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Interview with Randy Linden

·1 hr 23 min·5 clips
Randy Linden put a PlayStation disc into his PC and realized he could write an emulator, sparking a legal battle with Sony.
The episode is an interview with Randy Linden, hosted by Bob on RetroRGB. Linden begins by sharing his early programming background, starting with BASIC at age 11 and assembly at 13, leading to paid work on Commodore 64 software like Paperback Writer in his teens. He discusses his role in creating early commercial emulators, including the 64 Emulator for Amiga and the term 'emulator' itself. The core of the interview revolves around Linden's most famous project, the PlayStation emulator Bleem, which he developed after discovering PlayStation discs could be read on a PC. He describes the legal battle with Sony, where courts ruled emulation and comparison screenshots were legal, though Bleem eventually settled and shut down. Linden then explains his work on porting Doom to the Super Nintendo in the mid-1990s, involving reverse-engineering the Super FX chip using a custom 'Romulator' built from a Star Fox cartridge. The episode shifts to his current project, 'Ultimate Doom' for SNES, released through Limited Run Games. This version adds missing levels, music, and features, using a Raspberry Pi chip to emulate the Super FX chip at higher speeds, doubling the frame rate to 20 fps. Linden also details the addition of rumble support, with custom waveforms for different weapons, and emphasizes open-sourcing the technology for community use. The interview concludes with discussions on future projects and community adoption of the new hardware.

As heard by us

A grounded account of how Randy Linden's early Commodore 64 tinkering led to a Super Nintendo development workaround.

Randy Linden's path into game development has the neat shape of someone learning by taking machines apart and making them answer back. A Commodore 64, a first BASIC program at 11, and an underwater Centipede clone called Bubbles written in assembly at 13 set the tone.

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Why you'd press play

You get Randy Linden tracing the path from a Commodore 64 holiday gift to the Super FX workaround behind Doom and Dirt Tracks FX.

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