Emulation Names - Part 13

Rasky

Giovanni Bajo, also known as Rasky, was a PSX emulator developer. He was born in Florence, Italy in 1979, and in 1992, at the age of 12, he began coding on his Commodore 64. In 1997, he began programming games for Windows, such as Tony Tough in 1997, Tsunami 2265 in 2002, Prezzemolo in 2003 and Tony Tough 2 in 2006. His first project in the world of emulation was alongside Stefano Crosara, also known as Moonshado, in early 1998, creating Psyke. At the end of the year, the two left for Duddie's PSEmu project, but continued with their Psyke project.

Prezzemolo, Tony Tough 1 and 2 and Tsunami 2265

Psyke

In PSEmu, he contributed by sharing Psyke code to help the project. In early 1999, he left the PSEmu project and then closed Psyke. After leaving the emulation world, he continued using his nickname, Rasky, in his professional career. Regarding help for other emulation projects, in 1998 he helped with the FoxFire video plug-in, FoxFire OpenGL, for PSEmu, helped with some bugs, also in 1998, the MasterGear SMS emulator released for the PSX console a year earlier, and finally helped the PSX emulator, AdriPSX in 1999, with codes for his emulator, Psyke.

PSEmu Pro (PSX)

Website, GreenApes, Team Digitale and Develer

Later, he moved on to developing software for Linux. He was also one of the pioneers of the Python programming language in Italy, having participated and even led Italian institutions (Python Italia Association) and European institutions (EuroPython and EuroPython Society) on the subject. He also promoted technology conferences in Italy and abroad (Better Software, Better Embedded, QtDay and Golab). For two years (2016-18) he was the creator of digital public services in the Digital Transformation Team (Team Digitale) of an Italian Prime Minister. The company worked on programming and project management, and Giovanni's role was as CTO. He also works at Develer, a software producer, and GreenApes, creating applications, games and media to educate people about the environment. In addition to his work in companies, he has also developed several software programs independently throughout his career.

Cen64 and R64Emu

Giovanni also has a GitHub account, created in 2003. There, he posts dozens of projects. His favorite pastime is creating games for the Nintendo 64. Among them, we highlight CZ80 in 2014, a compact emulator written in C++, based on Marat Fayzullin's Z80, with the goal of ideal speed and much more sustainable compact code, R64Emu in 2018, an emulator that does not yet run games, written in Rust, code developed by Mozilla that brings greater security and performance to the process, with the goal of perfect emulation of all processors and devices of the console, and with the implementation of the N64 System Bench to test the performance and efficiency of the emulation, G64Drive in 2019, a tool for Windows, Linux and Macintosh to handle the 64Drive Retroactive, a cartridge with memory card support to run games on the console, CEN64 in 2021, a NeoGeo emulator for N64, LibDragon Cli in 2021, a tool to manage the development of homebrew projects (games) for N64, through LibDragon, a software development kit (SDK), N64 PI DMA Test in 2021, a data flow tester between the PI (interface processor), which takes care of input devices (cartridges), and the DMA, which is the console's main memory, N64 System Bench in 2021, a prototype of what would be a hardware performance testing tool, such as CPU, RSP, PI and RDRAM, testing speed of operations, transfers and vector calculations, for example, developed alongside Hacktarux, creator of the classic Mupen64 emulator (the father of Mupen64Plus), N64 System Crash in 2022, a hardware failure tester, N64 VI Image Size in 2023, is a ROM to test the size of the console's VI (Video Interface) image, a component responsible for the format and size of the console's video output image, this ROM, most likely used for creating games, and N64 Corruption Bug in 2024, a repository, showing bugs that can happen in the RDRAM processes, which are data movements between the main memory and the CPU and video core processors, and RSP DMA, which talks the console's geometry processor with the non-core processors.

NDSMe (NDS)

Outside the Nintendo 64 world, he also created some game emulators, such as Pacman in 2014, an arcade Pacman emulator for reverse engineering training, Genemu in 2014, a Mega Drive emulator created just to explain how emulation concepts work, and NDSEmu in 2017, an emulator for the Nintendo DS handheld still in the development phase, with only a few games working and written in Go (Google's programming language).

CryptoFaxPA

And finally, it created various utilities and programs, such as Golomb Coded Sets in 2011, a data structure used to save space, used in caching, spam filters, duplication (process of eliminating duplicate data) and others, also bringing the option to search this data, Trello-HipChat in 2012, a project that integrates the Trello platforms, for reminders and notes, and HipChat, for corporate communication, making notifications from Trello automatically sent to HipChat, Gevent Connection Pool in 2012, is basically a connection manager, built with the Gevent library, to manage multiple TCP connections (reliable data connection between two devices), used mainly in high-performance servers, GO LZO in 2015, is the application of LZO, an algorithm that works on lossless data compression, in the Golang programming language, from Google (known as Go), used in internet servers or systems of large volumes of data, CryptoFaxPA in 2018, a software based on hardware of the same name, to work with encrypted transactions through blockchain, that is, the data is encrypted by the hardware, transmitted to another device via micro USB and read by the software in question, unlike the classic version of the hardware, CryptoFax, which issued encryptions through physical prints, among others. In many of his projects, he worked a lot with programming in C+, C++ and Go (Golang).

Giovanni Bajo and Alessandra Bajo

In his private life, he is married to Alessandra Bajo, whom he met in 2002.

Emulators:

Psyke (1998), PSEmu (1998), CZ80 (2014), Pacman (2014), Genemu (2014), NDSEmu (2017), R64Emu (2018), CEN64 (2021)

Applications/Utilities:

Golomb Coded Sets (2011), Trello-HipChat (2012), Gevent Connection Pool (2012), GO LZO (2015), CryptoFaxPA (2018)

Tools (N64):

G64Drive (2019), N64 PI DMA Test (2021), N64 System Bench (2021), N64 System Crash (2022), N64 VI Image Size (2023), N64 Corruption Bug (2024)

Moonshade

Stefano Crosara, Moonshado (mOoNsHaDoOo), started on the PSX Psyke project, alongside Rasky in early 1998. Also with Rasky, he went to the PSEmu project, also on PSX, at the end of the year, contributing to Rasky's code. He stayed on the PSEmu project until early 1999. Months later, he also ended his Psyke project. Moon also helped with FoxFire's video plug-in, FoxFire OpenGL, for PSEmu in 1998. In 1998, he also developed some games.

Psyke (PSX) and Stefano Crosara (1998)

PSEmu Pro

He later studied technology at the Galileo Galilei Industrial Technical Institute in Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, where he currently lives. In his professional career, he worked at Paolo Barsotti Software Livorno (2002-08) as a programmer analyst and systems engineer, developing systems management programs for IBM, Windows Server/2K/XP and others. Chemical Controls SRL (2008-16) as a programmer analyst, developing 3D drivers and applications in C++ for .NET Framework, iOS, Android and Java.

GitHub, Datach Technologies, and Chemical Controls websites

Passione Amiga (Magazine)

DataCH Technologies (2016-present), as a senior programmer, doing basically the same work he did at SRL, but focused on port security and protection. At this company he was a senior programmer. In 2021, he started working as an editor for Passiona Amiga magazine, talking about another of his passions, computers and old operating systems.

MarranoFTP-Amiga, DOSEmu-iOS and iAmigaMS

Speaking of which, he also developed some software for classic systems, such as Spy-MS-DOS (1996-97), a TSR (programs that ran within MS-DOS) for spying on MS-DOS systems, MarranoFTP-Amiga (2006-08), an FTP client for the ArOS and PorphOS systems (which are compatible with Amiga PCs and PowerPCs), and classic system software for iOS, such as iAmigaMS (2011) for Amiga (a port of iAmiga) and DOSEmu-iOS (2011), a port of DOSBox for iOS. Stefano created forks of several projects between 2008 and 2022, such as C64Emu-iOS for Commodore 64, UAE4ARM for Amiga for Raspberry Pi, ScummVM for AmigaOS 3, game emulators such as GBA4iOS, NDS4iOS, NDS4droid, MAME4Apple, MAME4iOS, iNDS, as well as the 1981 game Defender for Windows and Linux and the Amiga Enforcer debugger for Amiga, however, none of them had any update or release, being just a textual replica of the original versions. All these releases and forks were posted on GitHub, totaling 23 projects in all. At the time of writing, he was still updating his projects on GitHub.

Programs:

Spy-MS-DOS (1996), MarranoFTP-Amiga (2006), iAmigaMS (2011), DOSEmu-iOS (2011)

Emulators:

Psyke (1998), PSEmu Pro (1998)

Plugins:

FoxFire OpenGL (1998)

After

NRST Frontend

Nach MS was a major contributor to SNES projects. He was born in Israel, and around 2003, he was working at the Jerusalem College of Technology. Unfortunately, we couldn't find much information about him. He helped with the Snes9x projects in 2003, 2006 and 2007, and ZSNES and SNEeSe in 2004, with revisions, corrections and additions. Some of his work on Snes9x was carried over to the BSNES emulator, such as the 2003 and 2006 updates to the CX4 and DSP-4 chips, respectively. Nach also contributed directly to the project, creating the ZIP compressed file reader, ZIPReader in 2005, creating the JMA compressed file reader, JMAReader in 2005, changing several files in the zLib library used in the emulator in 2005, and making adjustments to the graphical interface that uses the GTK library in 2006. In 2003, Nach became known for creating the NSRT program, which is a utility for modifying SNES ROMs.

SNEeSe, Snes9x and ZSNES

NSRT Websites

It can rename, compress, decompress, split, merge, patch, deinterlace, generate ROM lists, add and remove headers to ROMs, check for duplicates, add and remove headers to IPSs, etc. The application was released for Windows, MacOS, Linux, MS-DOS and Solaris and was updated until 2004. The working group for this application was called the NSRT Team, with a website (2003), and a forum replacing the website (2004). The forum existed until 2007. In addition to NSRT, Nach was part of the JTT (Jerusalem Tracking Tool) project in 2003, together with Yedidia Klein, a task tracking tool with a full English and Hebrew interface. It was developed and used at the Jerusalem College of Technology in Jerusalem, Israel, a university of science and technology education, where Nach worked (and probably studied). In 2005, he helped with the MinGW project, a program with development and source code compilation tools, being a port of the GNU tools from Linux to Windows. In 2007, he joined the VBA-M project, alongside Zach Thibeau, Squall Leonhart and others, being part of the third team (the VBA-M Development Team), to update the VirtualBoyAdvance emulator.

Emulation Projects:

Snes9x (2003), ZSNES (2004), SNEeSe (2004), VBA-M (2007)

Programs:

NSRT (2003), JTT (2003), ZIPReader (2005), JMAReader (2005)

Overload

Super Sleuth

Kris Bleakley, also known as Overload, is a SNES emulation personality. Kris was born in Australia and has been involved in computer programming since 1985. He has a degree in Computer Science and is active in reverse engineering. He began developing his emulator (Super Sleuth) in 1998, during the boom of the SNES emulation scene.

Snes9x v1.51

Snes9x: Credits and Chips DSP-1 to 4, Arrow ST-010, C4 and OBC1

After a hiatus of years, in 2002 he brought some updates to the project. In mid-2003, he joined the Snes9x project, helping, among other things, with special chips for the console. Kris created the Snes9x DSP Project, helping to develop the documentation for the special SNES chips, including the DSPs, ST-010 and OBC1. The team that worked on this development, of which Kris was a part, was called the Snes9x DSP Team.

BSNES: Chips DSP-1 to 4, ST-010 and C4

MAME: DSP-1 to 4 chips and Arrow ST-010

The chips that Kris participated in emulating were taken to the SNES emulator, BSNES in 2004, being the DSPs 1, 2, 3 and 4, St-010, and two that were not for the Snes9x, which were the S-DSP and the Cx4. As for the OBS1 that was for the Snes9x, it was not for the BSNES. Overload also contributed directly to the BSNES project, with information on DRAM refresh in PAL systems in 2005, that is, a way to keep data in the SNES memory, such as graphics, sounds and data, without them being lost, and with the graphical interface that uses the GTK library and the 'About' window in the interface in 2006. In the MAME project, its chips were also present, in the years 2005 (DSP-1), 2008 (DSP-2, OBC-1) and 2009 (DSP-3, DSP-4 and ST-010).

Kindred

Kindred: DSP Docs

Kris remained with the Snes9x emulator project until mid-2006, and with the Snes9x DSP Project until 2011. In 2004, he finally released his own SNES emulator, Super Sleuth. The project had versions released until 2008, with the last version being updated until 2011. In 2013, Kris created Kindred, a multi-emulator that ran NES, SNES, GB, SMS, the IBM PC AT and IBM PC XT PCs, and silent support for the WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color handhelds.

Retro Store, Scans, Kindred and Super Sleuth websites

Snes9x DSP Team Websites

Its latest version was released in 2019 and was updated until 2020. It also had plans to include Commodore PCs, GBC, GBA, NDS handhelds, and the MD console. Numerically, that is, in version numbering, it followed where the numbering of the last version of Super Sleuth had left off, and was considered a continuation or update of the SNES emulator. Alongside the emulators, there was a virtual retrogame store called Retro Store from 2016 to 2020.

Emulators:

Super Sleuth (2004), Kindred (2013)

Chips:

DSP-1 (2003), DSP-2 (2003), DSP-3 (2003), DSP-4 (2003), ST-010 (2003), S-DSP (2004), CX4 (2004)

Nitsuja

Genes Re-Recoding

Nitsuja (also known as nitsujrehtona), pseudonym of Sabih Khairullah, was another figure who left his mark on the world of emulation, mainly working on hacked versions/forks of original projects. A resident of Hamburg, Germany and of Muslim descent, Nitsuja began his history in the gaming world in 2004, when the TAS scene began on the internet, a timed game competition, the famous speedruns. That year, Nitsuja created the Speedruns website, where his gameplays and those of third parties were posted. The website competed with Nesvideos, in which Nitsuja also participated and contributed through its forum.

Speedruns, Nesvideos and WebNations websites

In 2006, Nesvideos became TASVideos. That year, Nitsuja also created his own YouTube channel to post his videos and those of his colleagues, WebNations (the same name as his private website dedicated to creating websites). In 2011, Speedruns ended, and Nitsuja remained only on TASVideos. It was during the era of speedrun websites that he also began his emulation phase. The first project we have information about his work was Gens Re-Recording in 2004, which was an alteration of the Gens MD emulator for recording gameplays. The main recording formats were AVI and MPEG-2. He was in charge of this project until 2013.

TASVideos Forum

HOW To Compile FCEU In Windows

At the time, he was part of the TASVideos forum, an important gameplay publishing site. He was on the forum from 2004 to 2011. In 2005, he contributed to the NES FCEU projects, with the default_nitsuja.pal palette and the .txt HOW To Compile FCEU In Windows. In 2008, he created another palette for the projects, nitsuja_new.pal. All of these palettes were used in several forks of the project over time.

FCEU Re-Recording

Snes9x v1.51

In 2012, these palettes were also implemented in the BizHawk multi-emulator. In 2006, he began to take care of the FCEU Re-Recording project alongside Luke, after the departure of Blip, with some updates. In 2007, he joined the Snes9x team, being responsible for the project only in version 1.51. Among his contributions, he made several fixes to video recording, joystick, netplay, GUI, cheat settings, as well as additions such as EPX, HQ, TV and DM filters, save state support for DSP-1 and SuperFX chips, among others.

VBA Re-Recording

Snes9x Re-Recording

In 2009, he was part of the TASTools project, a tool to help create gameplay videos and post them on the TASVideos website. He was part of the project until 2011. Also in 2009, he was part of the VBA-RR project for Gameboy Advance, where he was the project leader, and the SNES9X-RR (known as Interim) project for SNES, where he was part of the project. Both projects added a recording function (known here as ReRecording).

Google Code: FCEU, Gens Re-Recording, VBA Re-Recording and Hourglass Win32

He worked at VBA-RR until 2010, and at SNES9X-RR until 2011. Nitsuja was part of the main ReRecording projects in emulators. In 2011, he created the Hourglass-win32 software, a program that simulates the functions of an emulator for native Windows games, with time acceleration and reduction, pause, game reversion to a previous stage, video recording in AVI, among others. His last content posted, both on the TASVideos website and on the WebNations channel, was in 2018. An interesting fact. Nitsuja actually means “to Justin” spelled backwards. There was another TASVideos user called nitsujirehtona, from Berkeley, California, USA, who joined the site’s forum in 2007 and also participated in the FCEU ReRecording project in 2008. This is not Nitsuja, but his pseudonym was created in his honor, with the backwards spelling of “Another Justin”, which means “Another Just One”, in allusion to the one who gives this article its name. After 2008, nitsujirehtona was never heard of again.

Emulators:

Gens Re-Recording (2004), FCEU Re-Recording (2006), Snes9x 1.51 (2007), VBA-RR (2009), SNES9X-RR (2009)

Others:

default_nitsuja.pal palette (2005), HOW To Compile FCEU In Windows (2005), nitsuja_new.pal (2008), TASTools (2009)

Programs:

Hourglass-win32 (2011)