I've been running this website now since sometime in the middle of 1996 and finally in the midst of its most frequently updated period, Alain Brobecker suggested to me that I should add an interview with myself. We started such an interview but due to time constraints on both our parts it was never really finished off, it's included here anyway in its unfinished state...
Lets start with a short description of yourself:
Ok, I'm 18 years old (dob 28/12/79) and live with my parents in Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK. I'm about 6' tall with medium length dark brown hair, brown eyes, and depending on how late I get up in the morning, stubble. I've just finished my A levels at The King's School, Grantham, a grammer school for boys and having got 4 A grades will be starting the Computer Science course at the University of Warwick this October. Aside from the obvious computing interests, I enjoy reading fictional epics (just finishing off the mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson - it's brilliant), playing rugby (tight head prop forward position), going to the pub with my friends and spending time with my girlfriend Caroline who's doing a Music degree at Nottingham University.
Being on the young side, how come you are so interested in the emulation scene? Is it all part of nostalgia?
To be honest, I haven't lived long enough to build up a great deal of nostalgia about computers. I first got into computers when I was about 10, playing on my parents old BBC B, and although I can recall using computers before that and being quite fascinated I never really excelled. With pretty limited spending power at that age, I don't have any fond memories of blasting the galaxies in elite to draw me back. Having misspent many afternoons round at a friends house playing on his Sega, we did get a Sega Master System (with light phaser) just a few months before the Megadrive took off, but I loved playing those games and still do today (on my Acorn).
My first real experience with emulators came when my parents bought the family an A5000 back in 1991 with Acorn's software PC emulator - something which still blows my mind even today. The emulator could run all the latest software, and even the games my friends were playing on their PCs, such as Leisure Suit Larry and Dune 2, while my parents could use wordperfect 5.1 and even windows at a stretch, albeit a little slowly.
When PC software started to get faster and really outstrip the Acorn for bloatedness, the PC emulator was all but defunct. I started decreasing the DOS partition from 10Mb to 5Mb (a large saving on a 40Mb hard disc) and eventually deleted it all together since it was rarely used. I had got a couple of Spectrum emulators from various PD libraries, and had even seen 6502Em and Z80Em be released, but on whole wasn't overly impressed with what they could do.
Then in 1996 my dad got a PC with a 28.8kbps modem and I finally got access to the fabled Internet. After spending the first few weeks addicted to the chat rooms, I started to explore the web a little more. I had heard of the Gameboy emulator in an Acorn magazine, and really liked the idea of being able to play these games on my A5000 (despite the fact my sister has a perfectly good gameboy) so managed to get hold of a couple of the emulator and a couple of ROMs for it and played Super Mario Land again.
I was in the middle of putting together my software homepage to be able to upload my programs to the rest of the world (and hopefully get some fame) but at this time geocities only provided the user with 2Mb of space which I quickly filled up and wanted a little more. The solution was to get a second geocities account with a dummy page and store excess files on that. Realising that this great little Gameboy emulator was hard to get hold of, I uploaded the emulator, scribbled some HTML, and the 1st version of the Acorn Emulation Page was born, with no ROM links, no advice, no screenshots, just the single tasking !Gameboy in a PackDir archive.
I stumbled across Gareth Moore's emulation section on his Acorn gaming pages, and was taken aback reading about his Sega emulator which could play the games of my beloved Master System on an Acorn. In the early days of !Sega the emulator could run on pre-RISC PC machines, and although terribly slow, bizarrely coloured and distorted to hell and back, I could still make out Sonic. I was worried geocities might see my site and think it was a waste of space (I was new to the web in those days) so I uploaded !Sega too, and scribbled a bit more gibberish to fill up the site.
After about 4 months or so, it struck me that there were various emulators about on the Acorn that no one seemed to know much about and were a bit of a pig to find - searching through FTP archives isn't my idea of fun. I started adding bits and pieces of information to the page, only small paragraphs for each emulator (back then there was rarely more than one per platform) with a few software links and important points on a single long page (still viewable in the old news archive).
Finally I decided that it was getting too long, it was time to take the plunge and created the emulation page in a fairly similar guise to today with a separate page for each emulated system. (whoops, strayed off the question a bit)
The Acorn Emulation Page clearly represents a huge amount of work! Tell us the secret of your motivation?
I don't really know why I continue to develop it so strongly - I guess it's a desire to bring something new to the Acorn world, as well as a need to maintain a web page. I also enjoy knowing the inside story on exciting projects and being at the forefront of knowledge on a subject (of limited breadth though it might be). It does irritate when something new is released and the page is out of date, and I like to constantly keep something new coming up on the horizon. I like to try and make the page as comprehensive as possible, so I cover all the emulators available, not just the exciting new ones for the quality gaming systems. That's also the reason I started the interviews, as well as to try and bring the idea that developers are working on these emulators for free, to the game hungry teenage user.
It can be hard to keep motivated when some emulators are released. When the systems are ancient, have limited software available, are almost unheard of and aren't completely emulated it's quite unpleasent trying to dig around for scraps of information when I know no one will use the emulator, preferring to play the games on Snes9X - a lot of the MESS drivers spring to mind!
What feedback do you get from emulator developers and users?
The developers are very helpful indeed, I guess it's just an extension of the friendly feeling in the Acorn world that makes it so much easier for me. Most of them have answered my questions in depth, kept me up to date with the latest developments, supported the message board and sent me screenshots when I pester for them. I often hear about new projects, new versions and developments long before they're announced to the public, although it's also nice when something appears out of the blue like the new ArcVic emulator.
The users are generally very friendly also, I've only had the occasional ROM request, but the number of times I've been congratulated on the page more than make up for it. I also get a lot of people asking whether there is an Acorn emulator for the PC and considering there is a very indepth page on the subject, that's irritating. I had to smile when I got an email from Korea in piss poor english asking why Genecyst wouldn't work.
I'd also like to say thanks to Michael Koenig who consistently sends me an email out of the blue with essential information, and loads of links that drive me to develop whole new sections to the site to improve it that little bit more (the technical information on each system, MESS OS guide and PC card emulation was his idea), even when I'm so snowed under I often don't get a chance to write a decent reply.
To be continued.................(perhaps)