Whatever Happened to Byuu

 Whatever happened to me. That is for those not interested in old television, a link to the theme tune to the Likely Lads. 

Apart from being the correct way to spell Byuu, it has no bearing on this post, except to pose the question, what ever happened to Byuu?.

My second or so post on here was about the MSU1 unit for the SNES, at the time, ten years or so ago a way in the emulator BSNES to simulate the failed CDROM add on that Sony was developing in the mid 90's for the SNES.  

The author Byuu, was someone I've been following or so for years on forums, a mercurial chap best known for his work on the Emulators BSNES and its all dancing follow up Higan. The former a cycle accurate SNES emulator and the latter a expanded out into a multitude of systems taking in N64 during lockdown and when I last saw on the twatter, preliminary PS1 emulation (only Ridge Racer played if I recall correctly.)

Then, nothing, a few name changes from Byuu, to Near and Higan got rebranded as Ares, then bang, he deleted the whole thing. His site remain up although relevant emulation parts are archived,

 Seems like he moved to Japan and retired from the scene, I knew of the first as he regularly posted food and stuff on his twatter from Tokyo and places, but until looking into this never knew he'd retired from the scene. 

As someone who cannot program in any capacity I do kinda think he was cool even though I never got half the things he put up. but that whole scan and document every US / Euro SNES game to check for inconsistencies are what got me into doing the UK Hardy boys scanning project. Something barely documented and with a few inconsistent PDFs lying around the net. I could do better and this was the inspiration needed.

Whatever you do, big guy, I hope you have fun, and enjoy your retirement.

Edit: Seem s like he showed up on the twatter again, pushing a new re translation of Bahamut Lagoon for the SNES, ironically one of the first fan translations I ever downloaded back in dial up era. 

He's still retired from the scene, and it seems Higan has gotten a ZX Spectrum core to it now, which is cool. My words still stand though, nice retirement dude, keep safe.

Double Edit: Terrible news, seems that Near has passed on due to pressure from Kiwifarms of all places. Seems like there was a suicide attempt and no one can get in touch with him. I hope for his sake that he is OK and that he just wants time away from twitter, and it's not real. 

But if it's true then. Fuck....