The constant searches for Napster, Morpheus, and other file sharing programs have demonstrated that Lycos users want music for free. That's not all they want however -- a large number of them want their games for free as well. Thus the regular searches for emulators and ROMs.
Emulators are programs that cause your computer to think it is a video game console. In the case of MAME, the multiple arcade machine emulator, your computer even thinks it is a classic standup arcade game. Having emulated the basic code of these video game machines, gamers can download ROMs, which are files that tell your computer which game to play. These are the files that are included on game cartridges.
A few weeks ago we noticed that searches for Super Nintendo ROMs were getting hugely popular. That's a lot of attention for a game system that is ten years old.
Taking a further look at searches for ROMs and emulators, we discovered that Nintendo is by far the most popular company to emulate. We counted up all of the ROM searches that mentioned a specific machine type, and here are the top ten:
1) Super Nintendo
2) Nintendo 64
3) Game Boy
4) NES/8-bit Nintendo
5) Game Boy Advance
6) Sega Genesis
7) MAME
8) Neo Geo
9) Sony Playstation
10) Sega Dreamcast
Wow. It's pretty clear that the game code emulating community is quite fascinated by Nintendo games, since they hold the top five spots. Even more impressively, Super Nintendo ROMs receive two-and-a-half times as many searches as any other emulator ROMs.
We thought we had no idea what was driving the interest in Super Nintendo games among the computer-savvy. But reader Josh Ledwell wrote in to tell us, "The Nintendo software comes on cartridges and there's a lot less code on those cartridges than they pack onto a Playstation CD-ROM. That makes them much easier to compress and download."
So, what does this mean for the new Game Boy Advance, two weeks old and sitting at #46 on the Lycos 50? Well, searches for Game Boy Advance ROMs arrived in March, even before the system was out in America, and two weeks ago they tripled. Could anxious hackers already have figured out a way to teach your computer to think that it is a Game Boy Advance? Actually, it seems they started to work on it as soon as the system was released in Japan.
That is amazing when compared with the even more popular Playstation 2. Compared with older systems, Playstation 2 emulator searches are quite minimal. Is it the Playstation 2 so advanced that hackers haven't managed to figure it out yet? Why all the interest in older Nintendo systems, and not the new and fancy Playstation 2?
It should be pointed out that this is all technically illegal. You are not allowed to own a ROM file from a game unless you own the actual game. But, of course, is the federal government's Napster ban stopping people from trading free music online? Nope.
Then again, we're not sure why anyone needs to play Game Boy Advance games on their home computer. The whole point of GBA is that it's portable. Your computer isn't, unless it is a laptop. Nevertheless, hackers faced with a challenge will always take on the challenge, and searchers will always go searching for free stuff.
