048 (1997), O2EM (1997), V7M800 (1999)

Simulator:

DiscreteSIM (2007)

Martin Korth

No$gmb

Martin Korth is an important creator of console, handheld and PC emulators. Along with Marat Fayzullin, he is one of the greatest emulator creators of all time. Martin was born on June 3, 1972 in Hamburg, Germany. It all started in 1985, when he got his first computer, the MSX, where he began to learn programming. The following year, he also got a CPC Amastrad. From an early age, he learned programming from his father. In 1992, he dropped out of school a year before finishing high school and began to study computers on his own. He also began working with community services at a place near his home called Kurt Juster Heim GmbH. He spent 15 months working there. It was during this phase that he created the Nocash concept, because he did not want to have a career, nor did he want to learn through school or college. Later, he adapted the term Nocash as a statement against consumerism and luxury. Around 1995, he tried to study to become a kindergarten teacher, but did not pursue this career. His real entry into the world of emulation began in 1993, when he began to tinker with the programming of his Gameboy, creating some games for the handheld. In 1994, he began to create a debugger for the handheld, which would be used for his other subsequent projects. In 1995, he began to create the emulator for CPC Amastrad. At the same time, he created emulators for the Z80 and PSG sound processors, which would also be used in the project. At the end of 1995, he released his first emulator, NO$CPC for the CPC Amastrad computer. All of his emulators began with the name NO$ (nocash). In the beginning, he charged for his emulators, later releasing them for free. 

No$2k6, No$msx and No$psx

No$nes, No$zx and No$sns

No$x51 and No$zx8

No$gba and No$c64

After creating CPC, he wanted a GB emulator that would run his games on his 386, but none of the ones available on the market, including Marat Fayzullin's pioneering Virtual Gameboy, were enough for this, so he decided to develop his own emulator. At the end of 1997, his second emulator, NO$GMB, was launched for Gameboy, the most famous of them all (later also supporting GBC). In 1999, it was NO$MSX's turn, created in just five days. The other projects were NO$GBA (supporting NDS in 2005, DSi in 2014 and 3DS in 2019), NO$C64 (from Commodore 64) and NO$ZX81 (from Sinclair ZX80/ZX81 PCS) (and in 2012 becoming NO$ZX, and adding the ZX Spectrum, Lambda (ZX81 clone) and Jupiter ACE systems), all in 2001. In the same year, he created NO$X51, emulating the 80C31/80C51/P8xCE558 microcontrollers, but it had no practical use, as it did not emulate any peripherals. From 2018 onwards, it became an emulator of the AMT630A video chip. Also in 2001, he created his own emulator for the 6502 microprocessor, especially for his Atari 2600 emulator, the NO$2K6, started in 2003 and released in 2005. In 2004, he started the NO$NES project for NES and Disk System, which was released in 2005. At the time, the NO$GEN project for Mega Drive was also mentioned, but we do not know to what extent this is true.

No$fun Website

No$x51

In 2006, he started the NO$SNS project for SNES. It all started in 1999, when he was given a SNES and an SGB to help develop his GB emulator. In 2006, he unearthed the console and decided to work on its emulation. At first, he decided to create an emulator for the console's CPU, since his 6502 emulator, which seemed similar to it, was not suitable as a base. But the biggest problem was the documentation for the physical calculation processors (PPU) and audio processors (APU), and this made him give up on the project. In 2010, he discovered documents from Anomie, a member of the Snes9x and ZSNES projects, that explained the processors in question, and from then on he resumed the project. After getting stuck on some add-ons, he finally released the emulator in 2012. His last project launched began in 2008, the NO$PSX PSX emulator, which was completed over a period of 12 to 15 months. However, the emulator was only released in 2012, as Martin needed a break for his ideas. His emulators were very characteristic, with all the emulation and debugging codes exposed on the home screen. He was also one of the few who studied the physical hardware of the consoles before emulating them. With the exception of the GB, MSX, CPC Amstrad and Commodore 64 emulators, which had their last updates between 2000 and 2005, all the others were updated between 2012 and 2018, with the exception of NO$GBA, which is updated to this day.

IMB.ASC (1997)

Hack (1994)

In addition to Windows versions, some of their emulators also had MS-DOS versions, such as NO$CPC, NO$MSX and NO$GMB (2000), NO$ZX (2001), and NO$2K6, NO$GBA and NO$C64 (2005). Other Windows versions were also released, such as GBA (2008) (Gaming Version) and PSX (2014) (Cut-Down Gaming Version), respectively Gaming Version and Reduced Gaming Version, which show only the standard game window, a compressed version of the emulators. Regarding programs and applications, he created INF.PAS (1993), a Turbo Pascal interpreter for games created by Infocom, XKEY (1993-95), an optimized keyboard driver for the DOS environment, XED (1993-98), a lightweight text editor, Hack (1994-95), a lightweight debugger also for the MS-DOS environment, Reset.com (1998-00), which programs a key combination, similar to Ctrl-Alt-Del, to reset your computer more easily and Shit & Goodbye (1999), a desktop shortcut that automatically shuts down Windows when clicked.

Myrampos and Hardfire

Peep-Show and Starfight (GB)

He also created specific tools for each portable, such as for GBC, where he changed/forked two assemblers A22 and A22I, used in the portable emulator as Z80 assemblers (1997), in addition to having also changed a Z80 disassembler (1999), also for GBC. All were originally created (1993). For CPC Amstrad, such as No$Cart (2000), a tool that converts CPC disk images into CPC Plus/GX 4000 cartridges. For NES, such as PC10 Make (2012), which updates incomplete ROM images of the PlayChoice-10 arcade in .NES format, adding missing encryption data. And for SNES, such as KRom Test and NSS Test (2012), test programs that show unknown details about the Super Famicom Box hardware, used in hotels in Japan, and the Nintendo Super System, an arcade that runs SNES games.

Beamrider, Hero and Magic Floor (SNES)

Regarding documentation and manuals, he released IMB.ASC (1997), a document in German with hardware programming information for IBM computers in ASCII language and SWF-3500 Super Woofer (2012), a schematic and service manual created by Martin for this stereo, in addition to documentation for its emulators, such as NO$GMB (2001), NO$X51 and NO$ZX81 (2002), NO$NES, NO$2K6 and NO$C64 (2006) and NO$SNS and NO$PSX (2012). Martin also created some games, such as Myrampos (1990) for CPC Amstrad, Peep-Show (1992) for GB, under the pseudonym HotTop, Starfight (1999) for GB, ZX81 and NES, Beamrider (2012) and Hero (2012) for ZX81 and Magic Floor (2012), for ZX81, Ace, Atari 2600, SNES, Satellaview, Nintendo Super System, NES, PlayChoice-10, GBA, NDS, DSi and Sony SuperDisc (PSX Prototype), in addition to winning a port in 2018 for GB by Damian Yerrick. In 1993, he developed the Infocom Gameboy (1993-98), an interpreter for Infocom games, which were text-based games, here run inside the Gameboy.

Emulators (Windows):

Z80 (1995), PSG (1995), NO$CPC (1995), NO$GMB (1997), NO$MSX (1999), NO$GBA (2001), NO$C64 (2001), NO$ZX81 (2001 ), NO$X51 (2001), NO$NES (2004), NO$2K6 (2005), NO$SNS (2006), NO$PSX (2008), NO$ZX (ex-NO$ZX81) (2012)

Emulators (MS-DOS):

NO$CPC (2000), NO$MSX (2000), NO$GMB (2000), NO$ZX81 (2001), NO$2K6 (2005), NO$GBA (2005), NO$C64 (2005)

Emulators (Windows - Gaming Version):

NO$GBA (2008), NO$PSX (2014)

Assemblers:

A22 (1997), A22I (1997)

Disassembler:

Z80 (1997)

Games:

Myrampos (1990) (CPC Amstrad), Hardfire (1991) (MS-DOS), Peep-Show (1992) (GB), Infocom Gameboy (1993) (GB), Starfight (1999) (GB, ZX81, NES), Beamrider (2012) (ZX81), Hero (2012) (ZX81), Magic Floor (2012) (ZX81, Ace, A26k, SNES, Satellaview, NSS, NES, PC-10, GBA, NDS, DSi, SuperDisc)

Programs:

INF.PAS (1993), Hack (1994-95), Reset.com (1998-00), Shit & Goodbye (1999), No$Cart (2000), PC10 Make (2012), KRom Test (2012), NSS Test (2012)

Documentation:

IMB.ASC (1997), Pan Docs (GMB) (2001), x51 Specs (2002), ZX Docs (2002), Everynes (2006), 2k6 Specs (2006), Pagezero (C64) (2006), Full SNES ( 2012), PSX-SPX (2012), SWF-3500 Super Woofer (2012)