CIA Nigger
Not a fed, just a random object on the street.
Retired Staff
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 15, 2017
2/8/2020 Update: Two years later, Byuu got verified and has posted a response to this OP and it's worth reading. Worth noting is that much of the information in this OP is circa 2018, and that things have changed since then. Also BSNES and Higan are FOSS projects, and have more than just Byuu contributing to the project as the HD Mode 7 mod shows.
https://archive.fo/Jxrl8
If you’ve downloaded a Super Nintendo emulator within the last 5-6 years, you probably might have heard of Byuu, or at least used the emulator he wrote for the console (BSNES, now known as Higan). Byuu is one of the biggest names in the Super Nintendo and emulation “scenes” and for a good reason: He created the first cycle accurate Super Nintendo emulator and got it to the point where every game was playable, just like it would be on a real Super Nintendo.
Of course, having talent doesn’t exclude you from drama or being crazy on the internet, and as you can find from just searching Byuu on Warosu (a 4chan archive), he’s a highly polarizing figure in the emulation community as well. From a failed preservation project to being extremely stubborn on how he wants to handle emulation, Byuu has made a name for himself in other ways than just Super Nintendo emulation. Oh and did I mention he’s a furry that’s trooning out?
A cycle-accurate Super Nintendo emulator
Byuu’s story goes back to 2004, when he started work on an open-source Super Nintendo emulator designed to be cycle-accurate (as in, it runs games just like the real console does), and he named it BSNES. In 2004, Super Nintendo emulation was in a desolate state, lots of obscure games had major issues, and even some bigger games had issues, such as Star Fox running too fast. Byuu’s goal was to write a Super Nintendo emulator in the spirit of other accurate emulators like Nestopia or MAME, but with the Super Nintendo instead.
By 2011, BSNES was pretty accurate, and that’s when he wrote an article about it for Ars technica, going well into detail about how the emulator got there, and it’s still worth a read for anyone interested in console emulation. At this point BSNES became seen as the most accurate emulator for the Super Nintendo. Despite its eccentricities, such as each SNES rom having to be imported into the program and stored in a custom folder or a clunky user interface, it became the benchmark for Super Nintendo emulation, especially if you had a powerful CPU.
BSNES’s popularity and accuracy combined with his noble goal (that echoed that of the MAME project) gave him instant status and popularity in the retro gaming scene, especially as the mainstream media wrote articles about him.
Even during this time, there was still some drama related to his website, notably a feud between him and Kevin (admin of AssemblerGames) in which Kevin tried to pull a scam on Byuu by abusing eBay’s second chance system over a Nintendo branded CRT monitor from the kiosks he wanted for "emulation research", and this would resurface a few months ago when Kevin’s mismanagement of AssemblerGames caused every staff member to quit that site. However, after BSNES became mainstream, a lot of drama would eventually hit Byuu once his projects didn’t go as planned.
The next few years weren’t as active for Byuu. Once Super Nintendo emulation was far more accurate thanks to his emulator, Byuu lost focus somewhat as development of the SNES part of the emulator was mostly reduced to fixing obscure bugs and BSNES started to include more consoles with less accurate emulation (as the SNES side was considered just about complete). This led to a renaming of the emulator, from BSNES to Higan, which now supports other consoles with varying degrees of accuracy.
Despite this, Higan continued to be popular for Super Nintendo emulation with the emulator being implemented in the popular RetroArch project and the documentation and source being used to help improve other SNES related projects, such as the SNES9x emulator. The NEC chip emulator portion of the code was used to even help Stephen Hawking's voice system be emulated.
In 2012, he made media attention again as he put his complete USA SNES collection up for sale for $20,000, and not long afterwards he did an interview with Polygon talking about how he got 1 cent offers, and rejected anything under $20,000.
In 2014, his depression started to set in from his only talent being programming, spending the last 10 years of his life and lots of his money on a Super Nintendo emulator, and his failure to learn Japanese or drawing. He got older, realizing that he hadn’t done much with his life, and he posted a vent post to his website. He mentioned that he also was having health issues set in, and that he was going to take a break from Higan development to learn. This would be an earlier sign of his behavior pattern a few years later.
https://archive.fo/efPBT
The $10,000 SNES package (And more drama tales)
The late 2016-early 2017 time period though was a turning point for Byuu’s internet reputation, as he went from a famous emulator developer to being seen as a source of drama in the community, and a bit of it has to do with how he handled a box of Super Nintendo cartridges. While his negative reputation was slowly building itself up as the fame got to his head, this is when it really exploded in his face.
One of Byuu’s main projects with regards to the SNES was a preservation project, to both dump and catalog the SNES library his way with checksums and info on each cartridge, especially as he wasn’t too satisfied with the efforts of other groups with the same objective like No-Intro.
However, February of 2017 was when disaster struck the project, disaster that ended up denting his reputation while being covered in the gaming press. See, Byuu wanted to dump and preserve these SNES games his way, and this meant that any collector who wanted to help had to mail their cartridges to Byuu for dumping. He borrowed 100 cartridges, or $7500-10,000 worth of Super Nintendo games, for dumping and scanning from a German collector, which was sent his way via USPS. During shipment, the label was secured to the box (actually two boxes wrapped together and shipped as one) with “brown paper wrap” all over the box, causing the part of the paper with the label to be ripped off and causing the USPS to send him a letter saying his package was missing. He opened up a Patreon account to possibly reimburse the owner, and threw a nuclear grade chimpout online accusing the USPS of stealing his SNES game package.
Not long after the media circus about this, the USPS found his package, in the recovery center, and he wasn’t too thrilled. Afterwards, he decided to preserve SNES games….by just posting the hashes on his website and not posting his extremely accurate roms somewhere (not even in a stealthy way like you see with MAME). Furthermore, he found out that one of the games he had was undumped, so instead of sharing it he flexed it on Twitter. This didn’t give him many fans at all; especially not after nearly $10,000 worth in games being sent to him was lost with him having to go to patreon to beg for money to replace them.
This has led to Byuu being accused of being a dump hoarder on 4chan's /vr/ board, since a common habit in that subculture is when someone buys a rare game, posts pictures of it online, doesn’t spread a dump of it with some excuse (in Byuu’s case it’s “they’re gonna sue me”), but in reality it all comes down to “I have it and you don’t”, another form of flexing that rich and notable game collectors love to do, which leads to disaster if they die or if some lawyers come knocking at their door.
License Drama
Another source of drama has been Byuu’s licensing format. See, Higan is licensed under the GPL V3 license, which requires the full source code to be released of any piece of software that includes it. The main competitor to Higan is SNES9x, which has a notable no commercial use clause in its license, similar to the older MAME license. This had led to controversy with emulator authors such as the developers of LibRetro/Retroarch, angry at the license violations.
Byuu came up with a clever way of making money from this, along with actually helping put his non-SNES emulator cores in use somewhere: License his emulator commercially to anyone wanting to rerelease a game on Steam or build an emulator console, and reaching out to companies caught in SNES9x or GPL licensing issues. This led to both Hyperkin and another console builder from Asia licensing Higan as a way to avoid license tangles with Retroarch.
Some people involved with Retroarch, like TwinApex weren’t too thrilled about this and ended up calling Byun parasites profiting off Retroarch’s problems in leaked chatlogs, chatlogs that also said that Byuu didn’t write a good portion of BSNES and that called Byuu a narcissist and hard to work with as well. Not long afterwards Byuu found this and had a meltdown of his own revolving around these chat leaks.
Byuu on FPGAs and Cemu
With the license violations (and accuracy issues) harming those emulator consoles I mentioned, the new trend in console clones has been high end FPGA (think like the entire SNES hardware programmed in a single freely programmable chip and you get the idea) based consoles with HDMI support, notably the Analogue NT and Analogue Super NT. These offer some advantages over emulators, like less latency or the ability to run real cartridges, while also offering HDMI output and upscaling settings,
Byuu decided to rant about them on his website, and this got him some flak on sites like Reddit. Not long afterwards he had to tone the article down but the damage had already been done.
Byuu also isn’t too thrilled about the existence of CEMU, a Nintendo Wii U Emulator that became popular when it was shown off running most Wii U games, including big name games like Smash or Zelda. While Byuu only makes around $300 on Patreon right now, CEMU makes around $10,000 a month on Patreon, and at it's peak it was pulling in around $18,000. This has resulted in Byuu acting somewhat salty over this, to the point of even saying he wouldn’t defend CEMU if Nintendo came after them.
While Byuu raised a genuine issue with CEMU (the open source issue), when you consider how low his patreon dollars are it comes off as salty.
Trump Derangement Syndrome and Paranoia
Byuu’s political views are also a bit of contention for many. Even as late as 2016, he was against Social Justice and identity politics in software development. When Trump won, he cracked hard and he wrote a long ass rant on the website he ran about how Trump was going to break up his gay marriage and how Trump is literally hitler.
Byuu also suffers from some paranoia, and oftentimes he likes to lash out at numerous people, from the 4channers that don't quite like him to RetroArch lead dev TwinAphex (who's just as much of a dramacow in the scene as Byuu is). He also does not use his real name online at all thanks to his paranoia that the entire internet is harassing him, choosing a character name from an obscure Japan-only Super Nintendo game called Bahamut Lagoon.
https://archive.fo/kvdxD
Byuu the non-binary Furry
Image Source: https://archive.fo/aZNxv
In November of 2017, Byuu found himself a new crowd to hang around too: The furry fandom, specifically the troon techie branch of it. He made a fursona and a Twitter account for it, and took on a nonbinary identity, initially tying his furry account to his main Twitter but hiding it once he realized those darn 4channers mocked him for it.
https://archive.fo/S9P1b
Now, a lot of his friend circle consists of troon furry programmer “techie” troons and he takes pride in this, and few of the tweets on his furry account have anything to do with the fandom, mostly having to do with transgender issues and his nonbinary identity.
https://archive.fo/XWlea
https://archive.fo/LZ5Ls
https://archive.fo/ccLiz
https://archive.fo/o1qvf
https://archive.fo/M0DLc
His friend circle replied to this:
https://archive.fo/zVA5G
Some troon meme RTs:
https://archive.fo/jc0QV
https://archive.fo/hB45R
https://archive.fo/Knoxi
https://archive.fo/YeIKF
His patreon account (which wouldn't archive the full page) has more links to troon furries, with his patreon giving money to Sisk, also known as “No, I didn’t solicit that underage girl for sex over the internet also I’m trans now pls get me out of jail”.
While those gatekeeping bigots might be trying to keep him from taking hormones and other drugs (and they have every right to considering his mental state), he’s taking hormones now since all his friends are doing it down to even promoting /r/transdiy, a subreddit that has come under fire for telling underage teens how to get hormones.
https://archive.fo/zh8Tj
Furthermore, he actually calls people who criticize autogynephilia to be gatekeepers as well (a dodgy position even in the trans community), and he RTs both troons who believe in this kind of thing and “hilarious” troon memes. Hell, in this Tweet storm he's even telling those questioning their gender to do HRT to "experiment" with it.
https://archive.fo/vujfG
His fursona is quite young agewise, and when you consider his use of icons that look a bit “shota” on his main Twitter account, it seems a little sketchy as well. A few years ago though he wrote an article about “thoughtcrimes” and a lot of it has to do with lolicon and shotacon and their legality.
He also retweeted Eevee’s post responding to the Kiwi Farms thread about his girlfriend’s husband’s chatlogs, in which he was soliciting minors for sex. Ouch.
https://archive.fo/lqwv0
https://archive.fo/Eyhpp
Summary:
Byuu is a classic example of a programmer savant who completed his passion software project, and then once it was finished he slowly lost it. His public image is slowly burning away due to the failed project and conflicts with others in the scene, and trooning out might accelerate this.
Social Media Accounts and Links:
Twitters:
Main: @Byuu_San (Archive: https://archive.li/tr1hr)
Furry/Troon: @Byuu_Nyan (Archive: https://archive.li/iQKec)
Alt (Locked): @Byuu_Tan (Archive: https://archive.li/fuZBn)
Emulator: @Higan_Emu (Archive: https://archive.fo/uoYPr)
Website: www.byuu.org (Archive: https://archive.fo/6pLzu)
Furaffinity: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/byuu/ (Archive: https://archive.fo/rdsRa)
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/byuu (Archive: http://archive.li/EwRR1)
https://archive.fo/Jxrl8
If you’ve downloaded a Super Nintendo emulator within the last 5-6 years, you probably might have heard of Byuu, or at least used the emulator he wrote for the console (BSNES, now known as Higan). Byuu is one of the biggest names in the Super Nintendo and emulation “scenes” and for a good reason: He created the first cycle accurate Super Nintendo emulator and got it to the point where every game was playable, just like it would be on a real Super Nintendo.
Of course, having talent doesn’t exclude you from drama or being crazy on the internet, and as you can find from just searching Byuu on Warosu (a 4chan archive), he’s a highly polarizing figure in the emulation community as well. From a failed preservation project to being extremely stubborn on how he wants to handle emulation, Byuu has made a name for himself in other ways than just Super Nintendo emulation. Oh and did I mention he’s a furry that’s trooning out?
A cycle-accurate Super Nintendo emulator
Byuu’s story goes back to 2004, when he started work on an open-source Super Nintendo emulator designed to be cycle-accurate (as in, it runs games just like the real console does), and he named it BSNES. In 2004, Super Nintendo emulation was in a desolate state, lots of obscure games had major issues, and even some bigger games had issues, such as Star Fox running too fast. Byuu’s goal was to write a Super Nintendo emulator in the spirit of other accurate emulators like Nestopia or MAME, but with the Super Nintendo instead.
By 2011, BSNES was pretty accurate, and that’s when he wrote an article about it for Ars technica, going well into detail about how the emulator got there, and it’s still worth a read for anyone interested in console emulation. At this point BSNES became seen as the most accurate emulator for the Super Nintendo. Despite its eccentricities, such as each SNES rom having to be imported into the program and stored in a custom folder or a clunky user interface, it became the benchmark for Super Nintendo emulation, especially if you had a powerful CPU.
BSNES’s popularity and accuracy combined with his noble goal (that echoed that of the MAME project) gave him instant status and popularity in the retro gaming scene, especially as the mainstream media wrote articles about him.
Even during this time, there was still some drama related to his website, notably a feud between him and Kevin (admin of AssemblerGames) in which Kevin tried to pull a scam on Byuu by abusing eBay’s second chance system over a Nintendo branded CRT monitor from the kiosks he wanted for "emulation research", and this would resurface a few months ago when Kevin’s mismanagement of AssemblerGames caused every staff member to quit that site. However, after BSNES became mainstream, a lot of drama would eventually hit Byuu once his projects didn’t go as planned.
The next few years weren’t as active for Byuu. Once Super Nintendo emulation was far more accurate thanks to his emulator, Byuu lost focus somewhat as development of the SNES part of the emulator was mostly reduced to fixing obscure bugs and BSNES started to include more consoles with less accurate emulation (as the SNES side was considered just about complete). This led to a renaming of the emulator, from BSNES to Higan, which now supports other consoles with varying degrees of accuracy.
Despite this, Higan continued to be popular for Super Nintendo emulation with the emulator being implemented in the popular RetroArch project and the documentation and source being used to help improve other SNES related projects, such as the SNES9x emulator. The NEC chip emulator portion of the code was used to even help Stephen Hawking's voice system be emulated.
In 2012, he made media attention again as he put his complete USA SNES collection up for sale for $20,000, and not long afterwards he did an interview with Polygon talking about how he got 1 cent offers, and rejected anything under $20,000.
In 2014, his depression started to set in from his only talent being programming, spending the last 10 years of his life and lots of his money on a Super Nintendo emulator, and his failure to learn Japanese or drawing. He got older, realizing that he hadn’t done much with his life, and he posted a vent post to his website. He mentioned that he also was having health issues set in, and that he was going to take a break from Higan development to learn. This would be an earlier sign of his behavior pattern a few years later.
https://archive.fo/efPBT
The $10,000 SNES package (And more drama tales)
The late 2016-early 2017 time period though was a turning point for Byuu’s internet reputation, as he went from a famous emulator developer to being seen as a source of drama in the community, and a bit of it has to do with how he handled a box of Super Nintendo cartridges. While his negative reputation was slowly building itself up as the fame got to his head, this is when it really exploded in his face.
One of Byuu’s main projects with regards to the SNES was a preservation project, to both dump and catalog the SNES library his way with checksums and info on each cartridge, especially as he wasn’t too satisfied with the efforts of other groups with the same objective like No-Intro.
However, February of 2017 was when disaster struck the project, disaster that ended up denting his reputation while being covered in the gaming press. See, Byuu wanted to dump and preserve these SNES games his way, and this meant that any collector who wanted to help had to mail their cartridges to Byuu for dumping. He borrowed 100 cartridges, or $7500-10,000 worth of Super Nintendo games, for dumping and scanning from a German collector, which was sent his way via USPS. During shipment, the label was secured to the box (actually two boxes wrapped together and shipped as one) with “brown paper wrap” all over the box, causing the part of the paper with the label to be ripped off and causing the USPS to send him a letter saying his package was missing. He opened up a Patreon account to possibly reimburse the owner, and threw a nuclear grade chimpout online accusing the USPS of stealing his SNES game package.
Not long after the media circus about this, the USPS found his package, in the recovery center, and he wasn’t too thrilled. Afterwards, he decided to preserve SNES games….by just posting the hashes on his website and not posting his extremely accurate roms somewhere (not even in a stealthy way like you see with MAME). Furthermore, he found out that one of the games he had was undumped, so instead of sharing it he flexed it on Twitter. This didn’t give him many fans at all; especially not after nearly $10,000 worth in games being sent to him was lost with him having to go to patreon to beg for money to replace them.
License Drama
Another source of drama has been Byuu’s licensing format. See, Higan is licensed under the GPL V3 license, which requires the full source code to be released of any piece of software that includes it. The main competitor to Higan is SNES9x, which has a notable no commercial use clause in its license, similar to the older MAME license. This had led to controversy with emulator authors such as the developers of LibRetro/Retroarch, angry at the license violations.
Byuu came up with a clever way of making money from this, along with actually helping put his non-SNES emulator cores in use somewhere: License his emulator commercially to anyone wanting to rerelease a game on Steam or build an emulator console, and reaching out to companies caught in SNES9x or GPL licensing issues. This led to both Hyperkin and another console builder from Asia licensing Higan as a way to avoid license tangles with Retroarch.
Some people involved with Retroarch, like TwinApex weren’t too thrilled about this and ended up calling Byun parasites profiting off Retroarch’s problems in leaked chatlogs, chatlogs that also said that Byuu didn’t write a good portion of BSNES and that called Byuu a narcissist and hard to work with as well. Not long afterwards Byuu found this and had a meltdown of his own revolving around these chat leaks.
Byuu on FPGAs and Cemu
With the license violations (and accuracy issues) harming those emulator consoles I mentioned, the new trend in console clones has been high end FPGA (think like the entire SNES hardware programmed in a single freely programmable chip and you get the idea) based consoles with HDMI support, notably the Analogue NT and Analogue Super NT. These offer some advantages over emulators, like less latency or the ability to run real cartridges, while also offering HDMI output and upscaling settings,
Byuu decided to rant about them on his website, and this got him some flak on sites like Reddit. Not long afterwards he had to tone the article down but the damage had already been done.
Byuu also isn’t too thrilled about the existence of CEMU, a Nintendo Wii U Emulator that became popular when it was shown off running most Wii U games, including big name games like Smash or Zelda. While Byuu only makes around $300 on Patreon right now, CEMU makes around $10,000 a month on Patreon, and at it's peak it was pulling in around $18,000. This has resulted in Byuu acting somewhat salty over this, to the point of even saying he wouldn’t defend CEMU if Nintendo came after them.
First he commented on it in 2016, before he made a Patreon after another troon emulator dev whined nobody was supporting his GBA project.
https://archive.fo/2autj
In 2017, CEMU's patreon dollars rolled in after the new hyped up Zelda game was running in it, and Byuu threw a fit, as it was both closed source and emulating games people gave a shit about wanting to see run on their PC.
https://archive.fo/kDFBr
https://archive.fo/IM777
https://archive.fo/BkfMx
https://archive.fo/2autj
In 2017, CEMU's patreon dollars rolled in after the new hyped up Zelda game was running in it, and Byuu threw a fit, as it was both closed source and emulating games people gave a shit about wanting to see run on their PC.
https://archive.fo/kDFBr
https://archive.fo/IM777
https://archive.fo/BkfMx
While Byuu raised a genuine issue with CEMU (the open source issue), when you consider how low his patreon dollars are it comes off as salty.
Trump Derangement Syndrome and Paranoia
Byuu’s political views are also a bit of contention for many. Even as late as 2016, he was against Social Justice and identity politics in software development. When Trump won, he cracked hard and he wrote a long ass rant on the website he ran about how Trump was going to break up his gay marriage and how Trump is literally hitler.
Byuu also suffers from some paranoia, and oftentimes he likes to lash out at numerous people, from the 4channers that don't quite like him to RetroArch lead dev TwinAphex (who's just as much of a dramacow in the scene as Byuu is). He also does not use his real name online at all thanks to his paranoia that the entire internet is harassing him, choosing a character name from an obscure Japan-only Super Nintendo game called Bahamut Lagoon.
https://archive.fo/kvdxD
Byuu the non-binary Furry
Image Source: https://archive.fo/aZNxv
In November of 2017, Byuu found himself a new crowd to hang around too: The furry fandom, specifically the troon techie branch of it. He made a fursona and a Twitter account for it, and took on a nonbinary identity, initially tying his furry account to his main Twitter but hiding it once he realized those darn 4channers mocked him for it.
https://archive.fo/S9P1b
Now, a lot of his friend circle consists of troon furry programmer “techie” troons and he takes pride in this, and few of the tweets on his furry account have anything to do with the fandom, mostly having to do with transgender issues and his nonbinary identity.
https://archive.fo/XWlea
https://archive.fo/LZ5Ls
https://archive.fo/ccLiz
https://archive.fo/o1qvf
https://archive.fo/M0DLc
His friend circle replied to this:
https://archive.fo/zVA5G
Some troon meme RTs:
https://archive.fo/jc0QV
https://archive.fo/hB45R
https://archive.fo/Knoxi
https://archive.fo/YeIKF
His patreon account (which wouldn't archive the full page) has more links to troon furries, with his patreon giving money to Sisk, also known as “No, I didn’t solicit that underage girl for sex over the internet also I’m trans now pls get me out of jail”.
While those gatekeeping bigots might be trying to keep him from taking hormones and other drugs (and they have every right to considering his mental state), he’s taking hormones now since all his friends are doing it down to even promoting /r/transdiy, a subreddit that has come under fire for telling underage teens how to get hormones.
https://archive.fo/zh8Tj
Furthermore, he actually calls people who criticize autogynephilia to be gatekeepers as well (a dodgy position even in the trans community), and he RTs both troons who believe in this kind of thing and “hilarious” troon memes. Hell, in this Tweet storm he's even telling those questioning their gender to do HRT to "experiment" with it.
https://archive.fo/vujfG
His fursona is quite young agewise, and when you consider his use of icons that look a bit “shota” on his main Twitter account, it seems a little sketchy as well. A few years ago though he wrote an article about “thoughtcrimes” and a lot of it has to do with lolicon and shotacon and their legality.
He also retweeted Eevee’s post responding to the Kiwi Farms thread about his girlfriend’s husband’s chatlogs, in which he was soliciting minors for sex. Ouch.
https://archive.fo/lqwv0
https://archive.fo/Eyhpp
Summary:
Byuu is a classic example of a programmer savant who completed his passion software project, and then once it was finished he slowly lost it. His public image is slowly burning away due to the failed project and conflicts with others in the scene, and trooning out might accelerate this.
Social Media Accounts and Links:
Twitters:
Main: @Byuu_San (Archive: https://archive.li/tr1hr)
Furry/Troon: @Byuu_Nyan (Archive: https://archive.li/iQKec)
Alt (Locked): @Byuu_Tan (Archive: https://archive.li/fuZBn)
Emulator: @Higan_Emu (Archive: https://archive.fo/uoYPr)
Website: www.byuu.org (Archive: https://archive.fo/6pLzu)
Furaffinity: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/byuu/ (Archive: https://archive.fo/rdsRa)
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/byuu (Archive: http://archive.li/EwRR1)
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