Champaign, IL, January 20, 2000

W elcome to |tsr's NES archive, a font of information and support for the best video game console ever made - the Nintendo Entertainment System. If it's over eight bits, don't touch it!

January 20th - Read this. January 13th - Hopefully you're enjoying the new year so far. You'll be enjoying it more now that the webboard is back up, finally! Go and post like mad on it! The NSF page was updated with a brand new NSF collection by Kevin Horton which I seriously recommend you download if you're at all interested in NES music. If you have any suggestions for the collection, remember to mail him, not me. See you on the board... December 27th - A quick holiday gift for you. First there's a new game spotlight in the Famicom section, with a game I really love. Second, there's a new special feature that I guarantee will blow your socks off. Enjoy the rest of your vacation... November 21th - Thanks to Alan Davis and a host of others, I filled most of the holes in the NES gallery once and for all. And Toot sent me a PAL box for Flintstones II (I added more to the Euro page, too). Now all I need to finish NTSC scanning is Flintstones II and Stadium Events. I also gave the NSF section an overhaul. It needed it. Everything should be up to date in there now. Oh, and new NES stories all around. In particular note the new (and first) edition of |tsr's k-rad list. Anyway. November 4th - Umm, sorry to keep you waiting. Hopefully these two main things will make up for it: I interviewed Ed Logg, programmer of Tengen Tetris. He talks for a little bit on Tengen's side of the whole affair, and it's pretty neat, so check it out. And when you're done with that, note that I added 400 or so pictures to the NES gallery. There's only a very few titles left to scan now. If you have a scan of Flintstones 2, Nobunaga's Ambition II, Casino Kid II or Mario's Time Machine, send it over! Mega thanks to Alan Davis for providing the majority of these. If you have NES/FC-related news announcements you'd like to have featured in this space, mail away. As the world continues to surge onto the internet at a faster rate than ever, so does the world of video game fandom... and especially, emulation fandom. No one can deny that emulation is the reason more than a few people are getting bigger hard drives, faster computers, and better connections. Maybe this wasn't such a problem a couple years ago when the number of people involved were few, but now (especially around colleges) everybody is pirating. And no matter what I do, I can't seem to get myself to mind too much about this. If it's possible, you know, people will do it. And I'm not going to lie and say I haven't. What worries me more is that the emulation world is going towards nothing but piracy, and is ignoring what's behind the files they so effortlessly transfer. One of the top news sites calls itself Vintage Gaming and yet it routinely covers software like Bleem!, Napster and the good* utilities, which all kidding aside are all about about pirating not so vintage intellectual property. And sites that deal with game images try to project themselves as being more about nostalgia and history by putting descriptions like "Oh, I loved this game as a kid, it's a classic [even though it only came out 5 years ago]" next to their file lists (quite a lot of Amiga sites are like this). I'd like to see game-pirating web sites that are less centered on creating excuses for emulation and more centered on the total history of the gaming world, its history, and everything behind the game... and as an aside perhaps offer the ROM as part of the exhibit. The video gaming web has been divided between emulation/ROM sites and "real" history sites until now, but I believe that the two can be happily married given the right mix of information. -tsr









