Editor's Note: Most of the sites mentioned on this page have since moved or shut down.

Why am I writing this? Well, I guess i'd like everybody who visits this site to know how this site came into existence. For me, it started in mid '96 when I was looking for material for a Donkey Kong page to put on my personal site, MEGAߥTE's Homepage, now called 404 Not Found. That page never did get off the ground, but now I have started work on it again to include in my new site, (Nîn-tên'-dö).

Anyway, while browsing the web through Yahoo!, I came across the Classic Donkey Kong Homepage. It had some good information and nice pictures, which I was looking for at the time, but it also had something new to me.. emulators.

At first I thought these screenshots from the different systems were actually from the different systems, but after clicking on the links and browsing a little while, I found out that, no these shots were taken from a PC running these old system programs by something called an 'emulator'.

Well, none of this interested me greatly, partly because I had never heard of half of these systems, and the ones that I had were very obsolete in my view. The first real emulation site I visited was Atmospherical Heights, but all it had were games dating pre-1983.

But then one day I came across a Gameboy emulator. This sparked my interest. Pretty soon I had found a Nintendo emulator and downloaded it, I believe it was Famicom v2.0, and the games didn't work, I think this was because the small ZIP I had downloaded was of .NES ROMs and Famicom requires the .FAM format. I didn't know this at the time and basically became disinterested. I would visit the old Damaged Cybernetics/Archaic Ruins, Node 99, Zophar's Domain, and the like, they had very good information, but still I didn't do much with emulation.

Then Nesticle was released. I tried v0.2 and for what it was at the time, it was GREAT. I started trying other emulators and found out that a great many systems were being emulated. Pretty soon Snes'96 had come out and ROMs were being released like crazy, and it was great.

But many of the best sites had shut down, Damaged Cybernetics, Node 99, and others. Archaic Ruins, Atmospherical Heights, Zophar's Domain, and the new EMU News Service were about the only ones left, and even AR was barely there.. Things were changing, ROM sites like IHOR would go down as fast as they came up. Emulators were being discontinued, Snes'9X comes to mind (though that one is now recontinued :). IRC was filling up with lamers. Shadow of RPGe accurately captured the state of emu in his e-mail sig: "Emulation is a dream quickly being turned into a nightmare." It went on like this for a while, and then I thought that maybe I could make a large emulation archive to keep emulation alive if the rest of the giant emu sites went down.

I didn't want to put such a site on the same server as my personal website because I was afraid that it would eventually get too much traffic and severely lag the server, so I just let the idea sit for a while.

Then I found out that Netside, who I was friends with, had a Simplenet account, meaning unlimited space. He was looking for something to do with his space instead of just having a personal page posted. He had a small downloads page, which I liked, and said maybe he should expand that. He said that he never really liked it, and wanted to do something that nobody had every really put up before. We threw around some ideas, but we found out that people already done them, but some put effort into it, and not others.

Then he said that he would like to do a site with me. I said how about and emulation related site, which he was acquainted with, but did not know a whole lot about. He wasn't sure about because of all of the illegalities involved with ROMs, etc. at first, but I assured him that if we did such a site, I would not put up anything illegal.

Then we came up with the idea of a video game site, involving both emulation and PC games, which he was more familiar with. We decided the basis for content, and recruited some people to work with us on the site. I thought up the name of this site from looking on the back of Nintendo carts, particularly Gameboy. If you look on the back, you'll notice that it says 'Pat. Pend.'

On New Year's Eve, 1997, I designed the original logo. We scavenged the net for the file archives, most of the original files came from Archaic Ruins and CD-ROM.COM. From this we built this site into what it is today. It's far from complete, but still, it has much of what we dreamed it would have. Though, I lost my internet connection two months ago, I will continue, just as the rest of the staff, to bring the best of Video Gaming, be it 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond. As I see it, emulation is the future of the past and we cannot let this future pass.

As another great emulation site, Atmospherical Heights, went down last week, it only makes our job here more important. We will not let gaming die.

--=MEGAߥTE,
March 9, 1998