Neill Corlett

Neill Corlett is a God in the emulation community. He was the project leader behind one of the most ambitious ROM hacking projects of all time, that of translating Seiken Densetsu 3 to English. He has also lead or helped a great number of other ROM hacking / translation projects, and made a few excellent and popular programs and file formats.

Here are some of the man's projects:

• Games:
  • Lead the translation of Seiken Densetsu 3, and carried out most of the hacking. The translators were Nuku-nuku, Lina'Chan and SOM2Freak.
  • Started the translation of Bahamut Lagoon. He gave up on the project after a time, but Dark Force (from Dejap Translations) picked up the project, and, along with the translator Tomato, completed the project. The patch was released in May of 2002.
  • Gave technical support (recoding, etc.) to the Neo Demiforce translation of Final Fantasy III on the NES.
  • Hacked a new ROM for Kingdom Grand Prix aka Shippu Mahou Daisakusen (an arcade ROM playable in MAME) which lets the game display English characters.
  • Reverse engineered the compression schemes on Magic Knight Rayearth, to help with Lina'Chan and Nuku-nuku's translation patch for that game.
• Other:
  • Developed PlayStation Sound Format, aka PSF. This allows certain sound files to be ripped from PlayStation CDs or ISOs.
  • Programmed a number of utilities for ripping and playing PSF files.
  • Programmed Bleep!, a Nintendo Sound Format player plug in for Winamp.
  • Programmed VB2Rip, a utility for ripping wav files out of some specific Konami PlayStation games.
  • Programmed Dexter, a utility for organising PlayStaion Memory Card saves and other Dexdrive functions.
  • Programmed Multi-Gauntlet Emulator, an emulator which played Gauntlet 1 and 2, arcade version.
  • Programmed Emu-92, an emulator for the Ti-92 graphing calculator.
  • Programmed the Starscream programming Library, which is a 680x0 CPU emulation library. This was used in, amongst other things, the Multi-Gauntlet Emulator.
    "The only CPU emulation library good enough to be named after a Decepticon"
    
  • Programmed HeadAmp, a Winamp DSP plugin made for headphone compensation.
  • Programmed Nana, a generic file viewer for DOS.
  • Programmed UIPS, an IPS ROM patching utility.
  • Programmed ECM, a utility which allows people burning, for example, .bin files to CDs to reduce the filesize by taking out error correction codes.
  • Programmed ID3Point, a command line ID3 tagger.
  • Programmed a few random Unix utilities, such as an accurate time keeper.

Although Neill is not that active in the emulation community, the patches and utilities he has created (in particular the SD3 translation and PlayStation Sound Format have got him a huge amount of respect. The fact that other translation projects go to him for help on tough areas is proof enough of this.

His site is located at http://www.neillcorlett.com - cheers to nanashi for pointing this out to me. All the stuff mentioned here is downloadable from there, and I'm sure he has plenty more interesting projects up his sleeve for the future. He has a hint right now on his front page that PSF2 is coming soon...