Underground News: My interview with Jamie Sanders

I recently got a chance to interview Jamie Sanders, creator of Virtualnes.com and Virtualgbx.com and also part of the alliance known ans "The Emulation Collective" that creates Emulation websites that follow legal code. Meaning you can play games online without consequences.

UN: How did you get into emulation?

JS: I discovered emulation when I was 8, but it took several years, and attempts at writing other things, before I gave writing my own emulator a chance. I've always been the sort to want to know how things work, and the idea of recreating hardware in software was really appealing to me.

UN: Why did you choose to emulate in Java?

JS: I wanted to have a reliably way to play games using a web browser, and at the time, Java was really the natural choice. Flash just wasn't powerful enough at the time, and Silverlight didn't exist. Silverlight never panned out to be a good idea, and there's a lot of Flash backlash these days.

Of note, one thing I wanted to be rid of were terrible clones of (predominately) NES games in Flash that simply didn't capture the proper feeling and appeal that it does via emulation.

UN: Did you expect VNES and VGBX to get such a large a following?

JS: I'm not really sure if I expected this to be quite as large as it did, but I've met a lot of really cool and interesting people all over the world through this project, and I'm very thankful for that opportunity.

UN: What features can we expect for the coming weeks?

JS: Punch-Out!!, Zapper, and a few others that are still secret.

UN: With the announcement of VirtualSNES, what can be expected at launch?

JS: Somewhere over 100 games, and excellent sound support.

UN: Do you plan to just make emulators for the rest of your life, or do you hope to move on to bigger and better things?

JS: It's a hobby. I plan to do a lot of increasingly awesome things, but this is a hobby, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

UN: Do you plan to make an emulator for (insert video game system here)?

JS: Yes.

UN: More for my own curiosity, what is "We can dance. We can dance. Everybody's taking the chance."?

JS: It's a reference to a 1980's one-hit-wonder Men Without Hats, specifically their song "The Safety Dance".