ROM Collection

When I was growing up, ROMs were becoming quite popular. Most of my friends owned Android phones, and there were a lot of ROM-sharing websites online, so getting ROMs was relatively easy, and required little effort, unlike today, where you risk getting a virus whenever you visit any of these websites.

Nonetheless, I had the largest library of games at the time, often ones that never left Japan or were obscure and unrecognizable to the mainstream.

And so, some time ago, I found an old, somewhat broken phone I assumed was from when I was far younger. I turned it on and went through the files to see if there was anything of value. Amazingly, I found that almost all of the old ROMs I'd downloaded were nearly untouched.

My nostalgia got the best of me, and so I began flipping through some of the games I'd downloaded. By the end of the day I'd gone through just about all the games on the list, until I stumbled upon a file called "zscope.nds". I opened it up on my DS emulator and... nothing. All that appeared was a blank, black screen.

Thinking that the game had crashed, I tried to reload it. Nothing. I opened up Pokemon Platinum, and then reopened zscope.nds. Still nothing.

Intrigued, I downloaded the file to my computer, to see if it would run there. I assumed that my phone lacked the power to open this file, after all games like "Dementuim: The Ward" would fail to open on this same phone, however zscope.nds still produced a blank screen when I opened it up on my computer. No error screen, no crash report, nothing, in fact according to Dualis the game was working perfectly fine.