That account's also scrubbed, now - the account (@Far27340190) still exists, but the tweet's deleted (although that might be because it was posting Null's old dox).
Those edgelords can be also amusing, they may or may not discover that this place has true and honest LGBQiwis aswell and if they sperg out about it - its baffling to watch them get ridiculed for being a sperg.
electro schock therapy worked and is needed
First, your spoiler was spelled wrong so it didn't work. Second, what the hell does CW mean? Content Warning? I thought it was TW for Trigger Warning. What, is the word "Trigger" itself, now a trigger for people?Dunno if this has been posted yet but
Spoilered for length
This nigga has fucking él pronouns.
well yeah because guns have triggers and guns are evil
Maybe it sounds too similar to the gamer word and that makes it triggering?
They're going to need another noun. The word "content" is very triggering for traumatised malcontents.
él creatura
P sure that's implicit when making an account here, fam
Fucking pedoarse technicaI'm going to have to rudely ask you to calm down.
Well, when you put it like that buddy, I guess I'm going to have to rudely accept, then very rudely shut the fuck up!
Seriously, nice work. Great job. I realise it's a bit of a mess to read, but still the info is there for a grep. Lot of info though.
Yeah, the site has been down for a good few hours. They probably noticed the odd traffic and just shut it down themselves as a precaution while they figure out how to keep it accessible to users and harden it to 'intruders'. You got it just in time!
Just a few thoughts...
Seriously that fucking ars tehnica is fucking pozzed to fuck. There is some great bullying going on there where one user bullys another user that questions if Near is in fact dead, and like, wtf is the proof. He then says he has changed his mind, he now believes he is dead. And after admitting that after getting bullied, he gets bullied some more and downvoted for the wrongthink. Fucking hilarious. I've archived it. That bit is on the third archive below:
You need to scroll down.
Those comments are really something else. The amount of frothing hatred for the farms is just off the charts. Some of it is signalling but some of it is good old fashioned hate speech wanting us dead, but not before we have been tortured. Guess I'm a Kiwi Farmer now, fam. I've been digging through some other stuff, but if some other kind farmer would like to go through those archives I just posted above, then a few choice screenshots would be golden. Thanks in advance!
And for someone that was so loved by the community there, no one has made a post in his 'obituary' thread for over 3 fucking days. Gone, and also forgotten, it would seem.
OG post that I archived and is still up: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021...from-complete-perfection/?comments=1&start=40
It's a must read.
From there I came across Near's other website that is still up: https://near.sh/
It's dated 2021-06-01, so probably January of this year was its last update? It was archived 6 months ago, but I did a new one JIC. It's tech stuff. As you would expect. Boy, he really was gay for Bahamut-lagoon wasn't he?
Pages are refusing to be archived, oh well. I guess this is old news as well, but maybe it will function as a little recap to some that missed it.
Also came across this page -
SNES Emulator Developer Takes Own Life Following Online Harassment
Near, the developer of the bsnes emulator and lead on numerous fan translation projects, takes their own life following online harassment.
The utter certainty with which they speak when there is no proof is just fucking retarded now. I can't wait for Near to pop up somewhere, even it will be six months time. He will resurface. If he did actually kill himself then we will find out before too much longer, if we ever find out at all.
I also found another web page of his on archive org.
This is a snapshot from Feb 2015 and the post I'm about to quote is from 2014, so about 7 years ago. Does this sound familiar?
My emulator, higan, is now over ten years old.
I must stress right away that work will continue on the project into the foreseeable future. But, there's no denying work has slowed down immensely. In fact, there hasn't been much of any progress since January. There are several reasons for this, which I'll go over.
In January, I was in the process of wrapping up the finishing touches on loki, my SNES debugger, in preparing for a v095 release.
The first major roadblock was Debian's decision to acquiesce on systemd. At that time, Debian was my primary development operating system. Having suffered through years of broken audio by the same egomaniacal Redhat developers, I wasn't eager to repeat the experience by introducing such fascinating features as having an HTTP server that generates QR codes as part of my init system. I fundamentally believe systemd to be poorly designed and a major step backward for Linux. But with Linus asleep at the wheel while Redhat turns Linux into Windows, the writing was on the wall: it was time for me to move on.
This led to a few months of crash-course learning FreeBSD. Now, FreeBSD makes for a wonderful server, but is not exactly the best way to run a desktop. It can be done, and to great effect, but it requires an immense amount of effort and dedication.
Due to most developers only considering Linux, this leads to lots of portability issues that result in bugs which slip past port maintainers. I battled through issues with font rendering, libvte crashing terminal instances, Thunar refreshing and resorting on every gedit save due to the latter's insistence on creating temporary files for every save, mousepad crashing when opening any file an even multiple of 4KB due to an out-of-bounds memory access which apparently was hidden by the Linux implementation of mmap, more Thunar issues in failing to update file types and file sizes in its displays, ibus issues with anthy and mozc, browser issues with large images, and on and on.
The worst part was probably the horribly buggy binary nvidia driver. It was so unstable, taking my entire system down, that I went back to using vesa. By some miracle, my graphics card actually has a 2560x1600 vesa mode. After manually rewriting my MTRR tables, I've found I actually get rather decent performance. By multi-threading my software XShm renderer, I can even run my emulator and watch movies just fine.
For the most part, I was able to work around these software issues. In many instances, I had to switch to new software programs, or revert to older ones. For instance, the Firefox team decided to completely change its user interface to the braindead Australis design, and to hell with anyone who didn't like it. Classic Theme Restorer may get something about 80% close to what you're used to on Windows, but is an unmitigated disaster on Xorg.
After Metro, Unity, Gnome 3, KDE 4, Firefox Australis, and on and on; it has become painfully clear to me that I cannot rely on software vendors to not radically disrupt my workflow whenever some wide-eyed kid fresh out of college decides it's time to completely redesign applications that were perfectly fine already. I'm not against change when it leads to better ways of doing things. But I am vehemently opposed to change for the sake of it. And my desktop is not a god damned tablet, you stupid fucks. But well, as they say, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
Upon attempting to write replacements for critical programs, such as a file manager and text editor, it became clear that my UI abstraction layer, phoenix, was not going to cut it. I had to go back to the drawing board and work on the largest redesign that the project has ever seen. This required many new components in my template library, nall, such as shared objects and IPC. I then added a lot of power to phoenix, mostly focusing on the GTK2 target. I've added new widgets, new functions, and an entirely new shared memory model that will greatly aid in writing dynamically generated interfaces, among other things.
And just as I was finishing this up, the godawful web host I was using, InMotion Hosting, decided to reveal their gross incompetence. First, they managed to botch an Apache upgrade, resulting in all of my PHP files being accessible as plain-text. So anyone typing in /config.php would be greeted with the plain-text login credentials for MySQL. Then, a few weeks later, another update corrupted half of my phpBB SQL tables. Repairing didn't work: permissions were completely broken, allowing any user to edit any other user's post, page refreshes were broken, and many other similar issues arose. I had no choice but to drop five years worth of posting history and start over. But no way in hell was I going to start over on that host.
And so now, I've had to move my site over to a new host. This time, I decided to go the VPS route so that I could be in control of software updates. I certainly couldn't do any worse than my previous host. Thankfully I have plenty of experience in running and securing web servers, so this wasn't very painful.
But frankly, I've grown sick of Apache, PHP, and phpBB. I am so tired of bloated, buggy, poorly designed software. So now I am further working on designing lighter weight replacements with my usual emphasis on minimalism. Just because it's the web, that doesn't mean I want to throw away native code performance and compile-time type safety. And I am so tired of fighting mod_rewrite to do simple things like map a subfolder to a subdomain.
I've been having frequent chest pains and issues with lethargy, which my GP is either too incompetent or apathetic to help me with. So my output has been reduced quite significantly. I've been trying to take up healthier eating and exercise to try and improve my health. All the same, I find it increasingly difficult to pull off marathon coding sessions any longer. And even when I do, it leaves me out of commission for the next day or two.
So as you can see, it's just been one hell of an awful year. I've been jumping from fire to fire, struggling to keep everything afloat. And it's been taking a toll on my enjoyment of programming. It seems like the more work I try and do, the more work I have waiting for me. I can never really complete anything when I keep getting new things dumped on me all of the time.
I have an incredible backlog spanning years worth of work here. I have to map out and scan nearly 1500 games, I have to do all of the programming work for a fan translation of Tengai Makyou Zero, I have to finish up the Windows, Cocoa and Qt4 phoenix targets, so that I can continue on the design of higan and loki, I have to write a myriad of desktop applications, up to and possibly including a web browser frontend (for either Webkit or Gecko), and then I have all of my backlogged hardware research on the BS-X, Cx4, etc, and it just keeps going. All the while dealing with diminishing health.
Yet when it comes to all of this ... I really feel that I've already accomplished more than I ever wanted to or thought I could on SNES emulation. I no longer feel like I am facing strong challenges that force me to grow, but rather an infinite stream of tedium and maintenance. I'm not saying I necssarily hate programming, just that it's lost its magic.
The most fun I've been having lately has been in attempting to improve my Japanese knowledge through some fan translations of manga (holy hell is that language a nightmare to learn), and getting a bit back into drawing again.
So, what I hope to do from this point out is to start winding down on my programming projects, and focus on new ventures while I'm still young enough to take on large new challenges in fields I have little to no experience in. Again, I don't mean to seek to abandon my projects, but to get them more suitable for a slower development pace, so that I can start branching out into new areas.
He talks about his diminishing health and how programming has lost its magic for him, that he can now no longer do marathon hacking runs, and he mentions his loathing for 'web' languages like PHP along with Apache.
I've been having frequent chest pains and issues with lethargy, which my GP is either too incompetent or apathetic to help me with. So my output has been reduced quite significantly. I've been trying to take up healthier eating and exercise to try and improve my health. All the same, I find it increasingly difficult to pull off marathon coding sessions any longer. And even when I do, it leaves me out of commission for the next day or two.
With regard to the programming stuff, and keep in mind he offered his services to Null for these in his little extortion attempt:
But frankly, I've grown sick of Apache, PHP, and phpBB. I am so tired of bloated, buggy, poorly designed software. So now I am further working on designing lighter weight replacements with my usual emphasis on minimalism. Just because it's the web, that doesn't mean I want to throw away native code performance and compile-time type safety. And I am so tired of fighting mod_rewrite to do simple things like map a subfolder to a subdomain.
This is like 7 fucking years ago he was feeling this way! He later abandoned any idea of writing his own programming languages due to time and health restrictions, well, of course...
You can read the full lot in the spoiler on the web page.
One last thing from that archive - the most recent - are his general thoughts and a good indicator to his mood at the time. This would have been 21 Dec 2020 or earlier from when it was archived:
I believe the advice in this article applies much more broadly than just emulation, but nonetheless I am going to present this article from said vantage point.
When looking to begin a new emulator project, where to begin can be very daunting: is it okay to look at the source code of other emulators? To read notes that explain how to implement various details? Or is that just copying? And how do you make a positive difference in the scene?
My Perspective
When I started on bsnes back in 2004, I did not start from scratch: I started with the combined wisdom and research of dozens of talented individuals that helped to reverse engineer and emulate the Super Ninendo between 1996 and 2004. I had a full eight years of progress at my fingertips: source code, documentation, forum posts, and bugfix changelogs from the work of ZSNES, Snes9X, et al. This, to me, was invaluable.
(I also had six years of my own experience in reverse engineering SNES games for the fan translations I had worked on, which was also a benefit.)
If you search back to the early days of bsnes, you’ll find that I was able to catch up to their general level of accuracy and compatibility within only six months, in spite of bsnes being the first major article I had written.
To claim that this represents some extraordinary talent of mine would be facetious: I had a lot of help, and I’m not ashamed of that. I leaned on the folks who came before me, studied their work, asked them questions, and benefited greatly from their patience and assistance.
Folks like anomie, TRAC, etc helped make bsnes a reality. I would not be where I am today without them.
Success Begets Success
After the first six months of development, it was now my turn to improve the state of the art. I developed new techniques to more accurately analyze the cycle timings of the SNES, and I wrote hundreds of test ROMs to suss out countless edge cases and new behaviors.
After relying on pre-existing knowledge, I had to transition to discovering new details myself. This required a hardware setup and knowledge of how to write programs for the SNES. Even though I technically had that from my days of ROM hacking, such a thing is not necessary to begin writing a new emulator, that can come later on. These days, for most major retro systems, there is enough information to create relatively high-quality emulators without ever even owning the original hardware. Case in point: the MiSTer SNES emulation core was written by someone using only bsnes’ source code as a reference, having never even owned a Super Nintendo!
Returning the Favor
bsnes has now been under active development for the past fifteen years. But I haven’t forgotten my origins. Instead, I’ve strived to give back. You can see my contributions in pretty much anything in the SNES space today: I have answered questions for and/or donated source code to Snes9X, SNESGT, Mesen-S, the Super Nt, etc.
My source code has always been open source, and where required I’ve even relicensed it for use in other projects, such as my APU core for Snes9X’s non-commercial license.
And just as I was able to catch up to ZSNES and Snes9X before me in only a tiny fraction of the time, modern SNES emulators from 2018 onward have quickly been able to catch up to me.
The Super Nt was created in only nine months, and Mesen-S in only four months.
Research
As an example, Speedy Gonzales for the SNES was an infamous bug. For around 15 years, no emulator could figure out how to run this game. It would deadlock in the middle of stage 6-2 for seemingly no reason.
I spent approximately eighty hours of a two-week period reverse engineering the game, and trying to understand what was happening. It was actually pretty easy to get the game playable: there were several ways of getting around the problem area of code. But only one way was the right way. Implement any of the other ways would mean my emulator had two bugs instead of one. Potentially an incorrect fix would end up breaking a different game in the future.
And so the challenge was ruling out every other possibility through devising a comprehensive and exhausting set of tests, so that I could be sure I had it right.
I eventually reached this conclusion: the game was reading from an unmapped memory address, waiting for a bit to be set that never would be. But by sheer chance, after thousands of scanlines, an Hblank DMA transfer would fetch a value with said bit set, and if the cycles aligned just right, this value would remain on the bus, and the loop condition would terminate.
After this was discovered, I was able to provide the answer to other SNES emulator developers, who could then implement this behavior within a few seconds.
This is no different than all of the bugfixes I gleaned by reading through the old Snes9X changelogs and forum posts about problematic games.
Cheating?
I know it can seem like it, if you view emulation as taking a test and other emulators as having the answer key for the test. And by all means, if it is your ambition to learn how to reverse engineer hardware for the sake of it, you are most welcome to not study what was done before you.
But if your goal is preservation of the original hardware, then it is not in any way “cheating.” It is simply being practical and making use of the resources that are available to you.
We have limited time in this world, and the hardware we seek to preserve is not getting any younger, nor any more readily available. Eventually, it will not be possible to pick up working original hardware to analyze. That is already the case for some very old and rare systems, and even more modern ones have become prohibitively expensive and fragile, such as the Atari Jaguar CD.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel: make use of what tools we have, and then strive to build an even better wheel. Any lingering guilt you have can easily be absolved once you give back to the community.
Closing
My hope is that the broader community can see emulation as team effort, and not as a competition. It isn’t about who did it first, or who did it best. It’s about making sure the works of video game studios can live on, and that our great-grandchildren can, if they so choose, look back and see how video gaming began.
No one in emulation is a god or a king. No one is more important than anyone else. We’re all in this together, collectively.
Again, you don’t have to rely on existing knowledge. You are welcome to forge your own path. But there should be no shame in standing on the shoulders of those who came before you.
Thank you for reading, I hope this will help some of you to get started. I look forward to seeing what you come up with one day soon. Good luck, and don’t forget, we’re here for you!
I'll just quote his final closing paragraph:
My hope is that the broader community can see emulation as team effort, and not as a competition. It isn’t about who did it first, or who did it best. It’s about making sure the works of video game studios can live on, and that our great-grandchildren can, if they so choose, look back and see how video gaming began.
No one in emulation is a god or a king. No one is more important than anyone else. We’re all in this together, collectively.
Again, you don’t have to rely on existing knowledge. You are welcome to forge your own path. But there should be no shame in standing on the shoulders of those who came before you.
Thank you for reading, I hope this will help some of you to get started. I look forward to seeing what you come up with one day soon. Good luck, and don’t forget, we’re here for you!
Sounds pretty chipper to me!
Actually, I can see now the earliest archive of that was 2019-10-01
We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants | Advice
Words of inspiration for aspiring emulator developers.web.archive.org
So from being depressed and in decling health in 2014, he has bounced back to being fairly optimistic, and the fruits of his labours bare this out as well because he did a lot of great work between then and 2019 when he made that closing post on his website. He couldn't have been that fucking depressed in the interim to complete that body of work.
Or maybe he was. I've known alcoholics and I've know workaholics. Near was definitely the latter. Both use these modes for maladaptive coping mechanisms. Did he finally just crack? No pun intended. Egged on by a failed relationship and hormone fucking his body/brain metabolism in to a fucking right old 2 and 8?
One thing that stood out as well for me in this little detective session. He posts his face to his official twitter channel. Not the other one that is locked and is actually linked by ars technica so I assume it is genuine. But on his public and still available twitter, he posts the same shot as he sent to null: I just can't smile...
It would be interesting to know the timeline of when he posted that as opposed to when he sent the shot to Null, because it actually makes quite a difference to the credibility he has. I expect he only posted that after he saw Null posted his face, hence he knew he had nothing to lose. It would be more emotional blackmail and reverse propaganda for his cause.
This fucker knew what he was doing. Not a thing he did that was not calculated as far as his human debugging process/brain could carry it.
Who knows, the old fox might just have outsmarted us all
Poor Josh, those mean twitter bullies fatshaming him. HE'S JUST BIG BONED OKAY?!View attachment 2319421
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That's not how the POV meme works unless I guess you're looking in the mirror but then why do a POV meme argh
Come and get us at Bearmeat's, bitchesView attachment 2319421
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Someone archived it, yes. Don't have the link, but it's in this thread, around page 400 or so.
