The emu scene still has lots of drama, but it's different and I won't get into why on Hackernews.
EDIT: In fact Damaged Cybernetics, which was indeed the group to go to for emulation news and information back in the day, was disbanded because of the backlash against its leader, who had the friendly nick "MindRape". MindRape stole and released the source code to... NESticle, leading to Sardu's withdrawal from the scene and the lack of a SNESticle we can all enjoy.
It was Genecyst that had the bloody menus.
Back in the day, we didn't really worry about software like this being malicious just because of the author's gruesome sense of humor. It was all part of the fun. Back in the 90s, people were edgy like that. It's not like today where you're suspected of cryptofascism for not properly reciting the right nostrums. If it were malicious, someone would've found out, word would have spread around the scene, and the author would be branded the worst of lamers. People had reputations to uphold and good will to farm out of the community, even when running quasi-legal programs to play pirated ROMs.
There was a lot less incentive to be malicious. No crypto-mining on compromised devices, no ransomware, and limited Internet banking
Source: I made a lot of money between the ages of 12-15 running HijackThis and Spybot Search and Destroy on neighbors' machines.
Other source: circumvented my school's firewall with "anonymous proxies" on lists of what, in hindsight, were absolutely compromised machines.
There's a certain irony in the fact this is exactly how it works today.
I guess the difference is back then you were in on "the right nostrums", some people likely weren't and felt just as alienated by that scene as you do by today's...
The Android PS2 emulation drama is hilarious (and sad). For the most part a lot of the modern drama is around money, it seems?
Considering how badly his privacy was violated during the late 90's, it's not even a little surprising that he never released it.
It seems people never learn: just look at the effort to find who Satoshy or _why_ are. This is not respectful: they gave you something cool and asked to be left alone. Their work is theirs and they generously shared it with you. Why do they believe they are owed anything else? Why can't some people take "please stop" for a response? Why do they keep trying their best to alienate the very people who accomplished miracles way beyond their capabilities?
It seems self destructive in any way I take it, and driven only by spite/jealousy/beggar-chooser spirit.
What should his financial state have to do with his want to retain privacy?
Should I do like you and exclude from the sympathy due to every human being those who are filthy poor if I don't like the poors? Or will you invoke some special exemption clause making it totally ok, like it's ok to punch up but not down?
If I should not, maybe you should ask yourself if respect should exclude those who you dislike, because other people may dislike those you like... or even yourself.
(I don't want to imply that Satoshi did anything untoward, because I don't think he did. However, it's a valid thing to want to investigate.)
"Sardu was running Windows 95 at the time. He made the mistake of leaving drive sharing on (which should not have been on by default, but for some reason, it was on). MindRape was then able to mount Sardu's hard drive (since drive sharing was enabled) with Samba. Pretty clever, right? Regardless, he did this and not only was he able to retrieve the NESticle source code, he was able to look through all of his drives. His Zip drive. His hard drive. His CD-ROM drive. Whatever he wanted. Such an invasion of privacy is ridiculous, but this is what transpired."
Author of this emulator really sounds like a man with an insane amount of skills and an even larger grudge assuming he actually did either of the two things just out of spite. Got to respect his dedication either way.