Zophar's Domain closing?

[Frogacuda]

Originally posted by haohmaru
Uhh...no, that would be your opinion ... =)

Maybe a bit short stated, but hosting it costs money, doing it costs time, and hobbies don't pay the bills.

Alot of emu authors are high school and college kids. It's always been that way. Some of them are like 13.

[JMET]

Zophars has been dead forever, and yes they have pulled this stunt more then once only to come back with promises of a redesign and or more updates but then after a month its dead again.

www.retrogames.com is the only emu site you need imo....

Been my homepage for like 4 years.

[Shine]

Originally posted by Lordmrw
The roms on mame.dk aren't gone.

Originally posted by ChaoofNee
Shh!

LOL, Yup, They sure are down And you almost had me going for a sec.

[OmegaFlareX]

Are you a registered user?

[DirtySouth]

I hang in what is probably THE IRC channel for anything emulation related, #retrogamers on EFNet (I'm an op in there...not something you really want to tell friends ). A lot of emulator coders and emulation site ops hang in there, including the retrogames.com staff, zophar.net (former?) staff, JoseQ (emuviews site op), mame.dk site ops, various MAME coders, ZSNES coders, visualpinball/mame coders, etc. I haven't really messed with emulators and roms for a while, because most of the stuff I cared to be emulated happened a long time ago, but I'm still in there, because I've talked to a lot of the people for many many years. You guys wouldn't believe the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. There are so many egos and interests clashing, that it's like a virtual soap opera. Things from site wars, to DDoS'ing competing sites, to emulator's code getting stolen, to rom hoarding, to illegally selling CD's of ROMS and emulators, to people's code being reverse-engineered, to fake emulators being released, and all the stuff that goes on on IRC, and the various forums can be written into a best-selling novel. There were even a few lawsuits thrown around a while ago. While Zophar's will be missed, it hasn't been an important part of the "emulation collective" for quite a while, although their collection of emulators is nice. There was so much in-fighting going on over there, I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. For lots of fun and happiness, do Google searches on the following words: ztnet, c0njurer, kinox, emu-lmao, "leaked betas and emulation", ,"swampgas and emulation", atila mert, fatila, orlando ortiz, daemon_, Tim Eckel, raflsiau, #retrogamers, #classicemu, marat fayzullin, emuchrist, "efront and scandal" (not really emulation related, but that was a HUGE fiasco involving Mr.Eckel above, and various emulation sites were affected). I'm sure most of you all won't care for any of this, but once you realize that it's adults that are acting like this, you should get a chuckle (or shake your head in disgust).

[Ragnarok the Red]

Originally posted by OmegaFlareX
The emulation scene must truly be dying if Zophar is calling it quits. I hope a new site takes up their slack.

Actually Zophar himself left the site a couple of years ago and left it in the hands of his best friend or something. It's generally been slowly going downhill since then. It's still a shame though that they're going, was my favorite emu site for years

[Diff-chan]

Originally posted by haohmaru
Uhh...no, that would be your opinion ... =)

Maybe a bit short stated, but hosting it costs money, doing it costs time, and hobbies don't pay the bills.

Yea, hobbies dont pay the bills but people still do them. I think its ridiculous to think that just cause hobbies dont make money people are gonna stop. Does playing videogames pay the bills? People write emulators cause theyre good coders, cause they want the challenge, whatever. Sometimes if theyre really good they may even be hired by someone like Digital Eclipse.

Hosting may cost money but maybe, just maybe, these emulation programmers have real jobs that can pay for it to a degree? The idea that a hobby isnt worth doing because it doesnt make any money is ludicrous. Its quite unbelievable to me that you, such an avid videogamer, would make such a statement.

Emulation -> going nowhere. Emulation isnt something like CueCat or any number of ridiculous dotcom enterprises created to make money. It was born from love of gaming and technical expertise.

[haohmaru]

Originally posted by diffusionx
Yea, hobbies dont pay the bills but people still do them. I think its ridiculous to think that just cause hobbies dont make money people are gonna stop. Does playing videogames pay the bills? People write emulators cause theyre good coders, cause they want the challenge, whatever. Sometimes if theyre really good they may even be hired by someone like Digital Eclipse.

Hosting may cost money but maybe, just maybe, these emulation programmers have real jobs that can pay for it to a degree? The idea that a hobby isnt worth doing because it doesnt make any money is ludicrous. Its quite unbelievable to me that you, such an avid videogamer, would make such a statement.

Emulation -> going nowhere. Emulation isnt something like CueCat or any number of ridiculous dotcom enterprises created to make money. It was born from love of gaming and technical expertise.

You're putting words in my mouth. I never said emulation was bad, wasn't worth doing, wasn't a vaild hobby, or shouldn't be pursued. I did say that it's expensive to host, very time consuming. I wouldn't blame anyone for NOT doing it or not hosting it, either.

[Chux]

The counter was for the new year, and the news behind everything was the unveiling of the new staff.

A new staff that will continue to update the page with "No News" every 2 days.

[Lordmrw]

The no news thing is pretty much to be expected as it is nowadays. Most systems have perfect or near perfect emulators out, so anything that comes along will just be a bunch of bug fixes or minor tweaks.