Emerald Nova Games
Emerald Nova Games
DoctorV64 is a longtime member of the Sega Xtreme community and occasional blogger. He started out as a 14 year old kid that with a modded Saturn and wanted to experience everything that the Saturn had to offer after having missed it during the PSX days. He has stayed and visited the forum on and off for over 20 years.
Emerald Nova: When did you come into the SX community?
DoctorV64: 1998 or 1999, it’s very hard to say. My nickname was Mr^Burns on Sega Xtreme back then and I used that nickname on SX around 1998 to 2004 or something like that. Sometimes commenting on vbt’s emulator ports, like his Wonderswan emulator.
Emerald Nova: Do you remember how you found the community?
DoctorV64: Probably through IRC. Everyone with a modded Saturn was trying to find games and SX was probably the most public way of doing so. Saturn never had a release scene like the PSX with groups putting games on 0-day FTPs, but somebody did make a sort of scene release of the last Saturn game, Final Fight Revenge, with scene file name and a .nfo, but if it was a legit thing that was traded in scene FTPs, I don't know.
Emerald Nova: Which IRC channels were big at the time?
DoctorV64: The SX IRC channel must have had 40 members or something like that. The biggest channels were for finding PSX releases and movie releases, probably. I spent a week downloading the fight club cam in ASF then converting it to VCD for playback on my brothers Amiga cd32 that had a VCD card.
Emerald Nova: So you grabbed cams in proprietary format then re-encoded for playback on Amiga? Soudns like a lot of work.
DoctorV64: Yeah it was, but back then movies could take months or a year in some cases to reach Sweden/Europe. So it was worth it.
Emerald Nova: Could you give me a list of all the projects you have contributed to in some form?
DoctorV64: I'm not a coder, but I did maintain this blog that vbt used to visit a lot. That's why he sometimes calls me emperor coconut in the channel.
Emerald Nova: Is there anyone you think is in danger of being forgotten or lost to time that made contributions to the community in the earlier days?
DoctorV64: Not really, there was someone doing a Soul Hackers translation back in the day. They showed pictures on SX of it, but nothing was released.
Dr. Emerald Nova: Who was big back in the day? Names that everyone in the community knew about.
DoctorV64: RevQuixo, Iceman, vbt, Rockin-B, the usual suspects.
Emerald Nova: Is there anything else you could think of that should make it into the Saturn Homebrew history pages?
DoctorV64: Not that I can think of, most things have thankfully been archived.
Emerald Nova: If someone wanted to dig through said archives, where's a good place to look?
DoctorV64: Just the SX forums through waybackmachine. All stuff is now collected neatly by people on the internet. If someone releases a homebrew it will get into the tosecs. Someone did a linux port for PSX that was called something like Ruin. I even found the author on facebook, but that thing and getting it to work seemed to have been lost. So there is non-Saturn stuff I can think of. And the infamous video of metal gear solid on the Tiger Game.com that seems to be lost, too.
Emerald Nova: Was there a lot of communication between people working in different console/brand communities?
DoctorV64: I have no idea.
Emerald Nova: Thank you for your time!