Welcome to part 2 of my “Memoir” about how I came to be a hacker. Not much changed for me over the course of the next 10 years, in terms of “hacking” per se. I did get a PS1 in 1997 which will play a role much later in this story, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. Things would change in the fall of 2006 when my brother began attending Highschool.

My brother is a technically inclined individual (more math and business-focused) and as such, he was taking business and technology courses at our High School. It should be noted that he is 3 years older than me, so I received some of the discoveries that he brought home. For his Java course, he required a USB Flash Drive and was taking advantage of the Eclipse IDE. The flash drive was significantly more expensive than it would be today, at the time costing nearly $40 for either 128 or 256 MB of memory. Yes, you read that right, MB of memory, not GB. It was a silver Lexar drive with a blue LED, but it would be that very drive that provided me the first big foot forward.

Like most students, if you give us a computer we’re likely going to try to circumvent the rules. This was the case for a group of my brother’s peers. As it turns out, the IT Department of the School District was not exactly up to par. They had allowed access to School and District-wide shared Windows Drives on student accounts. Seeing that one could share files that way, soon there were several games copied to the directory, as well as at least one emulator.

One evening my brother brought home a couple of files to mess around with, and what I saw blew my mind. Upon plugging the drive into our family computer, he began to load up a program that I soon became quite familiar with SNES9X.

I saw him start up a game that I was only familiar with playing over at my friend’s house, years earlier: Super Mario World. I was astonished to see our family computer, running a game that would otherwise only be possible on an actual Super Nintendo! I asked him what this miraculous software was called, he spoke to me the one word that would set the course for my next several years: Emulator.

If for some reason you do not know what an emulator is, in short, it is a piece of software that “emulates” the function of a given piece of hardware, or in some cases, software. What he had shown me was a Super Nintendo Emulator that effectively provided us with a game console we didn’t own, and a game that we did not own. I would come to know the game files as a “Rom”, the data from the Read-Only Memory on game cartridges.

I soon found myself spending a great deal of time looking for new SNES games to play, and it was not long before I realized that if there was a SNES emulator, surely there must be NES emulators as well!

At this point in time, we were running our internet connection through NetZero over a 56kb/s Dial-Up connection. If you wanted to use the internet, you would have to tie up the phone line. This was the year that we did get cellphones as well, but we still relied on the land-line for most things (U.S. Cellular Pricing was egregious at the time.) I had been broadening my horizons on what systems I was emulating, I had seen romhacks of SNES games, I’d played the BS Zelda games, and even tried to make my own using “Zelda Classic”. What soon became my sole emulation focus was the N64!

Contrary to what you may be thinking, we were not really a “Nintendo” household. Yes, we did have an NES for a while, even an OG Gameboy in Green, a GBA SP, as well as my recently rediscovered Pikachu Gameboy Color (a whole story unto itself) but by no means were those our exclusive systems. We had the PS1 and a PS2 in 2002. So I never got to play with an N64 much aside from our former neighbor Ben who let me play a bit of Banjo Kazooie.

Suddenly, I had the console I’d wanted to play more of right at my fingertips. I had tried previously to get my parents to purchase a used one for me, but no dice there. I had a copy of Ocarina of Time that came into my possession, so technically I could download a ROM and play it on an N64 Emulator with no legal ramifications… right?

Like many midwestern fathers, my dad was an active participant in a Fantasy Football League with some of his coworkers, and I was able to use his obsessive checking of stats to my benefit. An average N64 ROM was about 75-80 MB per file, 80MB doesn’t sound that large these days… but you would be quite wrong. With our terrible Dial-Up mess, it would take nearly an entire afternoon to get the files. This meant that during my father’s time looking at his football scores for the whole of a Sunday afternoon, was a prime time to download a game or two (if I was lucky). Alternatively, overnights did work out sometimes, but piggybacking was a far safer route.

I set my sights on acquiring a ROM of OOT, and by that evening, I was able to give it a try. I set up my control layout for the keyboard (we had no PC-compatible controllers) and I started my first playthrough of the game. I would occasionally find myself stuck as I was far less patient about figuring out some puzzles, and began to consult walkthroughs and a new (to me) concept, Video Walkthroughs!

Youtube was in its nascent state at the time, and my brother had introduced me to its wonders through an infamous video, the Crichton Leprechaun (this very well may be the actual one too.) By now it was 2007, and my search for some assistance in Ocarina of Time led me to a video (that I can unfortunately not find anymore) showing off a “Retexture Project” that would enhance the graphics of the game.

This discovery would serve to enhance my engagement with the concept of emulation to a whole new level.