In 1997, two young hobbyists released two pieces of software that more or less prompted a new wave of interest in "retro" games—which were, at that point, really just a few years old. The first punch was Nesticle, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator that quite suddenly made it free and easy to play Nintendo's '80s and early '90s games on a PC. The second punch, delivered near the end of the year, was ZSNES, which did the same for much newer Super Nintendo games. And it was fast —even on the modest PCs of the era.

"When I was 16 years old I started learning assembly, and I got so fascinated with optimization, making everything as fast as possible," said zsKnight, the developer behind ZSNES, in an interview last week . While most software is written in higher level programming language

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