Emulation Names - Part 17

Jeremy Koot

Jerremy Koot, known as The Teacher, was born in Zoetermeer, in the province of South Holland, in the Netherlands. As a youth, he attended Pascal College in the city of Zaandam, in the metropolitan area of ​​Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He was responsible for creating Snes96, one of the first SNES emulators in history. It was created in 1996, and soon left aside by its creator, who left it in the hands of Gary Henderson. Gary developed the project on his own, when Jerremy created Snes97 the following year. Later, Gary merges his new Snes96 code into 97, but again Jerry becomes discouraged and abandons the 97 version of the emulator.

Snes96 (MS-DOS and Windows)

Gary continued to work on Snes96 until the middle of the year, when the Virtual Super Wild Card SNES emulator was finished and released its source code, then Gary and Jerremy took that code, plus their experience with Snes96 and 97, and created Snes9x. This was completed in late 1997. The project was groundbreaking. It was the first free and functional SNES emulator for Windows, the first SNES emulator to feature NetPlay, and the first to emulate the special S-RTC chip that ran the game Dai Kaijuu Monotarari II.

Snes97 ( MS-DOS and Windows)

In parallel with the project, around 1997, he participated in the emulation portal Damaged Cybernetics, which was very well-known at the time. Jerremy left the SNES9X project around 1999/2000, due to lack of time due to his professional activities. The last version of the emulator was released in late 2001. After that, the project was headed by third parties. Jerremy, despite no longer participating in the development of SNES9X, remained until early 2003 updating the emulator's website, passing it on to Funkyass in the middle of the year.

Snes9x

In parallel with the project, around 1999/2000, Jerremy managed a gaming website called OnlineCombat, together with a group. In 2004, he managed another website called Back Up Universe, but we don't know what it was about. Regarding his career, he worked remotely for many foreign companies. In the Netherlands, I believe he worked in all of them in person, and continued to live in Zoetermeer. In 1996, he joined Loyens & Volkmaars (The Hague, Netherlands) as an intern, working as an application manager in the area of ​​tax law.

Snes96 and Snes97 and Snes9x websites

In 1998, he joined Quercus (Obornicka, Poland) as a software developer, staying there until 1999. He later worked as a software developer for three other companies: Lemontree (Stockholm, Sweden), only in 2000, Alex Beleggersbank (Amsterdam, Netherlands) from 2000 to 2008, working on the company's website, and OneDev (Rotterdam, Netherlands) from 2001 to 2004. Also in 2001, he worked at Strictly IT (Zoetermeer, Netherlands), developing .NET software as a freelancer, such as the Net Framework, for example, until 2008.

Damaged Cybernetics, GitHub and Online Combat websites

And finally 80dB (Amsterdam, Netherlands), where he spent twelve years of his life, where he worked as a leader and creator of the main .NET software projects. As he himself said: "It's not just a job, it's a passion!" At the end of 2020, he left the company, going, in early 2021, to Online Seminar (Amsterdam, Netherlands), a company that provides services to the financial, healthcare, IT, media, training and government sectors.

Companies Loyens & Volkmaars, Quercus, Lemontree, Alex Beleggersbank, OneDev, 80dB and Online Seminar

To this end, Jerremy, as head of digital innovations, works to improve new technologies and tools to make life easier for his customers, including work in AI, machine learning and data analysis. He will leave the company in early 2023. Regarding his personal life, in 2015, he married Russian Olga Chishuina-Koot, and continues to live in Zoetermeer. In 2017, his son Alexandre was born, and in 2021, his daughter Anna-Sofia.

Emulators:

Snes96 (1996), Snes97 (1997), Snes9x (1997)

Gary Henderson

Snes9x

Gary Henderson (of English origin) appeared on the emulation scene in 1996, when Jerremy Koot gave up his SNES emulator, Snes96, and handed it over to Gary to take care of. In 1997, Jerremy created Snes97 and called Gary to help him, but he also gave up the job. In parallel, Gary continued to maintain Snes96, having rewritten its source code and released several versions for other operating systems. In mid-1997, Gary managed to develop sound support with the help of other emulators in the SNES scene.

Snes96

Snes97

At the end of 1997, he met with Jerremy, and together with the source code of Virtual Super Wild Card, a SNES emulator that had been closed earlier that year, plus all the knowledge they had developed with Snes96 and 97, they created the infamous Snes9x, the first free and functional SNES emulator for Windows. Despite its greatness, they were greatly helped by ZSNES, its competitor in DOS mode. 

Docs: Snes96, Snes9x and Visual Boy Advance

Although most of the special SNES chips came from the ZSNES, many of them were rewritten by Gary in C language, as was the case with the Super FX, DSP-1 and C4. The emulator ceased operations in late 2001, after which it was taken over by a third party, and Gary completely retired from the project and the world of emulation. His work was present in other emulators, such as the GBA Visual Boy Advance in 2001, where he contributed the SNES9X core, and the code for the SuperFX and DSP1 emulators. We do not have any personal information about Gary.

Emulators:

Snes96 (1996), Snes97 (1997), Snes9x (1997)

Ryphecha

Mednafen: GBA, NES, SNES and SMD

Ryphecha is the creator of one of the largest multi-emulators in existence, Mednafen. The project began in 2005 under the name Nintencer, an NES emulator. The following month, Ryphecha transformed his emulator into Mednafen, adding several consoles from Nintendo, Atari and NEC. A curiosity about the name of your emulator, which means My Emulator Doesn't Need A Frickin' Excellent Name. Such an imposing name with such a simple meaning lol.

Nintencer and Mednafen (Website and Forum)

bNES (Logo and LibRetro)

His project still exists today, and over time he also added consoles from Bandai, Sega and Sony, among the most famous portable and home consoles. Outside of Mednafen, he helped in the Temper PCE projects in 2009, alongside Exophase, for the GP2X portable and the BNES NES project in 2011, alongside Byuu for his BSNES emulator. BNES later gained a port to RetroArch in 2012.

Themaister

Hans-Kristian Arntzen, known as Themaister, was born in 1990 in Trondheim, Norway. Between 2004 and 2006, in high school, he began to dabble in programming. At that time, he began to take an interest in emulators. In 2010, he created the SSNES project, which is a front-end used to access the core of the BSNES emulator, which in turn is transformed into a core and executed within the LibSNES API, a back-end library also created by Hans to act as an intermediary between the front-end and emulation cores. The SNES9X emulator implements the LibSNES API, which Hans also ported to his project in 2011. Hans modified his front-end and API for RetroArch and LibRetro, releasing them in 2012 under the name RetroArch.

RetroArch ( Interface and ParaLLEl-RDP/N64)

This emulator, in turn, ran several other emulators and systems, such as SNES, NES, GBA, GB/GBC, Genesis and several Final Burn Alpha games. LibRetro connects to the emulators, now called cores, and runs them on the RetroArch front-end. In 2014, the emulator's front-end gained its own operating system based on Linux and with a web designer, called Lakka. Over time, several other consoles and portable devices were added to the emulator, becoming the largest multi-emulator in the world. Despite having a large core of work, it sometimes develops its own projects within the emulator, such as in 2011, when it ported Snes9x to the project, updating it until 2017, and in 2020, when it created the ParaLLEl-RDP plug-in for the N64's RDP processor through Mupen64Plus-Next, a fork of Mupen64Plus created especially for RetroArch.

Themaister's Den and Maister's Graphics Adventures websites

RetroArch Website

LibRetro Website 

Regarding the project website, initially, in 2011, Hans's personal website, Themaister's Den, was used until 2014. In 2011/2012, he created the website libretro.org (in 2013, becoming libretro.com) to publicize the technical part of the project. In 2014, he stopped updating the project on his personal website and created retroarch.com, where he only updated the download, tutorial and publicity parts of the project. The project forum started in 2012, also on Hans's official page, lasting until 2013, being transferred at the end of the year to the website libretro.com. The project still exists today.

GitHub

Outside of RetroArch, he created several projects, all of them posted on his GitHub, which in turn was created in 2009. We started with audio libraries, such as RSound in 2010, a sound library with several features, such as the possibility of playing sounds from one computer to another through a local network, an easy interface for implementing sounds in programs, designed for several platforms, such as Linux, MacOS, BSD systems and others, and is a useful library for games and emulators, such as emulators for the Playstation 3 operating system, DirectRSound in 2011, is a reinterpretation of some DirectSound functions within the RSound library so that it can be functional on the Windows system, LibMaru in 2012, is a library that serves to take control of a USB sound card, without needing to install a driver, based on LibUSB, which works in these contexts on USB devices in general, being useful for different platforms, such as Linux, MacOS and Windows, and LibFMSynth in 2014, a C library that implements an FM synthesizer, suitable for generating sounds from synthesizers or digital instruments.

RSound

LibSNES and LibFMSynth

In terms of different libraries, we have SimpleGL in 2011, a graphics library that simplifies the use of OpenGL (graphics creator), MuFFT in 2015, a library based on FFT, which works by improving noise and pixels in digital signals, such as in audio and digital images, applying the method of working in dimensions, accelerating this process, and GLFFT in 2015, a library similar to MuFFT, however, working with image processes on the GPU through OpenGL, which accelerates the process, adding filters and improving compression of the displayed images. We also had projects for OpenGL, such as Boxes in 2011, an experiment with OpenGL 4.3, focusing on better efficiency in the construction of 3D graphics, with choice of what should be drawn on the screen, improving performance, replica of a single object, helping in the creation speed, images ignored outside the camera's view, bringing better graphics speed, and different levels of detail of an object depending on the angle from which it is viewed, helping in graphics performance, with the project being displayed in the LibRetro interface through RetroArch, and GL Model Viewer in 2011, a viewer of 3D models written in OpenGL 3.0+.

forLLel-RDP and Granite

Many projects for RetroArch have also been posted on their GitHub. Among them, RetroArch D3D9 in 2011, a DirectX 9 external drive plugin for RetroArch, RetroArch-Phoenix in 2011, a front-end for the emulator built with the Phoenix framework, which brings its own components for this, such as window management, buttons, menus and other visual elements, RetroArch DSP Plugins in 2012, DSP audio plugins for RetroArch, and ParaLLEl-N64 in 2017, a rewrite/optimization of Mupen64Plus-Next created for LibRetro. Creations related to the FFmpeg player include LibRetro FFmpeg in 2013, a media player based on FFmpeg, an open-source command-line player ported to LibRetro/RetroArch, and SLIMPlayer in 2014, a simple and lightweight media player also based on FFmpeg. Some homebrew games include Dinothawr in 2010, a block-pushing puzzle game that was the first standalone game developed under the LibRetro library, and SFC-Pong in 2011, a pong game for the SNES. SNES-related projects include SSNES in 2010, a front-end for BSNES that later evolved into the RetroArch front-end, and BSNES-QT in 2010, a fork of BSNES version 0.73.

Dinothawr (2010)

And finally, various projects, which also have their importance, such as LibRetro RemoteJoy in 2012, an upgrade of improvements to the RemoteJoy client, used in portable devices, such as PSP, to transmit games to a PC in a more integrated way and with better performance, Emulator Shader Pack in 2013, which adds shading effects to old emulators, Midiviz in 2016, a simple MIDI visualizer, RetroWarp in 2019, is the implementation of AMD's Vulkan graphics API in generic GPUs for old games, bringing improvements to the images of old games, MIPS LLVM Jitter in 2019, is a tool that converts programs (mainly games) written for RISC processors to run on more modern systems, such as Linux for example, optimized by the LLVM compiler, among others, Granite in 2021, which is a custom rendering of the 3D graphics API, Vulkan, among others.

ARM Norway AS and Arntzen Software As

He has also contributed to other projects, such as Final Burn Alpha, fixing 64-bit codes in 2011 and implementing and updating LibSNES in the emulator in 2012, and making contributions to Snes9x in 2016. In his personal life, he graduated from university in the early 2010s, and went to work at ARM Norway AS, as a senior engineer, working on CPUs and APIs, staying with the company from 2014 to 2018. He also holds a master's degree in digital signal processing from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and a bachelor's degree in electronic science from the University of Southeastern Norway. Since 2020, he has his own website called Arntzen Software As, focused on high-quality programming services, specializing in 3D graphics and engine programming, and software programming for desktop and mobile platforms.

Aperture Desk Job (2022)

In 2022, he was part of the development of the Windows game Aperture Desk Job for Steam's portable, the Steam Desk, by Valve Corporation, a company from Washington, USA, known for franchises such as Half-Life, Counter Strike, Left 4 and Team Fortress.

Emulators:

SSNES (2010), BSNES-QT (2010), RetroArch (2012)

Audio Libraries: 

RSound (2010), DirectRSound (2011), LibMaru (2012), LibFMSynth (2014)

Games:

Dinothawr (2010), SFC-Pong (2011), Aperture Desk Job (2022)

Libraries:

SimpleGL (2011), LibRetro (2012), MuFFT (2015), GLFFT (2015)

OpenGL: 

Boxes (2011), GL Model Viewer (2011)

RetroArch/LibRetro:

RetroArch D3D9 (2011), RetroArch-Phoenix (2011), RetroArch DSP Plugins (2012), ParaLLEl-N64 (2017), ParaLLEl-RDP (2020)

Others:

LibRetro RemoteJoy (2012), Emulator Shader Pack (2013), Midiviz (2016), RetroWarp (2019), MIPS LLVM Jitter (2019), Granite (2021)

FFmpeg: 

LibRetro FFmpeg (2013), SLIMPlayer (2014)