Monday, January 6, 2025

Emulation Names - Part 24

John Stiles


John Stiles was a game emulator converter and game creator for the Macintosh system. John is originally from Bakersfield, California, USA, and from an early age he was interested in the world of programming, having dedicated himself to learning the programming language known as assembly in high school, mainly with the intention of programming a 68k processor in that language.

MacROT13, Poker, On The Edge, HQXer, French Kiss, Eazy-GZ information and Logo

After that, he began developing applications for the Macintosh system, such as HQXer in 1993, a converter of binary files into text in HQX format to be shared on a network, MacROT13 in 1994, a converter of simple text into the ROT13 encryption format, Logo in 1994, a logo creator in the Windows paintbrush style, French Kiss in 1995, a program that allowed you to dress up animated characters, among others.

PuyoPuyo

Candy Crisis

Skittles

Around 1994, he began writing games, such as MegaDude, which ended up being lost in a hard drive failure, On The Edge, also in 1994, a card game inspired by a homonymous game from a defunct BBS server, PuyoPuyo in 1994, an unofficial version of the famous Compile arcade game, Poker in 1995, another card game, Skittles in 1997, a puzzle game and Candy Crisis in 2000, also a puzzle game. All these projects are added to his website, Emulation On The Macintosh, created around 1993/94, posting ports of third-party emulators for the Macintosh.

Virtual Gameboy

MasterGear

fMSX

Around 1996, John began to create some of these ports, when he partnered with Marat Fayzullin, porting iNes, ColEm, MasterGear, fMSX and VirtualBoy, respectively from NES, Coleco, SMS and GG, MSX and GB. In 1997, his website began to be hosted on Marat's portal. Also in 1997, he created Emulation.net, leaving only the emulation part on it and the other projects on Marat's portal. On his emulation website, he talked about the main 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation consoles, such as the 1st and 2nd generation portables from NEC, Sega, Nintendo and Atari, as well as several PCs from Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Apple, MSX and many others.

iNES

ColEm

FreeMSX

In addition to the ports of Marat's emulators, he was also involved in other projects, such as MacSNES97, a port of Snes97 in 1997, alongside Michael Bytnar, Jeremy Shear and Richard Bannister. In the same year, he ported SNES9X, from the same creator of Snes97 for the Macintosh. This port inspired the creation of the SNES9X Custom emulator, also for the Macintosh in 2003. In 1998, he translated the Japanese FreeMSX Macintosh emulator, based on Marat's fMSX, into English. In mid-1999, he ported SMD's DGen alongside Richard Bannister (the main porter) and Gil Peterson.

DGen and Stella

SNES9X

MacSNES97

In addition, he began to take care of Aaron Giles' port of A26's Stella from 2000 onwards. In addition to emulation, in 1998 he created the Easy-GZ application for Macintosh, a file compressor in the .gz format of gzip, widely used in the Linux system. John mentioned that his main emulator ports ran ROMs in this format. The website was updated until the end of 2004 and taken offline in late 2005. In 2020, John posted on his GitHub (created in 2017) the 6502PPC, an emulation core that he developed in 1996 for the iNes version for MacOS, based on PowerPC, and compiled by the CodeWarrior software. There was a Robert Stiles who also converted emulators for MacOS, but he was not related to John.


Websites Guys, John Stiles' Home Page, Emulation.net, Skittles, Candy Crisis, EasyGZ, The Grabevard, SourceFourge and GitHub

About his academic and professional life, he graduated from the University of California, where he studied between 1996 and 1999. In 1999, he was hired by Future Point, in Riverside, California, as a software engineer intern. His first job was on Warcraft II: Battle Chest in 1999, for Macintosh. He also developed graphics and user interface engines for the game Diablo II in 2000 for Macintosh. These two games were developed for Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard liked John's work and hired him as a software engineer in 2000. John began to participate in several of the company's franchises, such as Diablo, WarCraft, World of WarCraft (WOW) and StarCraft.

Diablo II, Diablo II - Expansion Set, WarCraft - Reign of Chaos, WarCraft - Reign of Chaos (Collector's Edition), World of WarCraft - The Burning Crusade, StarCraft - Wings of Liberty, Diablo III, HearthStone - Heroes of WarCraft, Heroes of The Storm and Overwatch

He worked on the Macintosh versions of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction in 2001, WarCraft III in 2002, World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade in 2007, and Diablo III in 2012. After that, the Macintosh system began to be disregarded by major game producers, due to its low popularity. At this stage, John only worked on Windows games, and only on the WOW franchise. John had already worked on Windows versions since he joined Blizzard, and had worked on practically every Windows version of games released for which he had also worked on the Macintosh versions. In Windows-only franchises, among others, John worked on StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty in 2010, Heartstone: Heroes of WarCraft in 2014, Heroes of the Storm in 2015, and Overwatch in 2016.

Blizzard Entertainmant, Google, Google Tag Manager and Skia Websites

Within Blizzard, in addition to being a software engineer, he was a senior software engineer from 2006 onwards. In 2018, he left the company and went to work at Google, in Irvine, California, as a senior engineer on Google Tag Manager, a tag manager for websites and applications. Also in 2018, he began working on the Skia project, also at Google, a 2D graphics library that provides graphics engines for software and hardware, such as Google Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, Firefox and others. In 2020, he ended his activities at Google Tag, remaining only at Skia. That year, he moved to another Google branch, on the other side of the country, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Applications:
HQXer (1993), MacROT13 (1994), Logo (1994), French Kiss (1995), Easy-GZ (1998)

Games (Macintosh):
On The Edge (1994), PuyoPuyo (1994), Poker (1995), Skittles (1997), Candy Crisis (2000)

Emulators:
iNes (1996), ColEm (1996), MasterGear(1996), fMSX(1996), VirtualBoy (1996), MacSNES97 (1997), SNES9X (1997), FreeMSX (1998), DGen (1999), Stella (2000)

Games (Miscellaneous):
Macintosh: WarCraft II: Battle Chest (1999), Diablo II (2000), Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (2001), WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos (Collector's Edition) (2002), WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002), World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade (2007), Diablo III (2012)
Windows: WarCraft II: Battle Chest (1999), Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (2001), WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002), World of WarCraft (2004), World in Conflict (2007), World of WarCraft: Wrath of the Lich King (2008), World in Conflict: Soviet Assault (2009), StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010), World of WarCraft: Cataclysm (2010), Diablo III (2012), World of WarCraft: Mists of Pandaria (2012), World of WarCraft: Warlords of Draenor (2014), Hearthstone: Heroes of WarCraft (2014), Diablo III: Reaper of Souls (2014), StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void (2015), Heroes of the Storm (2015), Overwatch (2016), World of WarCraft: Legion (2016), StarCraft II: Nova Covert Ops - Mission Pack 3 (2016), StarCraft: Remastered (2017), World of WarCraft: Battle for Azeroth (2018)
PS4: Diablo III: Reaper of Souls - Ultimate Evil Edition (2014)

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