Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: "John Blackburne" Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: N64 on the PC Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 22:08:43 +0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 25 Message-ID: <78tbfg$ccr9@chuka.playstation.co.uk> References: <78qua8$ccr1@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <78sf9o$ccr2@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <78sm7j$ccr3@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <78sml6$ccr4@chuka.playstation.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: th-pm01-38.ndirect.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 4.5 (0410) > I haven't heard anything about an N64 emulator, I have heard about bleem > though. Any more information about it? Is it a 'proper' product or a > underground thing? I've also heard about it: as best I can tell it's an 'underground' effort, and is likely to stay that way, i.e. no right-minded company is going to attach their name to it. The problem is that the only way an N64 emulator works on a PC is using images of N64 cartridges. Previously N64 piracy has been limited to people with specialist hardware, e.g. CD burners and 'doctor' peripherals. An N64 emulator broadens the market for N64 ROM images to everyone with a PC. As N64 carts contain at most tens of MB of data, comparable to PC demos, they can be easily downloaded. If this emulator does well it will provide a massive boost to the N64 piracy market. Compare this to the PSX: as the medium is CD-ROMS emulators can run legitimate PSX disks, and an emulator can be written to reject gold/pirate disks. Few people have the bandwidth or disk space to download CD-ROM sized images, and the hardware and software required to duplicate PSX disks is not widespread. Connectix are putting this to the test by releasing an emulator that is commercial and respects Sony's territorial lockout and anti-piracy policies. If they don't succeed in this venture I imagine no one else will try. And I can't imagine an N64 emulator succeeding for a long time - at least until the N64 is as historic as those platform MAME emulates today. John