Peter Denholm

The brightest stars burn the fastest, so we must love them while we can.

-Anna Todd

Brilliance should be acknowledged, and David Ginder, better known by the pseudonym Near, was brilliant.

Near loved to play SNES RPG games. Unfortunately for Near, some of these games were only produced in Japan with no plans for Western localisation.

Undeterred by this, Near set out to learn Japanese and stumbled onto the still-developing fan localisation scene.

What's important to realise about the localisation process, is that it's more complicated than translating words from Japanese to English. That's hard enough. But when you’re editing compiled code, it may allow for only so many characters to be displayed at once, or use a font that doesn't include characters in the English language.

In order to translate these games, Near would first need to build a proportional font engine. This would allow more information to fit into the dialogue window.

There was only one problem: Near was not a programmer. So, equipped with unlimited time over the summer break, Near began teaching themself. They printed out a 200-page document that explained how the SNES CPU worked, and began trying to understand its secrets.

Despite having access to a computer, Near would write the code onto sheets of paper. This allowed them to “scribble and draw wherever”, and then calculate how it would work in their head. Once they were confident the code made sense, they’d insert it into a game and see what did and didn't work.

I have attempted this fan translation five times. The reason I've started over each time was because I learned more, and felt I could do better. The reason I've released this fifth attempt is because I no longer believe there's anything left that can be improved upon.

These adjustments aren’t implemented using the readable, high-level programming languages developers have become accustomed to. They’re made by painstakingly reverse-engineering the binary with a hex editor. Near’s programming and translation environment would’ve looked similar to this:

If that wasn’t impressive enough, Near was doing this at the ripe old age of 15.

“Brilliant” undersells Near.

What started off with translations for Dragon Quest I & II, was then followed up with a lengthy battle with Bahamut Lagoon, which eventually led to Der Langrisser. But around this time, Near noticed a reoccurring issue: using SNES emulators to test the edited code was causing issues.

To make an emulator fast, you have to sacrifice accuracy. To get around this, most emulators contain internal lists of the most popular 50 or so games. When you load those games, the emulators tweak their timing values and patch out certain areas of code to get these games running correctly. This will result in obscure bugs that aren’t present on an original console.

For Near, this wasn’t good enough:

Video games are a piece of our history, and we need to respect the fact that there is a “true” form they had when released. Imagine if we only had a JPEG of the Mona Lisa, a RealVideo stream of the moon landing, or a MIDI rendition of “Walking in the Air.” We have the ability to keep our past alive, and I feel like it's almost a duty to do so.

So Near started work on their most important historical contribution: the emulator bsnes, one focused on accuracy over performance.

But this accuracy comes at a serious cost. Making an emulator twice as accurate will make it roughly twice as slow; double that accuracy again and you're now four times slower.

At the same time, the rewards for this accuracy diminish quickly. Most games look and feel “playable” at modest levels of emulator accuracy. Near says that most emulators target a “sweet spot” of around 95% compatibility with optimal performance.

Sometimes the correct, more accurate emulation actually produces a “wrong” result. Super Bonk's attract mode demo actually desynchronizes, causing Bonk to get stuck near a wall on most real systems. And Starfox suffers from significant slowdown issues throughout the game. These are certainly not desirable attributes, but they are correct nonetheless. We wouldn't round pi down to 3 simply because irrational numbers are inconvenient, right?

Bsnes is widely considered to be a technical marvel, and one of the most accurate software emulators to ever be produced – all born out of Near’s desire to play games that weren’t localised.

But brilliance comes with a price: it attracts those who aren’t.

Near experienced ruthless online bullying, and publicly retired from the emulation scene citing a desire for a more private life. This followed a series of escalating privacy intrusions and targeted Internet harassment that resulted in Near seeking professional help to manage their anxiety.

Tragically, on this day 3 years ago, Near took their own life.

Near describes themself as having an “overwhelming drive to achieve perfection”. We can honour Near’s memory by setting high standards in our own work, remaining true to the essence of the art form, and focusing on accuracy of execution.