How NESticle changed NES Emulation forever | MVG

In 1997 developer Icer Addis released NESticle, a Freeware NES emulator that changed NES emulation forever. In this episode we take a look at the early days of NES emulation and the features NESticle brought to emulation and why its one of the most important releases ever.
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#NESticle #DOS #Emulation

[@LGR]

Ahh, memories. Installing NESticle on the Compaq machines in study hall was always a must. And iNES! I remember the excitement of finding a working serial number for that one on a Spanish emulation forum, haha.

[@dan3a]

Nice

[@kepinpin5277]

greetings!

[@mannysoriano]

Greetings... Nesticle d best for dos

[@shumpmaker8438]

oh dang, hey clint!

[@andrive]

The person below me is right

[@WalcomS7]

And just like that, you're back into the computer lab in sixth grade...

[@rvfiasco]

Dude. An Apple IIc or e? That was a LONG time ago. Lol

[@fila1445]

Even tho i was born in mid 90, in Poland we had the same vintages macines in computer labs when i was in 6th grade :p

[@omegarugal9283]

i know

[@BrickTamlandOfficial]

rocknes was the first emu i ever had the patients to get working when i was younger lol.

[@rvfiasco]

@@eatmyass Hell yea. Basic Baby! I guess we've come a long way...not necessarily for the better. I liked when games thanked YOU for playing. We don't get that anymore.

[@AltimaNEO]

The late 90s emulation scene was such a fun time. I went from only ever having played/heard of a handful of games from the 8 and 16 but era, to having access to everything. Hanging out at Zophar's Domain was awesome. The was always something new coming out.

[@zophar1]

Indeed. ;)

[@bbqtool]

I love how we're come to a point where emulators are a point of nostalgia, not just the games themselves. Leaving 2 SNES roms downloading on a 28.8k modem whilst you go up to the milk bar and buy some ice cream or lollies then coming back to games you didn't pay for. I love that bleeding hand.

[@alxxz]

Indeed! I still remember back in 1997 a mate from high-school claimed he could play NES, Mega Drive and SNES games on his PC! I was shocked when he gave me a CD full of ROMs and Nesticle, Genecyst & SNES9X emus and being able to play games I could not even imagine owning the real hardware let alone play them excellently and for free on my obscure Cyrix Pentium compatible PC! I then started adding and expanding on the collection via a home 56K dialup modem and the Uni's broadband connection when ever I had the chance! LoL! Good times indeed! :D

[@Kdekalcio]

I'm nostalgic for Project64 and VisualBoyAdvance

[@alxxz]

@@Kdekalcio Yeah Visualboyadvance was awesome. I beat all 3 CastleVanias on that back in in early 2000s. I was so surprised being able to play these brand new games perfectly on my PC without even owning the console!

[@DanJackson1977]

The real pain was when NeoGeo got emulated.. downloading those roms on a dialup connection... leaving Magician Lord or Fatal Fury 2 to download overnight then wake up and realize it failed 95% of the way through. So you'd have download add on software (maybe from CNet) that allowed you to resume downloads.

[@omegarugal9283]

only to get the dreaded "download fail at 99.9%"...

[@Screwy]

Wild how one of the innovators of emulation as we know it is named after a genital pun

[@KurtRichterCISSP]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/iKiUlJeImtxgkMk

[@NervousNoodles]

It's rather expected.

[@gigaslave]

There was a Neo Geo Pocket emulator called 'Rather A Pokemon Emulator', which had the acronym...

[@PronatorTendon]

True, I've been kicked in the nest and it didn't feel good

[@anonony9081]

It also had hairy testicles for an icon

[@JustMe-iw3ev]

Nesticle was the first emulator I stumbled across that could run games at full-speed on my old 486, chugging along with 8mb of RAM. It led me to discovering so many old titles that I'd forgotten, and even new ones that didn't make it across the ocean way back in the day. So many memories!

[@omegarugal9283]

nesticle was the emulator that actually brought the concept to everybody

[@cin2110]

@Daniel Long I mean you can just make accurate emulators for most old consoles nowadays even patato pcs will run it and in new platform emulators you can generally customize how accurate or fast you want it to be

[@Valientlink]

@Daniel Long optimization is still important for some emulators, like for anything on a 3DS

[@gangweedstudios]

hey thats my name

[@alfredocanas6802]

I think my first contact with emulation was in 1997 with a GENECYST emulator playing obscure Dragon Ball Z Japanese games, at the time I didn't know it was an emulator until later on.

[@jevansturner]

I haven't finished the video, but I should point out another legacy of NESticle: Many ROMs were hacked to be compatible with NESticle. Probably due to limited mapper support or other performance hacks. For many years (perhaps even now), ROM sets have been poisoned with ROM images that aren't properly identified as hacks for NESticle compatibility. NES and Famicom have particular challenges for redump/compare so I suspect there are still lots of NESticle-hacked dumps being distributed in ROM sets.

[@johnsimon8457]

You want to look at the NoIntro instead of GoodROM sets, but yeah, 90’s emulation scene was the Wild West. Janky dumpers, “best guess” mapper emulation this or that popular rpg romhack that was never tested on actual hardware and only hacks around ZSNES or NESticle bugs. But these days we have the checksums for every rom, anything that was hacked like that isn’t going to wind up in your typical retropie rom collection.

[@jevansturner]

@@johnsimon8457 "no intro" doesn't seem to imply "redump." Regardless, I'm sure many originals cannot be easily found to redump. Also, identifying mappers and circuit arrangements often requires opening the cartridge. It's risky to do that with rare Famicom games because many/most are snap-fit shells that do not have screws. Some even have screws under the label (I believe Arkanoid is one example).

[@ohnoitschris]

@@jevansturner Not to worry, everything released at retail worldwide has been thoroughly redumped by reputable folk. It's a good sign that things like the Earthbound "Zero" hack has been all but replaced by proper clean dumps of the prototype. (Earthbound Beginnings was known for a long time as Earthbound Zero, because a rom hacker added the "Zero" subtitle to the title screen. The prototype's proper name was "EARTH BOUND", awkwardly the same title as its proper sequel. "Beginnings" is the new title Nintendo gave it for the 2015 Wii U release)

[@johnathin0061892]

Don't forget the "FarFrontEast" ROM hacks that were hacked to run on crude early NES cartridge copiers from Hong Kong.(they saved games to and loaded them from floppy disks, like later SNES cart dumpers.)

[@johnsimon8457]

​@@ohnoitschris > Not to worry, everything released at retail worldwide has been thoroughly redumped by reputable folk. Yeah, like Byuu of BSNES/Higan took it on himself to buy every US Super Nintendo retail release, dump them and build up a database of reference checksums. Regarding Demiforce getting ahold of a Earthbound Proto, hacking it up to play on an emulator without anti-piracy checks and then changing the title to to "Earthbound Zero" .... that's just dumb - only adds confusion.

[@omegarugal9283]

i became famous in middle school when i installed nesticle on the school s pcs, even our teacher was impressed and took a copy home, i was allowed to play super mario 3 after class, and everybody kept asking if i could do the same with the snes, they believed i made the emu and kept telling them i got it from the internet...

[@penismightier9278]

Yeah, people were pretty gullible. I threw iNES on a bunch of PCs in the class I was in at the time with some ROMs and several days were lost solely to playing NES.

[@_pulstar]

and you’re telling me you didn’t get in trouble for the name of it

[@Holammer]

Mindrape, the guy that stole the NESticle source used to hang out on EFNET #emu and he was loud and proud about his deed. The chat was unsurprisingly a stream of explicit language for a long time.

[@artstrutzenberg7197]

(am I aging myself)? I can't forget when Mindrape offered up the source code via DCC...I was one of the folks in that channel when he did it, and yes will agree that the things got...very exciting in that channel for quite a while. Also won't forget when Sardu cooled off enough, and we saw updates come out...and yes MVG was not lying in terms of it taking the other folks within #emu a while to convince him to continue work on it.... What stinks (for me) about the whole Mindrape/Sardu debacle? Mindrape's site "Damaged Cybernetics" was where I first discovered details on what emulation was, AND also the basics about mp3s (this was prior to Napster) the summary on Damaged Cybernetics was something like "this file format is going to cause the recording industry to lose their friggen minds..."

[@reppy]

Kind of funny to see someone mention #emu in KZbin comments. :P What nick did you use?

[@Holammer]

@@reppy 'Freelance' and some variations thereof. Couldn't register nickname on Efnet, so you had to fight off the occasional pretenders.

[@reppy]

@@Holammer Ah okay, cool. I went by "reppy" or some variation of "reptile" for most of the years.

[@nickwallette6201]

I miss IRC. Used to hang out on Dalnet. Apparently all the action was on Efnet though.

[@reoire843]

My parents didn’t buy me many NES games back in the day so I missed out on a lot of classics at the time. Fortunately, Nesticle was around when I bought my first PC in 1998 and thanks for that I was able to finally play a lot of the old NES games that I had missed out on as a child.

[@iDidnotask0]

That's like saying "my parents didn't buy me an iPhone Back in the day so I stole one from store"

[@jaden8923]

​@@iDidnotask0 Not really

[@morganghetti]

​@@iDidnotask0 that's not like saying that at all. By 98 we were 5 years into the SNES. So he didn't cost Nintendo anything. Go simp for billion dollar corporations somewhere else, douche.

[@morganghetti]

​@@iDidnotask0 and why are you watching a video about emulation if you object to it?

[@szcmawo26]

@@iDidnotask0 You understand that he did not explicitly say that he download the games or not buy in the future. Also, you know that download doesn't mean losing a sale. If it literally wasn't going to happen or in a future he can buying other games from Nintendo. Att a Nintendo Fan

[@GearSeekers]

Flashbacks to playing Skate Or Die on NESticle

[@crotchsplotch]

That's game is ASS

[@Serveck]

Dug out my NES specifically for that game. Nothing beats authentic

[@pchound5962]

The controls are the worst!

[@dowskivisionmagicaloracle8593]

Whadya mean it was superceded by "better emulators"? Name ONE NES emulator that even comes CLOSE to matching the feature set of Nesticle? (That means allowing you to change the pallette so you can turn the boy from A Boy and His Blob into a skin-colored whistling NYC streaker!)

[@DamaramuHQ]

Whew...Genecyst. Had that and a bunch of Genesis roms on the PC I took with me when I left my hometown for school in another city. Helped dull that homesickness a bit! 😊

[@MrEdrftgyuji]

And Kgen98 as well.

[@mresturk9336]

Yeah, having grown up in a working class family in which I only had a choice of one console per generation Genecyst was my first chance to really check out what I had missed on the Sega side of things (I was a Nintendo fanboy as a child). I do remember playing through Castlevania Bloodlines only to make the disappointing discovery Genecyst couldn't accurately emulate the graphical effects of the final stage in a playable manner. But other than that it was a ton of fun.

[@Qwertyguy86]

I loved NESticle!!! Without it I would never have been exposed to so many NES games while I was younger.

[@spikester]

I owned an NES in my childhood but Nesticle too allowed me to play all those niche NES games I never even heard of up until the late 90's.

[@jeff15]

@@spikester me too and I still do ;) best !!!!

[@darunealbane]

I have a retro win2000 pro sp2 (old server that was good all the way to 2010 with all 4 sp installed and had multi core and large ram support) retro comp I want nesticle for it but hard to find

[@yellowblanka6058]

Of course with dial-up speeds it could take a whole night to download a handful of games, but it was preferable to browsing rental places then limited/non-existent stock of NES games.

[@BR-ty3hx]

In some countries its a crime to expose your nesticles

[@pagb666]

I just got the "Nesticle" pun... 25 years later /facepalm

[@jevansturner]

It took me several years to get it. I always called it "N-E-S-tickle" and I could never tell what the icon was supposed to be (hairy ball sack, LOL!) until I learned of the pun so many years later.

[@TKMRacer28]

It’s like testicle!

[@jimmothy79]

The icon was a testicle though ...

[@Islandswamp]

The icon was a gross looking nutsac. I used to make my own hacks with the Sprite map editor. Fun times.

[@ReigningSemtex]

The icon looking like a nutsack gave it away

[@cormano.]

It would be nice to have an interview with the guys from BloodLust software, there’s no much info about them

[@ohnoitschris]

Yeah really. I spend so much time reading up about emulation, NES in particular, and this video pretty well covers everything I've read about them.

[@mobiusbelts3607]

Oh stop it, Nintendo! It’s too late to sue...

[@PixelShade]

I remember both NESticle and ZSNES, I used them on my Pentium 166MHz with a Riva TNT PCI Card... I couldn't enable alpha channels in ZSNES and had to use the 256x256 resolution (I disabled transparency layers when they blocked the view, since they were solid). But man was I happy, playing Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Mario World, Mario 3, Megaman etc. It gave my old PC so much life, when all the modern games started running terrible on it. I had that PC until 2002.... It was painfully slow by then.

[@alxxz]

I still remember back in 1997 a mate from high-school claiming he could play NES, Mega Drive and SNES games on his PC! I was shocked when he gave me a CD full of ROMs and Nesticle, Genecyst & SNES9X emus and being able to play games I could not even imagine owning the real hardware let alone play them excellently and for free on my obscure Cyrix Pentium compatible PC! I then started adding and expanding on the collection via a home 56K dialup modem and the Uni's broadband connection when ever I had the chance from all sorts of obscure and shady sites! LoL! Good times indeed! :D

[@PixelShade]

@@alxxz hahahaha, I know! I did the same! downloading nes and snes games were pretty much perfect size for 56K modem, you got a lot of value out of the time you waited. :) Yeah, I only have fond memory to the early emulation days. I remember playing neogeo games with neorage as well later on. Increadible, it was such an unachievable console to own at the time.... or even now for that matter. The games were crazy expensive. :) anyway, good times! :D

[@alxxz]

@@PixelShade Indeed! NES, SNES and Mega Drive games were perfect for dialup connections especially when compressed into zip files! The funny thing is when I started downloading them back in 1997 I only had a 14K dialup modem at home! LoL! Ah Yes! The all-mighty NEOGEO! I was mesmerized being able to play perfectly all these super expensive games with NeoRageX Emu on my Pentium II PC in 1998 with enhanced graphics via interpolation filters on the Nvdia RIVA TNT card. It was a dream come true as I could not possibly buy one of those beasts as a kid! First time I encountered one of those systems was back in 1992 when I invited home for a sleep-over a new kid from school and he said that he would bring his new console along for the ride thinking it would be some Gameboy or Gamegear at best (I only had a NES at that time), so you can imagine my shock & surprise when I saw those gigantic joysticks unpacked and that thing in action on my living-room 30" CRT TV! He had 4 games. Ninja Combat, NAM 1975, Eightman & King of The Monsters 2 which were ions ahead from anything I had seen with the mere 16 on-screen colors and 5channel PSG audio of the NES! LoL! Needless to say all the kids from the block learned about the news and my living-room turned into an Arcade hall for the whole evening! And since NEOGEO ROMS were significantly larger than NES, I was using the broadband connection of the Uni in 2000 to get the entire 130+ game library of the system! LoL! :D Good times indeed!

[@form4li7y]

The first time I found out about emulation was about 2002. Someone at work brought in a cd-r with an NES emulator on it and all the games he had. You had to launch it in dos but it was still great! It was the first time I had gotten to play the first Goonies game again since I was a kid at the arcade! I never understood why they never released that game on the nes. Especially when you consider in Japan it got a Famicom release.

[@Hobo_X]

I remember playing the Final Fantasy 1 on NESticle back when I was only 5 years old. It was truly an incredibly impactful project.

[@kadosho02]

What a journey emulation had back then. I remember seeing coverage of NESticle, and ZSnes in issues of a pc magazine.

[@CommodoreFan64]

I'm going from fuzzy memory, but I think Maximum PC even put Nesticle, and ZSnes on their CD's at different points.

[@dr.velious5411]

Zsnes was the shit, I miss it's menu style so much.

[@elimalinsky7069]

@@dr.velious5411 It's still around, I used ZSNES up until 2010 or so, but then I realized how inaccurate it was and then reading online on this fabulous new SNES emulator called BSNES which was 1:1 identical to real hardware in accuracy, bringing my jaw straight to the floor.

[@dr.velious5411]

@@elimalinsky7069 Pretty much the same, I just wish some of that style rubbed off on newer emulators, although it is wholly unnecessary. I'm actually back to using Zsnes right now since I'm stuck on Windows XP.

[@chronology556]

@@elimalinsky7069 Higan is most accurate, but you need a powerful rig.

[@necromancer1983x]

NESticle was my first exposure to emulation in the early 2000's, was finally able to experience the original Final Fantasy which never got an EU release (I never finish the game till the PSP version)

[@KurtRichterCISSP]

"There's a name I haven't heard in a looong time..." Thanks for the great vid!

[@Dragonborn-dc4uj]

Yeah surprisingly 2 years later we had full on ps1 emulation imagine that. The Connectix Virtual Game Station was ahead of its time.

[@bitelaserkhalif]

The first PS1 emulator that I knew is connectix vgs There's even "modchip" version that allows for burnt copies Used to run this on ECS ibuddies with pentium 4

[@Kippykip]

yall remember the NES emulator for the PS1? That was wild

[@GothAlice]

Was somewhat helpful that most game or embedded systems went the RISC route (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), making the construction of emulators for the hardware somewhat easier. Also helpful, in later times, that PowerPC turned out to be the architecture of choice-broadly used and well understood. (Both Xbox and Playstation went the IBM route in the end.) Some ARM thrown in for good measure (Nintendo).

[@georg6876]

@@Kippykip It might be nes

[@Dragonborn-dc4uj]

@@bitelaserkhalif Yeah since the vcs didn’t allow unauthorized copies people made torrent software that allowed backups and pirated copies to run.

[@GameplayandTalk]

NESticle was really something when it was released. I lived off that emulator for a while. I still fire it up once every now and then on an old DOS rig just to remember how cutting-edge it was, and to see how far we've come.

[@desastreger]

1.79 MegaHertz?! I'm sure in 2021, plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1995 it's a little hard to come by.

[@Skuplia]

nice

[@tomypower4898]

YES to download!

[@p0llenp0ny]

??

[@user-pn1fe6sg2w]

Ah, this takes me back to playing an English translation of Pokemon Gold and Silver before it came stateside on my OG bondi blue iMac rev. A.

[@Oni64]

yup the good old days.

[@Rosa_Canina]

I had one of those, but it was only translated until Badge 3, then it all became gibberish. Not even Japanese, because the game did not display those characters correctly. Still somehow got to Badge 7 on that version

[@MrCed122]

I did the same thing with Pokémon Black on DS, good to see it was nothing new.

[@kargaroc386]

@@Rosa_Canina I assume that they literally stopped translating after that point, and left the original Japanese text in. But, with the character set replaced, it would display as mojibake.

[@Rosa_Canina]

@@kargaroc386 yeah, that's what we also thought back then. It also still had a few pokemon attacks that crashed the game, but that could be more the fault of the emulator itself than the hacked translation.

[@laurencecastle2321]

I remember being so happy I could play Link’s Awakening on my 486, and not make my eyeballs bleed squinting at a game boy by the hour

[@martinshearman-brettle1406]

Ah, they where the days. I used to DL NES roms at my art college, transfer them to 3.5" floppy and take them home to play on Nesticle.

[@dcikaruga]

Anyone remember ZSNES? I was pretty impressed that is was written in Assembler, ran great even on a 486 machine.

[@MrExnihlo]

Zsnes was my first emulator back in the early 2000's. Because of being poor I was running it on a 486. I got to play final fantasy 6 and it ran really well. It seemed like the time when ff 7 could be emulated was a life time away, but I have played that game at 4x the native internal resolution on my pc. Crap, it has been a lifetime and I'm old.

[@adam1984pl]

I played that around 2000-01 on Celeron 266.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

Some people are still holding onto the idea of a new release.

[@gustavovm491]

Not on mine, it was really choppy from what I can remember, maybe my cpu was one of those amd or cyrix. Nes and GB ran pretty well in the myriad of emulators I tried then.

[@mresturk9336]

Oh yeah. I loved I was able to play through the fan translated Final Fantasy 5 on ZSnes almost a year before my all friends were stuck settling with the sluggish, awkwardly translated PS1 port. Granted the ZSnes build of the time had graphical issues with FF5, but it was still a blast.

[@Lisa_Minci96]

Was this the one that started the tradition of questionably named NES emulators?

[@jendorei]

Like what for example?

[@dundermifflinity]

@@jendorei I know of no others that are questionably named either...

[@DenkyManner]

@@jendorei NEScock, NintenBUM, DiltenDO

[@jendorei]

​@@DenkyManner I searched all of these names and nothing related came up… Only some game news page that died in 2018 for Diltendo. Really, the only questionable emulator names I can think of came from Bloodlust.

[@RyanBro]

This isn't an emulator but I used it when ROM hacking. TileMolester is a pun on Child Molester.

[@BdR76]

It was pretty amazing being able to play all the classic NES games. I remember downloading loads of roms at school and copying them on floppies to play at home. Don't think I ever played any of them past the first few levels, there were just so many games.

[@JeffisWinning]

I was in high school when nesticle came out. I remember installing it on a few computers in this production class I took. My buddies and me would sit there on those no agenda days where everyone is allowed to do whatever and play the crap out of some NES ROMs.

[@noraretrouciech]

My favourite monitor- when you push “on” button it demagnetise screen. That means a specific sound was present then. 😁

[@legion162]

When I was in school circa 1984 we had the BBC micro computer with square screen monitors, we used to flick the monitor on and off to build static on the screen, wipe our hand across the screen to charge ourselves up then touch someone's ear 🤣🤣

[@noraretrouciech]

@@legion162 hahahhahahhahahahaa love it 🤣

[@Bo_Knows_Tecmo]

Love this. My favorite time in gaming. I remember playing nesticle on my computer at school. Learned to beat mike Tyson punch out via keyboard. All of their emulators from bloodlust were good. Callus and genecyst.

[@realmchat6665]

Nice trip down memory lane, back to those initial "wtf this actually works?!" moments.

[@WrestlingWithGaming]

Seeing nesticle again hit me with some serious nostalgia. Great video and topic choice.

[@The_Wandering_Nerd]

I was a sophomore in college in 1997, and one day I was in the computer lab when I saw someone playing Super Mario Bros. on one of the lab computers, to my utter amazement. That was my first exposure to Nesticle, and from that day forward, my grade point average would never be the same.

[@kakalv9152]

Man this was a throwback to my senior year in HS. great video.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

I loved Nesticle. It was so much easier to get up and running with it instead of FCE and FCE Ultra. Or maybe I was just a dumb kid....

[@jendorei]

If they are anything like FCEUX, they are just as easy if not easier to use than Nesticle - at least for someone used to dealing with Windows apps.

[@fungo6631]

You were better off with VirtuaNES

[@fungo6631]

@Sadist Fake Bootleg Tiki Today it's only Mesen, unless you want to play some bootleg multicarts that are dumped in some way FCEUX is neede...where is Near when you really need him? We really need an Eastern European Near/Byuu to conserve those bootleg multicarts and bootleg cartridges in general. Maybe Near himself could do this. Is there a way to contact him?

[@masonasaro2118]

@@fungo6631also, homebrew

[@myopiniondoesntmatter7068]

Genecyst was my first emulator. Wasnt for long as it wasnt the most stable. But it allowed me to play some long sought after games that only ever seemed to appear in UK sega magazines. Back in the mid 90s, especially in regional Australia, the only games that existed were the ones you could rent and the ones at places like target and Kmart. I didn't even know phantasy star had a third game until we stopped at a video store while visiting relatives and they were selling off their mega drive stock. Same with 4, no clue until I saw it on a list of roms. We have it so good now.

[@accumulator5734]

Thumbs up! I love videos like this. Keep up the good work vintage gamer! I also love the nostalgic background music, such a good touch.

[@__1201]

Nesticle was legit. I remember using it a ton when I was in my High School Web Development class. We also lanned with quake and Tetrinet as well. Nothing like using the "switch" letter to mess up your opponents field in Tetrinet and hearing them shout with anger from across the room :)

[@nthgth]

🤣 lmao

[@LordMazafeff]

Jesus, Nesticle took 2 weeks to code? Some mad genius,

[@mattb9664]

Very interesting talk! As always much appreciated to hear the background story on the folks who brought us their creations!

[@Hexydes]

Thank you for documenting and sharing this period of time in computing history! Important stuff, excited to watch additional episodes in this series!

[@blwckguyhere]

I remember going to the computer lab at school and installing nesticle and zsnes on the the pc good times

[@odinsplaygrounds]

This emulator definitely was far ahead of it's time, and had a lot of personality for being an emulator.

[@richardcooper]

Awesome and informative as always and brought back so many memories ;) Definitely do that followup on the others.

[@johndee759]

Thank you for making this video. I like how you tell the story and brought back the nostalgia

[@Root3264]

Nesticle. I love how you just know there are just tech guys behind this.

[@yellowblanka6058]

More accurately a couple of high-schoolers who formed the company in 92. Given the bloody nature of their other games/amateurish look of the art I had a feeling - looks like something straight out of the notebook of a bored, edgy high-schooler doodling in study hall, lol.

[@NIC_Pineiro]

Wow! I just realized that Nesticle was the first emulator I ever used back in the early 2000s when I was getting into emulation. Havent thought about that in a while

[@trueakuma777]

Oh man, this takes me back! I remember my friends introducing me to NESticle back in the day shortly after high school! I've pretty much stuck to using emulation to play NES games ever since! Thanks for the awesome video and stay safe out there!

[@RinVindor101]

The new outro music is great, I love the slight alteration. Awesome video as always!

[@dukemagus]

0:45 "With as much accuracy as possible"... *Angry ZSNes noises*

[@BdR76]

iirc Nesticle could also record the sound to a .wav file with channels enabled or disabled. This meant you could more easily transcribe the game music and play it on keyboard.

[@takogamesaustralia5414]

Excellent video, well researched and clearly put together. Thumbs up

[@justintaylor3569]

Been subscribed for a couple years. Thanks for putting put consistently entertaining yet informative content!

[@tylermcdonald1152]

Hell Yeah MVG talking about emulators!

[@dogmd7]

The bloody hand of the cursor used to freak me out as a kid.

[@LucasCunhaRocha]

Genecyst was the first emulator I ever used and the blood dropping was freaky as hell.

[@MoultrieGeek]

Thanks for the history, I love it when you cover historical emulators and the processes behind them. Vids like this is why I subscribe.

[@RapideWombaticus]

Great vid and a great shirt! Your reviews are informative and concise - keep it up mate 🙃

[@MaxOakland]

The Sega Saturn had you covered? That’s the most positive thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about the Saturn

[@stagecoachrobbery]

Apparently you haven't played some of the amazing games that it has to offer. It's library is small, but its top tier games are as good as any other system. There are reasons why the games for Saturn that are good are at minimum $100-$150 a pop and top out with Panzer Dragoon Saga for over $1k.

[@UON]

Heheheeheheeh "Nesticle" I remember using it to edit the graphics in my favorite games, what wild times!

[@EmilianoFraga]

Nice video, thanks. Nesticle, Callus and Genecyst were mandatory parts of my emulators library back in the day.

[@snowdreike]

01:10 Touhou lotus land story ! Great choice of brackground music

[@Konarcoffee]

Zsnes used a similar interface and I think also benefitted from assembly language, was very impressive stuff.

[@darkcoeficient]

Stumbled upon nesticle when I was a teenager... I always saw it myself as "nes tickle" and I thought the icon was a hairy nose. Since I had a lot of nasal allergies it made sense in my head. It wasn't until I was an adult that I made the connection. English as a second languange!

[@ConsoleKits]

That you so much for making this video! Nesticle was the first emulator I used. Must have been 1997/1998, cause I remember save states day 1. Always been interested in hearing a history on Nesticle. I was certain it had a good backstory, and I wasn’t disappointed!!

[@immoloism]

This was one of the best videos I've watched on this channel, I never knew this was the emulator that gave birth to so many of the features I have just taken for granted for the last 2 decades and can't wait to hear about the other ones.

[@iamlucidess]

Guy making emulator: haha genital jokes, my friends will say i'm the coolest kid on the block.

[@GothAlice]

Successfully making gorilla.bas swear at players that lose *does* make you the coolest kid on the block. Also ensures your computer lab privileges get revoked for that semester, but… totally worth it. The joke name is irrelevant in comparison to the scale of the problem solved.

[@Fausto_4841]

he was tho. free nintendo bro

[@bugrasevinc9696]

Nesticle, nice name!

[@NeafPlays]

Keep it going, you're doing a great job with these mini documentaries! :)

[@willierants5880]

This was an excellent episode of MVG. Extremely informative, grossly entertaining.

[@Shimazaki00]

This makes me feel so old, i remember using cmd to execute dos emulators like nesticle, or zsnes because they were faster on dos than windows, they were kind of witchcraft to me...but made my dream come true, to play a giant number of games that i played never before...was like disneyland to players!

[@RyanBro]

I remember dragging the icon on to a dos4gw icon, I was too young but too old to know how to use the command line.

[@mrflamewars]

NEStice and WinAMP - made PCs a blast in the late 90s. Made me a piratey pete.

[@iamdarkyoshi]

Great video as always. Love these looks into the past on how stuff started and evolved

[@drmud97]

Its great to see that you are going in depth of the history of emulation. There are many great videos that go into gaming history, but seldom do they cover emulation other than footnote going over the gray legal space it exists in or how gaming companies try to prevent it. Excellent work, I am eager to see more in these topics in the future!

[@alexanderveritas]

A pioneer not always receives the praise or recognition it deserves, but nonetheless, they are those that have brought us the many things we take for granted today. _For they are those that have brought innovation into our lives._

[@ninjoi]

You the GOAT brotha

[@LemonGingerHoney]

You make Blue Mondays into Happy Mondays! Love to watch your content after day of hard and intensive work.

[@danmons7446]

Wow, such great memories. '97 was university for me, and I remember discovering this mind bending bit of software. Really great video and a great trip down memory lane for me.

[@CebolaBros]

0:43 I hear Touhou music!

[@waltercomunello121]

"NESticle", as if the dude who programmed it never imagined how ludicrously massive the emulation thing would have become. although I would nickname it "NESTickle".

[@Trenchbroom]

A great video, and I hope you continue with emulation history. MAME needs its full story told, and Retrocade would be a fun tale to dive into as well.

[@JD-nc7mk]

Wow, just WOW! Awesome vid you did there. Brought back memories of the first internets I looted on floppies from a library access. Good times with my first computer! Thanks a lot! Nice work!

[@tranquility6789]

NESticle is a name that a middle school kid would make Edit: LETS GOOOO I GOT LIKED edit whoops lol

[@Slenderquil]

It sounds like an AVGN character

[@Kabodanki]

@@Slenderquil shitpickle

[@LittleRainGames]

@@Kabodanki piss pipe

[@tourgasmsvt]

It was the name of an emulator a middle school kid would download. Which I did.

[@rooni8188]

NESTICLE TESTICLE LOL

[@MrGencyExit64]

Attention Restaurant Customers, NESticles. That is all.

[@tomg2217]

Thank you Mr Griffin.

[@delta7890]

Props for showing Terminal Velocity in the intro. Love that game!!

[@dheaddy]

I remember getting the Nesticle emulator working for the first time and I almost lost my mind. Huge nostalgia for this program and Genecyst. Another fascinating video as always.

[@Simte]

Still the best name in the scene.

[@sandyf4931]

I got here really early - what luck! Really interesting video as always

[@jenshartmann8475]

It's always a pleasure to listen to your insights.

[@juanmvallejo]

This was one of the first emulators I ever tried, I remember being blown away by it, thanks for this video!

[@ordinary_magician]

Is that Touhou music at the beginning? It sounds strangely familiar...

[@Jdn19]

Whenever you drop a video i stop everything and watch.

[@asdfjklo124]

I remember you, I saw you in a "Seconds from Disaster" episode!

[@turbochamp7885]

GREAT video! I fondly remember bloodlust software and the three emulators they developed. Also, brought back memories of the whole damaged cybernetics saga....

[@nicotineblues]

Brings back memories... Wow what a nice and nostalgic video! I'm looking forward to see the Genecyst and Callus episodes! What about an ep covering snes96 and zsnes? Thank you for this, I've really enjoy it.

[@JamilThePimpLol]

last time I was this early I didn't have anything on mind to comment

[@atomic_gamming3732]

Early gang

[@adams213]

Absolutely amazing video, like always.

[@jonhoyles714]

Great video MVG bringing back bedroom memories with this one x