Dave (Conjuror)

Dave, known online as Conjuror, ran Dave’s Video Game Classics, one of the sites that helped readers find and discuss emulators in the late 1990s. The later Vintage Gaming Network grew from that earlier site; the two names belong to different stages of the story.

Before the network name

The surviving record says more about Dave’s website than about his private life. His surname and a verified portrait are not established in the sources used here, so this page uses the name and handle readers knew. Dave’s Video Game Classics was already active before 1997: later histories place its beginnings in 1996. By the following spring, other emulation editors treated it as a place worth sending readers. An Archaic Ruins news entry praised its coverage of lower-end systems and its up-to-date arcade section at a moment when Archaic Ruins itself was struggling to keep pace. That contemporary recommendation is stronger evidence of the site’s place in 1997 than a later claim about exactly when every page first appeared.

The site gave readers something they badly needed: a current map of software that was changing almost weekly. A visitor looking for an arcade emulator could find a description, a download, a discussion, and often related game files in one place. That mixture was useful and controversial. Emulator programs and commercial game data were different things, and the scene was still arguing about what a fan site should distribute. Dave’s site became popular partly because it made the path from hearing about a release to trying it unusually short.

A site in the middle of the Callus rush

Dave left a particularly clear trace in October 1997. In a post to comp.emulators.misc dated October 9, a writer signing as Dave of Dave’s Video Game Classics announced Sardu’s new Capcom arcade emulator and directed readers to his site. The post named Final Fight as a game Callus could run and noted the early, incomplete state of Street Fighter II support. It shows the site acting as a relay between a developer’s release and a wider audience, with the excited tone of someone watching a favorite arcade machine come to life on a PC.

By November, the relationship between the site and Callus players was more than a download link. A surviving StormWorld news archive records Dave opening a Callus message board, moving emulator boards to a new server, and briefly taking the Callus board offline after repeated requests for ROMs against its posted rules. That small moderation episode says a great deal about the work behind a popular emulation page. Hosting a conversation meant setting rules and enforcing them while users wanted files, fixes, and answers immediately.

The same archive repeatedly points readers to Dave’s site for Callus-related game files. Those notices are evidence of the site’s reach, not an endorsement of distributing copyrighted data. In 1997 an editor could provide useful technical coverage and also become a flashpoint over game-image sharing. Both facts belong in the history. The site did not merely report that people were excited about Capcom emulation; it was one of the places where that excitement gathered and where its limits became visible.

Forums that led somewhere unexpected

Dave’s boards also had an effect beyond software downloads. Andy “Saint” St. Clair later recalled encountering a discussion about using real arcade controls with a computer on Dave’s Video Game Classics message boards in mid-1997. That conversation helped lead to the Build Your Own Arcade Controls site, which began later that year. The connection is a useful reminder that emulation did not stay on the monitor. Players wanted the feeling of the original cabinet: buttons, joysticks, spinners, and the physical ritual of play. A web forum could turn a few comments into a new community project.

The memory is retrospective and does not preserve every message in the original thread. Its value is the concrete path it describes: people meet on a site dedicated to classic games, compare ways to build controls, and create a separate resource for others to follow. Dave did not build every arcade cabinet that resulted. He provided one of the rooms in which the idea could spread. That is a different kind of contribution from writing an emulator core, but it helped make emulation useful and enjoyable to people who were not programmers.

Dave’s Classics and Vintage Gaming Network

The name in the 1997 record is Dave’s Video Game Classics. The Vintage Gaming Network identity belongs to the site’s later history, around the end of the decade. Treating VGN as if it launched in 1997 would erase the earlier site that readers actually visited. It would also flatten an evolving web project into one permanent brand. Addresses, hosts, designs, and ambitions changed rapidly on the early web; the name on a 1997 link is part of the evidence.

Martin Nielsen’s account of NES WORLD says Conjuror hosted that site through part of the later davesclassics.com and VGN period. Nielsen also describes a difficult split after a hosting disruption in 2001. Those are his recollections and belong to a later chapter, where they can be set beside other evidence. For 1997, the established point is simpler: Dave had already made a visible emulation hub, and editors and users were sending one another there.

The person behind the handle

There is an understandable urge to put a full face and legal name beside every influential site. Here the contemporaneous material supports “Dave,” and a later host’s recollection supports the handle “Conjuror” or “Conjurer.” It does not support attaching an unrelated portrait to the page. The question-mark image makes that limit visible. The Callus image illustrates a topic his site covered; it is not presented as a photograph of him or a capture of his homepage.

Dave’s importance is easy to miss in a history organized around emulator executables. MAME and Callus could be written by brilliant programmers, but people still needed to learn that a new build existed, find a working copy, understand what it did, and talk to other users. Dave’s Video Game Classics helped with those tasks. Its forums generated their own stories. Its popularity made it a reference point for peers. By the time Vintage Gaming Network became the better-known name, that work was already well under way.

Dave (Conjuror) in the History of Video Game Emulation

Related People

• Chris Hickman — Archaic Ruins editor who recommended Dave’s site to readers.
• Brad Levicoff — Zophar’s Domain founder and fellow emulation-site operator.
• Icer Addis (Sardu) — released NESticle and then tackled Genesis and Capcom arcade hardware. The Bloodlust programmer made emulation feel fast, playable, and impossible to ignore.
• Nicola Salmoria — brought separate arcade experiments together as MAME in February 1997. His reusable approach gave contributors a way to add new machines and games far beyond the original five.

Sources and further reading

• Archaic Ruins 1997 news log — contemporary recommendation of Dave’s Video Game Classics.
• Dave’s October 9, 1997 Callus post — public announcement signed as Dave of the site.
• StormWorld November 1997 archive — dated references to Dave’s site and message boards.
• Build Your Own Arcade Controls origin account — Saint’s recollection of a 1997 discussion on Dave’s boards.
• NES WORLD’s site history — Martin Nielsen’s later recollection of Conjuror’s hosting and the VGN name.