Since I started this site in 1997, I realized I've never once taken the time to
really explain this site's purpose and why it exists. People who've
visited the boards have figured it out from bits and pieces I've posted over the
years, but I've never actually come out and said anything. Well, why not
take a moment to fix that? I think I'll start off with a history of the
site.
Vimm
(written in 2002?)
Somewhere around 1996/1997 I had an Earthlink internet account and for
months had seen them advertising their new, expanded 6MB of free web
space for each user! I knew absolutely nothing about HTML or any other web
language, but I was bored one day and decided to check it out. Netscape
4.0 had just been released and was now free, plus it came with a graphic HTML
editor, Netscape Composer. So, armed with 6MB of web space and Composer I
decided to build a web site (home.earthlink.net/~vimm/). The only problem
was, what the heck do I put on it? I had written a few games for the
TI-82/83 that were pretty popular, so I decided to post them on the site and
invite other people to send me their games to add to the site. Composer
made setting it up easy, and although it looked hideous (visually) a few people
actually visited it and sent me some of their games.
I tinkered with the site for a while and discovered two things.
One, there was a huge site that already had a library of pretty much every TI
game (ticalc.org). And two, TI games could be written in assembly which
allowed them to do things that blew my BASIC games away, plus they were smaller
to boot. I tried seeing if I could do some Assembly, but it just seemed
too alien and I quickly gave up. At that point I abandoned the site,
deleted my games in disgust, and never programmed for the TI-82 again (well,
except for one special request). My games have most likely been lost to
the sands of time.
So, I was left with a web site that once again had no content, only now I
knew some basics of HTML thanks to Composer. Without a topic for the site
though, there was nothing for me to do with it. Then one day in a computer
class somebody pulled up Super Mario Bros and started playing it in class.
I thought it was so cool that you could play Nintendo games on your computer!
I did some searching on AltaVista and found a few ROM sites and the almighty
NESticle, so I loaded up some Mario of my own. I later moved on to other
games that I had owned or played long ago and I had a blast! My favorite
ROM site was called Bowser's Keep and it had pretty much every game I ever
wanted to play on it. There were a few things about that site that I
didn't like that I thought I could do better. Then it hit me, I have a web
site with no topic, so why not make it an emulation site? Thus, Vimm's
Lair was born.
Gee, three paragraphs and I haven't even started the site yet. Ah,
what the heck, I'm having fun reminiscing.
I liked the layout of Bowser's Keep so since I had little knowledge of HTML I began by lifting that code and tweaking it to my liking. From there it was just a matter of downloading the ROMs and uploading them to my web space. Many of the zip files contained text files from other sites which just seemed lazy ("This ROM was downloaded from xyz.com. If you downloaded it from somewhere else, please report it to leech@xyz.com"), so as the eternal nitpicker I am, I cleaned them up by removing all the text files. I started with the A's and worked my way up alphabetically. 6 MB of web space doesn't go far, so somewhere around "E" I hit that wall and had to look elsewhere to complete F-Z. After some searching I turned to FortuneCity who offered 10MB of free space! Each page of The ROM Abyss was one letter, so being mindful of their policies I placed the appropriate pages of The ROM Abyss on FortuneCity along with all of the files for that letter. 10MB was only enough for a few more letters, so I opened up a couple more accounts. After several weeks of downloading/uploading using my 14.4 modem, A-Z was finally finished!
At this point the site really seemed to be getting popular to me. I must've been getting a couple hundred visitors every day! People had been very supportive along the way and given lots of advice on how to improve the site. Sometime in late 97 / early 98, a fellow by the name of Gizmo showed me how he had altered a ROM in The ROM Abyss so that it worked correctly in NESticle. I was amazed and asked if he had any more fixes. He soon sent me a few more and told me there were lots of others he could fix as well. I needed to find some way of thanking him, so I decided to open up a section of the site called Gizmo's Gallery in which I posted before and after screen shots of ROMs that he altered. You can actually still see a later version of it at this url (https://web.archive.org/web/*/vimm.net), though Gizmo had changed his name to Jigsaw by then. To me it seemed like a great way to thank Gizmo for his help, plus I thought it might be a unique draw for the site and may encourage Gizmo to want to fix more ROMs.
For a long time the only way for people to contact me was a "Problem
Report" page. Basically it was a simple form that I used for people to let
me know if something was wrong with the site. I decided to take it to the
next level by making it interactive and converting it into a message board.
My hope was that not only could I answer people's questions so that others with
the same question could quickly find an answer, but perhaps other visitors would
also help out as well so that questions could be answered quicker. PHP
didn't exist at the time and ASP is only for Windows servers (I was on LINUX),
so PERL was the natural choice. I didn't know any PERL of course, so I
downloaded Matt's WWWScript and after some reading figured out how to tweak it
to look like the rest of Vimm's Lair. Before I knew it people were posting
all over and one day someone mentioned the Vimm's Lair "community". What
the?! This was just supposed to be a place for me to get some feedback and
help people out! Who made this "community"? I guess from that point
on the unspoken title of community director was thrust upon me, so I went with
it. By being polite and courteous to people it seemed to attract other
people with similar outlooks. Many, many tweaks later the board that was
used back then is still in use today, though given proper motivation I'd love to
overhaul it using all the knowledge I've learned since then.
Then one day somebody said something I had never though of. It was
something on the lines of... "You've got a great site. Why don't you get
some sponsors? I'd be happy to click on them each time I visit".
Sponsors? I've seen ads running on other sites, but what would I want them
for? The site doesn't cost me anything to run, so what good would ads do
me? As I thought about it, I remembered reading about sites having trouble
with free sites like FortuneCity and Xoom since they don't like having ROMs on
their servers. While I was careful to follow their policy otherwise and
hadn't had any problems, that potential would always be looming over my head.
With a sponsor I could buy my own web space for Vimm's Lair. Also, with a
sponsor I could buy my very own domain name which had just dropped to $35 per
year! (First two years must be paid in advance) I figured, what do I
have to lose? so, I decided to give it a shot. The only problem was,
sponsors refused to sponsor sites on free servers or without their own domain
name. So, I decided to make my first financial investment into my little
hobby and plunked down $70 for vimm.net (vimm.com was already taken). I
couldn't use Earthlink to access vimm.net, so I also had to get my first real
web host (amhosting.com). I got one of their cheapest plans in the hopes
that I could get some sponsors who would pay everything back. If not, then
I could always cancel and move back to Earthlink. But once you add money
to the equation, it's hard to keep something as just a hobby....
And boy did I get sponsors! It was a piece of cake! Despite the hideous look of the site (it was uuuuugly) I quickly picked up several sponsors. Vimm's Lair kept getting more popular every day, and before long the advertising had more than paid off my initial investment. The one thing that bugged me is that many of the higher paying sponsors I had applied to rejected me. I figured it was because Vimm's Lair just didn't look professional enough. So, I decided to drop all the busy backgrounds and images I'd found on free graphic sites and create something of my own. This was sometime in early 1998 and I had never used an image editor before so I downloaded a free trial of Paint Shop Pro 5 and began to play around with it. To me "professional" means "clean and simple", so I developed a new layout using a simple red and black design which the site is still based on today. I submitted the new site to all the sponsors who had rejected me, and they accepted me!
Things seemed to be going great, but soon a new problem popped up. Vimm's Lair was too popular! The site was using more bandwidth than my web host allowed. The income from sponsors more than covered a plan upgrade, but soon even their highest plan wasn't enough. So, the trek for a new host began.
I don't really remember much about what happened from mid-1998 to mid-1999. I think for the most part that the site was paying for itself through banner ads so I kept adding more content, and more and more people kept coming. Pretty soon the site was getting over a thousand hits every day, and I had to hop web hosts a couple times in order to have enough bandwidth to support the traffic.
People had asked me to add SNES ROMs from the start but I just never had the resources to do it, plus the N64 hadn't been out for very long so I didn't really feel right about it. I don't remember exactly when, but after looking at Vimm's Lair at archive.org it appears that I broke down and added SNES ROMs during this time span. Using FortuneCity and Xoom as mirrors for the NES ROMs had worked great, so I extended that approach to include SNES ROMs as well. The response was tremendous and site traffic soared to 5,000, and then 10,000 hits per day.
Somewhere in early-mid 99 a tool called fixnes was released. This tool tapped into something called goodnes and used that to identify and correct all NES ROMs. I was amazed and quickly ran it on all of my ROMs, and it fixed almost every single one! ROMs that I had never been able to get working now worked flawlessly! Unfortunately that meant Gizmo (now Jigsaw) no longer had a purpose at Vimm's Lair, so after a while Jigsaw's Gallery was closed.
With Jigsaw's Gallery going away, I needed something new that would replace it. Anyone can build a ROM site and there's nothing I could do to make The ROM Abyss unique that someone wouldn't eventually just copy. Jigsaw's Gallery was truly unique, and I wanted to think of something equally unique that I could add in its place. I had seen sites that had text conversions of manuals, but it just isn't the same as seeing the real thing. I had dozens of manuals from games that I own so I figured, why not scan them and put them on Vimm's Lair? I looked around and couldn't find any other sites that were doing that, so it seemed that I had found something truly unique to separate Vimm's Lair from the crowd. And thus The Manual Project was born.
By mid-99 I was getting tired of Vimm's Lair outgrowing its web hosts and the site had amassed a steady stream of profits. So, I decided to take the next step and run my own server. Dedicated hosting was way too much, and co-location was really pricey too, so the best alternative was to use broadband. I used the Vimm's Lair fund to build the first Vimm's Lair server and in November 1999 I connected it to a dedicated 768K SDSL line (that's the equivalent of a 1/2 T-1 line). Now I could finally be my own web host and not have to worry about outgrowing my hosts anymore. As expected Vimm's Lair continued to grow in popularity, and soon the setup costs had been paid off.
The site continued to grow in content and popularity throughout 2000 and was still generating profits, so I decided to use that to setup yet another server. I knew that the increase in traffic from adding another server would more than pay for its maintenance in the future, so I went all-out and built a second server and added an additional 1.5Mb line (for a total of over 2Mb). Vimm's Lair just kept getting busier and busier and was soon up to 20,000 hits a day. The traffic was so heavy even the new server was choking to death. But that's another story.
By early 2001 the site was once again earning a profit and was getting 25,000 hits per day so I was considering adding yet ANOTHER server. But then in March, the bubble burst. The internet advertising market evaporated overnight and sponsors dropped like flies left and right. The few sponsors of Vimm's Lair that did stay in business drastically reduced their payout. Since all of the Vimm's Lair servers were funded solely from advertising income it was necessary to scale back, then eventually close one down. Many other emulation sites who were also funded by advertising had to close up shop, including many large ones. Ever since then Vimm's Lair has been operating on only one server, and it doesn't look like the advertising market will ever return to its former glory.
This represented a real problem to me. My family was supportive of my little overgrown hobby while it was generating a profit, but when that profit evaporated there was a lot of pressure to let it go. I had put so much time and energy into building the site and had learned so much in doing so that I didn't want to just abandon it. Fortunately I saw that the advertising market was going nowhere and decided to explore other options. I had once sworn I would never use popups. Vimm's Lair had been funded solely by banner ads for years so sites that ran popups just seemed greedy to me. Unfortunately for the short term that was the only way to keep the site afloat, so I gave in. In the meantime I was determined that I could still maintain my hobby without it hitting my wallet, so I devised ways to bring in income other than advertising. I cut costs everywhere possible and since I had been doing my own web hosting for years decided to try offering my own web hosting services. Danoz agreed to be my first guinea pig and as of this writing is still a client today. Several other people signed on too, mostly out of charity I suspect, and I truly appreciate the support.
I knew that web hosting would tike time to get established and generate enough income to make a dent in the monthly bills, so in January 2002 I decided to make one last ditch effort and open the Vault Store. A local used videogame store was closing up so I decided to use the entire remaining Vimm's Lair fund (roughly $400) to purchase a good portion of their NES stock. The Vault Store started out surprisingly successfully and is still going strong today. I guess it goes to show you there are still plenty of people out there who, like me, are into emulation solely for the nostalgia. Today due to the store, web hosting, and donations, the site no longer relies on advertising to stay afloat, though unfortunately it is still a necessary evil.
Since then the site has pretty much coasted. Today the site only gets a couple thousand visitors each day and I'm perfectly happy with that. I stopped worshipping the almighty hit counter years ago. Vimm's Lair seems to have reached a nice equilibrium between resources and traffic. Gone are the days when the boards were flooded with complains of slow speeds and dropped downloads (that's another story), and I actually enjoy reading through the posts on occasion.
I've added some content here and there, but for all practical purposes the site is pretty much finished. There's little more for me to do here. I've been content to let the site run as it is as long as it doesn't tap into my wallet, but it really is a lot of work to keep the Vault Store running. I gotta process orders, ship em out, and find new inventory. It really is a lot of work just to hold the status quo. I've considered closing parts of the site on several occasions but the outcry has made me feel too guilty to do it. My future plans for the site involve completing the Game Swap game trading service and hopefully finally making this site profitable. When you get down to it, The Vault is holding me back. But I don't intend to abandon the people who have been visiting here for years, or the many new people who come every day. As always, I'll just take everything a step at a time and see what happens.