Spent most of yesterday in Mario Heaven. Why? Well, I’ve been experiencing some flakiness with my video card, particularly whilest playing City Of Heroes, so my PC gaming activities have shifted in focus.

Oddly enough, the video card — a two-year old Nvidia GeForce FX5900 XT — performs just fine not only during normal day-to-day work, but also under heavier load activities like Counter Strike: Source. It would appear that City Of Heroes (and City Of Villains) has the enviable position of being the only game to stress out my graphic resources so much that the inevitable result after anywhere from five to ten minutes is a total system shutdown. No warning, no blue screen, just nothing. This annoyance occurred a little bit last year, mostly during the summer. The fix at the time appeared to come in the form of an additional 120mm fan mounted in the back of the case. The fan is meant to act like an exhaust, something to move hot air out and away from the motherboard. This solution no longer works, apparently. And while it seemed like a few more minutes of play were gained from running the system with the side panel removed, the result was the same. After a little more makeshift testing, I determined that while the video card’s GPU was probably fine (it sits beneath a pre-installed heatsink and fan), the RAM chips surrounding the GPU weren’t covered by the heatsink, weren’t being cooled at all and were becoming very hot to the touch when taxed by City Of Heroes.

While a simple fix might come in the form of a a different video card, I’m not ready to sink so much cash into new components, no matter how cool they might be. So after an afternoon spent splitting my time between browsing through a hundred or so reviews and running downstairs to check on some homemade soup I had simmering on the range, I determined that the least I should do would be to replace the card’s stock heatsink and fan. While the Zalman line impressed me to no end, particularly with the clarity provided by their website, I ended up going with an offering from Arctic Cooling. The Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 3 was designed specifically for my FX5900 XT, right down to the RAM placement. And the price was very right: about $9 at FrozenCPU. I should have the Silencer in about a day or two.

And now I’m on a cooling kick. My AMD CPU is working under the stock heatsink and fan, but I’m wondering if a replacement might help out even more. We’ll see.

Anyway. About Mario. With City Of Heroes no longer an option and Counter-Strike: Source growing tiresome (mostly due to the online behavior of other players), I started looking into other, far simpler distractions. Remembering that I had a Nintendo emulation application somewhere either on my hard drive or backed up somewhere else, I decided that some Super Mario World was just what I needed.

The emulator I found on hand was a bit rough around the edges, so much so that I can’t recall the name of it. I sought another. What I found was a vast improvement.

• NESTopia is a straight-up Nintendo Entertainment System emulator. Games open in a window that can be resized on a zooming scale of 1x to 3x. Unlike some others, NESTopia is easier to configure, particularly the inputs for the keyboard-bound among us (like me) who might not have a joystick on hand. The ROMs I had on hand were packed in a downloaded folder from years ago. There are 80 of them, but only the various flavors of Mario hold much interest to me … and to Nikki as well, who was reminded instantly of her one-time glory as a Super Mario Bros 2 master.

Not satisfied with only 8-bits, I expanded my emulator horizons until I found …

• SNES9x – a Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator. Very basic, but who needs much more than an application that can read even the most bastardized SNES ROM. It even has the courtesy to let you know if a ROM was found wanting with a bad checksum or some other glitch. If you’re feeling really proud of your throwback gaming, you can record an AVI or Movie for later viewing.
• ZSNES – another SNES emulator, but with a more “console-looking” user interface than SNES9x. This has pros and cons. On the con side, the attempt to look all retro jars horribly against the rest of my Windows XP desktop. Even the mouse pointer turns into a chunky mess. That being said, one of the pros is how deep the configuration is on ZSNES. If you can suffer through the blocky fonts, almost any variable can be adjusted. Makes great screenshots, too. Both SNES9x and ZSNES are small downloads, each weighing-in at about 2MB a piece for the Windows installs. However, neither as as tiny as …
• Kega Fusion – an all-around Sega emulator, Kega Fusion will run ROMs for every Sega console from the Master System to the Game Gear and beyond. I know, this is a bit of a derail from the All-Mario, Nintendo-Lovefest, but as I can’t think about Mario without considering his competition in the form of Sonic The Hedgehog, a Sega emulator was only inevitable. And this one is pretty incredible, as it will handle just about anything the least bit Sega-fied you throw at it.

Naturally, the next question is “Where does one find ROMs to play on these fantastic emulators?” The answer is simpler than you might think, but I’m going to be a little cagey about it all the same. My readers are savvy folk who don’t mind a little homework, a little investigation on their own, so don’t let me down. Google is your first friend, but realize that your better bets will be placed at more specific search engines that specialize in finding torrents. Another thing … ROMs travel in packs. Big ones. If you look around for a bit and still come up empty, get in touch with me directly.

Think of me like Moses. I might not take you directly to your own Mario Heaven, but I can surely point you in the right direction.

(One last thing … you know what I said up there about not having a USB-capable Nintendo controller? Well, for $30, such an item could indeed be yours. Or you could spend about $17 and retrofit your own.)