Remembering Byuu / Near, the legendary game emulator programmer

And an aside on Neil Patrick Harris

Hello, everyone!

Today I learned that Neil Patrick Harris (Barney from How I Met Your Mother) wrote an NYT-bestselling middle grade fantasy series.

No, this is not a Neil Patrick Harris ad. I’m just in awe of the guy’s range - actor, singer, comedian, writer, producer, television host, bestselling author, one Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2010, and he did voice work for a whole bunch of video games, including Saint’s Row 2 and 3. That’s some serious creative skill.

But I come not to bury NPH, only to praise him in passing. The subject of today’s email is remembering Byuu / Near, the legendary game emulator programmer.

If you’re like me, you will have at least one Gameboy and SNES emulator on your desktop - for when you want a hit of that nostalgia from a childhood classic video game.

This is not an easy task. What we take so casually is essentially a complete virtual simulation of a computing device - where in most cases the internal workings are completely proprietary, or even lost to time. Even when things are known, the hardware, operating systems, functions and special hacks were completely custom - the modern shift to AMD-based processor architectures on the Xbox and Playstation are just that: modern. Which means that the people who write emulators must reverse-engineer every aspect of processing of these systems: in effect, doing the work of entire corporations by themselves.

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Enter Byuu aka Near. For fifteen years, this anonymous programmer worked towards a perfect emulation of the SNES. If you want to understand the phenomenal complexity of something we consider so trivial, read up on Byuu’s quest: it is, as they explain, their life’s work.

As PCGamer explains, Byuu’s influence went far beyond establishing nostalgia: Byuu's bsnes was the first Super Nintendo emulator with 100% compatibility, and higan is a multi-system emulator supporting 26 different devices including the NES, SNES, Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, Sega Master System and Genesis/Mega Drive, and PC Engine. If you've played any of the indie games influenced by EarthBound, aka Mother 2, then odds are good that game's designer had a copy of EarthBound open in higan for reference.
Parts of the emulator created to keep Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer working in the final years of the famous physicist's life were even borrowed from higan's open source code.

I was largely aware of Byuu because of my obsession with Pokemon: my personal quest to play every Pokemon game in existence in a feeble attempt to recapture the innocence of my childhood led me to higan, the all-emulator; that got me hooked onto an RPG called Shadowrun, which came out for the SNES and was Cyberpunk before it was cool. Shadowrun was directly responsible for my obsession with Deus Ex . . . but I digress. Once you get into this stuff, you eventually come across Byuu.

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Byuu’s extraordinary genuis did not stop at emulation: among their swan songs is the 23-year localization of a little-known JRPG called Bahamut Lagoon. Near had been working on this project since 1998, making multiple technical breakthroughs in the art of fan translations and preserving old computer programs. Here’s a lovely snippet from that article that captures Byuu’s spirit: packed off to rural Pennsylvania for the summer, with no computer, at 15 years old:

"I would have just had to stare at the walls or corn fields if they had their way," they said. "But I've always been a clever little shit."

At home, Near removed the motherboard and hard drive from their computer and stuffed it at the bottom of their luggage, hidden from sight beneath a cardboard insert. Monitor? Case? Keyboard? Mouse? All of that was left behind, visual evidence the computer was where it was supposed to be, back at home and nowhere near the lazy cornfields of Pennsylvania.

Also in the luggage was every dollar they owned, and when their grandmother picked them up, they asked to stop by CompUSA, a once popular nationwide computer retailer. They rebought everything—monitor, case, keyboard, mouse—and built a new computer in those cornfields.  

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Byuu committed suicide recently. Byuu’s tweet thread describes extensive harassment from an forum; a Google doc from an anonymous friend adds context.

I will not dwell on the suicide. Byuu’s last tweeted wishes were to remember their work and the programs they poured their passion into; therefore, in respectful memoriam: Byuu, thank you for giving me my childhood back. And for Stephen Hawking’s voice.

Best,

Yudha